Demolishing And Building Up The Star Theatre (1901)
On September 25, 1861, noted British actor, James William Wallack opened Wallack’s Theatre at the northeast corner of Broadway and 13th Street in New York City. By this point in history, Wallack was the leader of an acting family dynasty and was successful enough to design and construct one of the largest stages in what was then the city’s primary theater district.
Following James’ death three years later, his actor son, John Lester Wallack took over operations of the theater and continued to manage the house to great success for the next few decades before the theater district began its migration uptown in the early 1880s.
As the new century approached, and as more and more immigrants migrated to New York City, the neighborhood where Wallack’s Theatre stood became known as “Little Germany” due to the large number of German immigrants that settled there. The Wallack’s opened a new theater further uptown and the ownership of the original theatre building changed hands several times, eventually becoming the Star Theatre in 1883.
Several expensive and elaborate redesigns of the building took place over the ensuing years in an effort to attract theater goers and keep the building fresh but by 1901 the neighborhood in which the Star Theatre stood had become overrun with buildings dedicated to garment manufacture and on April 7, 1901 it was announced that the theater was to be demolished to “make way for a clothing house.”
In 1901, the headquarters of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company was located across the street from the Star Theatre at 841 Broadway. By this time, the camera operators employed by the company were adept at taking to the streets of the city to capture actualities, slices of real life that were in many ways precursors to the documentary genre. The demolition of the beloved Star Theatre provided an ideal opportunity for a gripping actuality and the close proximity to the building provided camera operator, Frederick S. Armitage, the means to experiment and create a work unlike any seen at the time. Over the course of a month, Armitage trained his camera on the demolition and shot a few frames a day, thus creating an early work of time lapse photography that would stun audiences at the time as the building virtually disappears before one’s eyes during the film’s one and a half minute run time.