Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center)

Metropolitan Opera House

"The Met"
The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, seen from Lincoln Center Plaza.
Address	30 Lincoln Center Plaza
Location	New York City
Public transit	New York City Subway: ( late nights) at 66th Street-Lincoln Center
Owner	Metropolitan Opera Association
Type	Opera house
Genre(s)	Modernist
Capacity	3,800
Construction
Built	1963-1966
Opened	September 16, 1966 (1966-09-16)
Architect	Wallace Harrison, Harrison & Abramovitz Architects
Website
http://metopera.org/

The Metropolitan Opera House (colloquially The Met) is an opera house located on Broadway at Lincoln Square in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Part of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the theater was designed by Wallace K. Harrison. It opened in 1966, replacing the original 1883 Metropolitan Opera House at Broadway and 39th St. With a seating capacity of approximately 3,800, the house is the largest repertory opera house in the world. Home to the Metropolitan Opera Company, the facility also hosts the American Ballet Theatre in the summer months.

Planning for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera began as early as the mid-1920s, when the backstage facilities of the former house were becoming vastly inadequate for growing repertory and advancing stagecraft. The development that what would become today's Rockefeller Center was originally to have a new 4,000-seat opera house at its center, but financial problems and the following stock market crash of 1929 postponed the relocation of the Metropolitan Opera, and the complex became more commercial-based. With the development moving forward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. replaced the opera house with a 70-story skyscraper, opened as the RCA Building in 1933. Young Rockefeller Center architect Wallace Harrison would be approached some 20 years later by officers of the New York Philharmonic Society and the Met to develop a new home for both institutions. As chief architect again for the development of Lincoln Center, Harrison was chosen to design the new opera house- to be built as the centerpiece of the new performing arts complex. After a long process of redesigns, revisions and opposing interests (provided by the Met wanting a more traditional design for its home, and the conflicting wishes of the architects of the other Lincoln Center venues), construction of Harrison's forty-third design of the Metropolitan Opera House began in the winter of 1963- the last of the three major Lincoln Center venues to be completed. Construction delays due to the finishing of the neighboring New York State Theatre (in time with the opening of the 1964 World's Fair), resulted in the massive excavation site being nicknamed "Lake Bing" after then-Met General Manager Rudolf Bing.