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Walking past History - Ballet landmarks in NYC?


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I walked by what I think is the site of the Adelphi on my way home tonight. If I'm right, it's now 1325 Seventh Avenue, but the entrance is halfway down the block on 54th street - it is right next to the Hilton Hotel and across the street from the Righa Royal.

If anyone recalls anything about that space, I'd be curious! Was it a large house? small? Good to dance in? Bad? Big backstage? Cramped? Good sightlines? Anything!

I think I'm next going to pay a visit to 225 West 24th Street when I get a moment. I bet if I called the principal I could look at the auditorium.

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The "old" ABT studios were not where David Howard's or Robert Denvers' studios were. It was between Broadway and CPW and is still an empty lot. It was shocking to me that they tore the building down that the studios were in (the studio had not been there very long and it had been a major renovation) and then the lot has sat empty for so many years. I believe Millenium Partners own that lot. To me, the old Abt studios were on 57th street. I took from Pereyaslavic (sp), Swoboda and Danielion (sp) there. I also saw Carla Fracci rehearsing Giselle in a miniscule studio there.

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[Note: silly, I has missed the second page of the thread and was replying to Alexandra's post...]

Also having a map would make it easier for non-new yorkers to understand the discussion :)

By the way (sorry if it's getting a bit off-topic) I think it might be a bit interesting (even if somewhat morbid) to have some list of ballet-related cemeteries... A few years ago, the French magazine "Danser" had made an article with photographs of the graves of many ballet people buried in or near Paris. Are there some famous graves of ballet people in NYC? For example, is Balanchine's tomb there?

Perhaps we could even start an "online ballet graveyard" with scanned photos of tombs or urns... The only one I can offer is that of Isadora Duncan's urn at the Pere Lachaise (last spring my husband's friends organized a weird "bachelor's day" (like a bachelor party) for him which started near the urn of Georges Perec at the Pere Lachaise, and since he noticed Isadora Duncan's name not very far he took a photo of it).

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Estelle -

There are precious few cemeteries on the island of Manhattan; the ones left are quite old, and I think closed to new burials (but I could be wrong). Balanchine's funeral service was held at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign at 75 East 93rd Street and he was buried, I think, in Sag Harbor, about a two hour drive to the east on Long Island.

[Again - this is just off the top of my head; I haven't fact-checked any of this yet.]

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As has been noted, this is a really wonderful thread. Balanchine also lived at 27 West 67th Street. A friend of mine who still lives there recalls the time during a strike of building employees when Mr. B took his turn operating the elevator. Amazingly, the elevator in that building still has an operator. And a fellow Ballet Alerter sent me a photo this past summer of Balanchine's grave in Sag Harbor.

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Lincoln Kirstein lived at 128 E. 19th, or 126, or whatever one door west of 130 is. 130 is the number I can just barely make out, with a magnifying glass, on the snapshot I took.

I knew he'd lived on East 19th, but no one in the neighborhood seemed to know where and I only discovered it by accident a few months later while on vacation in Massachusets. I'd made arrangements to see few pieces at Harvard's Fogg Museum that weren't then out in the galleries, and one was an Elie Nadelman sculpture. After we viewed them, the curator asked if we'd like to see the papers pertaining to each piece. Well, sure. And there in the Nadelman papers was a letter to Kirstein. Oh happy day!

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