Academy of Music (Manhattan)
Coordinates: 40°44′04″N 73°59′19″W / 40.734568°N 73.988489°W
The Academy of Music was a New York City opera house, located on the northeast corner of East 14th Street and Irving Place in Manhattan. The 4,000-seat hall opened on October 2, 1854. The review in The New York Times declared it to be an acoustical "triumph", but "In every other aspect ... a decided failure," complaining about the architecture, interior design and the closeness of the seating; although a follow-up several days later relented a bit, saying that the theater "looked more cheerful, and in every way more effective" than it had on opening night.
The Academy's opera season became the center of social life for New York's elite, with the oldest and most prominent families owning seats in the theater's boxes. The opera house was destroyed by fire and subsequently rebuilt in 1866, but it was supplanted as the city's premiere opera venue in 1883 by the new Metropolitan Opera House – created by the nouveaux riche who had been frozen out of the Academy – and ceased presenting opera in 1886, turning instead to vaudeville. It was demolished in 1926.
The Academy of Music has been described as "the first successful dedicated opera house in the United States," but it was not the first building in New York designed specifically for opera. That honor goes to the Italian Opera House built in 1833 by Lorenzo Da Ponte as a home for his new New York Opera Company, which lasted only two seasons before the company was disbanded and the theatre sold. Over a decade later, in 1847, the Isaiah Rogers-designed Astor Opera House opened on Astor Place, only to close several years later after a riot provoked by competing performances of Macbeth by English actor William Charles Macready at the Opera House and American Edwin Forrest at the nearby Broadway Theatre. By May 1853, the interior has been dismantled and the furnishings sold off, with the shell of the building sold to the Mercantile Library Association.
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