George M. Keister

George Keister was an American architect. His work includes the Hotel Gerard (1893), Astor Theatre (1906),Belasco Theatre (1907), the Apollo Theater (1914), the Bronx Opera House (1913), the Selwyn Theatre (1918), now known as American Airlines Theatre, and the First Baptist Church in the City of New York. He also designed Woodbridge Hall at 431 Riverside Drive (1901), which faced demolition in 1996, and the Sigma Chi Fraternity at 565 W. 113th St. (1903). Preservationist Carolyn Kent helped save some of his work.

Keister was a skilled but little known architect who was active in New York City from the mid-1880s into the third decade of the twentieth century. He had a brief partnership with Frank E. Wallis (1887–88) and in the 1890s, served as secretary of the Architectural League. Although barely a score of his buildings have been identified, the collection indicates a gifted and innovative architect with facile design ability in a variety of styles. Prior to David Belasco's Stuyvesant, he had designed three New York theaters: in 1905, the Colonial (Hampton's; at 1887 Broadway) and Loew's Yorkville Theater (157 East 86th Street), and the Astor Theater in the following year; all three have been demolished. Belasco's Stuyvesant Theater thus takes on the added significance of being the earliest extant theater of an architect who would later make theaters his specialty, executing at least a dozen others in New York by 1923.

Among his most notable were the George M. Cohan Theatre (1911; demolished), the Bronx Opera House (1912–13), the enormously important Apollo Theater in Harlem (1913–14), Broadway's Selwyn Theater (1917–18, 229 West 42nd Street) and the Earl Carroll Theater at 753-59 Seventh Avenue (1922; 1931 Art Deco remodeling; demolished).

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