Grand Opera House (Manhattan)

Pike's Opera House, later renamed the Grand Opera House, was a theater in New York City on the northwest corner of 8th Avenue and 23rd Street, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. It was constructed in 1868, at a cost of a million dollars, for distiller and entrepreneur Samuel N. Pike (1822–1872) of Cincinnati. The building survived in altered form until 1960 as an RKO movie theater, after which it was replaced by part of an urban renewal housing development.

Pike's Opera House was built on what had been the property of Clement Clarke Moore, whose home, "Chelsea", has given its name to the neighborhood. The architect was Griffith Thomas. The grand auditorium was seventy feet from parquet to dome, with six proscenium boxes and two tiers. It could accommodate 1800 people, but over 3500 were known to have gained admittance at some popular performances. The first performance, on January 9, 1868, was Il trovatore, after which seven operettas by Jacques Offenbach were given in the space of four months. But the theater lost money initially, owing in part to competition from the Academy of Music on 14th Street.

Jim Fisk and Jay Gould bought Pike's theater in January 1869 and renamed it the Grand Opera House. Fisk extended the repertory to include more operetta—Offenbach's La Périchole had already received its American premiere there, 4 January 1869—and plays, like Victorien Sardou's La Patrie, expressly translated for the theater. Vehicles for his mistress Josie Mansfield are often reported, though her name does not appear in the detailed cast lists in Brown; her house west of the theater on 23rd Street was connected to the theater, it was reported, by a subterranean tunnel.

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