A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from December 31, 2005
Showplace of the Nation (Radio City Music Hall)
"Showplace of the Nation" is the original slogan of Radio City Music Hall, cited from at least January 1933.


Wikipedia: Radio City Music Hall
Radio City Music Hall is an entertainment venue located in New York City's Rockefeller Center. Known as the Showplace of the Nation, the Music Hall opened to the public on December 27, 1932, and now is home to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, a New York Christmas tradition since 1933, and to the women's precision dance team known as The Rockettes. The theater is also used for a variety of concerts and special events.

Radio City Music Hall
Showplace of the Nation
More than 300 million people have come to the Music Hall to enjoy stage shows, movies, concerts and special events. There's no place like it to see a show or stage a show. Everything about it is larger than life.

Radio City Music Hall is the largest indoor theatre in the world. Its marquee is a full city-block long. Its auditorium measures 160 feet from back to stage and the ceiling reaches a height of 84 feet. The walls and ceiling are formed by a series of sweeping arches that define a splendid and immense curving space. Choral staircases rise up the sides toward the back wall. Actors can enter there to bring live action right into the house. There are no columns to obstruct views. Three shallow mezzanines provide comfortable seating without looming over the rear orchestra section below. The result is that every seat in Radio City Music Hall is a good seat.

The Great Stage is framed by a huge proscenium arch that measures 60 feet high and 100 feet wide. The stage is considered by technical experts to be the most perfectly equipped in the world. It is comprised of three sections mounted on hydraulic-powered elevators. They make it possible to create dynamic sets and achieve spectacular effects in staging. A fourth elevator raises and lowers the entire orchestra. Within the perimeter of the elevators is a turntable that can be used for quick scene changes and special stage effects.

The shimmering gold stage curtain is the largest in the world. For more than sixty-five years audiences have thrilled to the sound of the "Mighty Wurlitzer" organ, which was built especially for the theatre. Its pipes, which range in size from a few inches to 32 feet, are housed in eleven separate rooms. The Hall contains more than 25,000 lights and features four-color stage lighting. And what's a show without special effects? Original mechanisms still in use today make it possible to send up fountains of water and bring down torrents of rain. Fog and clouds are created by a mechanical system that draws steam directly from a Con Edison generating plant nearby.

23 January 1933, New York (NY) Times, pg. 9:
RADIO CITY THEATRES
(...)
The SHOWPLACE of the NATION

10 May 1936, Waterloo (Iowa) Daily Courier, pg. 14, col. 8:
The Dave Apollon International Varieties was the show chosen to open Radio City Music hall, known as "the show place of the nation."
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New York CityBuildings/Housing/Parks • Saturday, December 31, 2005 • Permalink


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