54 ROUND GLASS TABLE TOP

Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

The Longacre Theater survives today as one of the historic playhouses that symbolize American theater for both New York and the nation. Constructed in 1912-13, the Longacre was built to house the productions of Broadway producer and baseball magnate Harry H. Frazee. Designed for Frazee by Henry Herts, prominent theater architect, the Longacre is among the earliest surviving Broadway theaters, and has an exceptionally handsome facade.

Like most Broadway playhouses built before World War I, the Longacre was designed by a leading theater architect to house the offices and theatrical productions of its owner. Though known as a baseball magnate, and at one time the owner of the Boston Red Sox, Frazee was also an influential Broadway producer who, besides building the Longacre theater, at one time also owned two other Broadway houses (the Harris and the Lyric).

Henry B. Herts, the architect of the Longacre, earned a reputation as one of New York's most skilled theater architects, first in partnership with Hugh Tallant and later practicing alone. His facade for the Longacre is an exceptionally handsome neo-French Classic style design, based on classical sources and employing polychromatic effects.

For three-quarters of a century the Longacre Theater has served as home to countless numbers of the plays through which the Broadway theater has come to personify American theater. As such, it continues to help define the Broadway theater district, the largest and most famous concentration of legitimate stage theaters in the world.

Harry H. Frazee

When Harry Frazee opened the Longacre Theater in 1913, he was thirty-three years old. Debonair, quick-witted and extravagant, he had risen from humble beginnings in the Midwest to become one of the most influential men in American theater.

Frazee began his theatrical career as an usher, and then a box-office attendant in Peoria, Illinois. By the time he was sixteen he was on the road as an advance agent for a small musical troupe. Six years later he produced Uncle John Perkins, the first of Frazee's many entertainments and the foundation of his later fortune. He acquired in rapid succession a series of touring shows and soon controlled musical comedy outside the large western cities.

In 1909 Frazee opened his first playhouse in Chicago. He named it for theater magnate John Cort who had befriended and encouraged the once-struggling young agent. In the same year Frazee took advantage of the swelling interest in a boxing match between the undefeated champion Jim Jeffries and his black challenger Jack Johnson. Frazee cast the former in an immensely profitable athletic program, which he scheduled for a world tour. Plans were cancelled, however, when the champion unexpectedly lost his title. This was the first of Frazee's lucrative, but ill-fated, involvements in professional sports.

Frazee rebounded with the muscial sensation Madame Sherry which he co-sponsored with George W. Lederer in a short-lived partnerhsip. Frazee used his share of its half-million-dollar profits to build the Longacre Theatre in 1913. The theater was foreclosed, however, the following year, after which he temporarily restricted his theater involvements to production. He then turned to professional sports.

In 1917, while continuing to produce Broadway plays, Frazee purchased the Boston Red Sox (reputedly for $400,000). Unhappily, most of his new musicals failed, leaving him in financial straits. Frazee's expedient, if unpopular solution, was the sale of his baseball players to the rival New York team. In so doing he reduced the once powerful Red Sox to little more than a Yankee fief. In the course of his six-year ownership, Frazee sold over a dozen athletes to New York, the most notable being Babe Ruth in 1920. The latter fetched $125,000 which Frazee promptly applied to his purchase of the Harris Theater (renamed the Frazee) from the widow of Titanic victim Herny B. Harris. He is also reported to have acquired the Lyric Theater.^"

Frazee retired from baseball in 1923, receiving $1,500,000 for his interests. During his remaining five years, he(was divorced and remarried, and generally lived a high life in New York society. He hosted Charles Lindbergh and his mother on their triumphant visit to New York in 1927, and was the frequent companion of the flashy New York senator, and later mayor, Jimmie Walker.

Frazee's last big success on Broadway was No, No, Nanette in 1925 which is reported to have made him millions. He attempted a companion piece two years later with the trite play Yes, Yes, Yvette. It was an abysmal failure, and hastened Frazee's retirement from Broadway in 1928. The forty-eight-year old producer died of Brights Disease while vacationing in France in 1929. His once vast estate was valued at less than $300,000.

Henry Beaumont Herts

Many of Broadway's finest theaters owe their design in part or in whole to Henry Beaumont H

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