Roseland Ballroom

Louis Brecker tried to keep Roseland a ballroom, banning rock and roll and, later, disco¹. "Cheek-to-cheek dancing," he told The New York Times in 1974, "that's what this place is all about"¹.

He had founded it in Philadelphia in 1917, with financing from Frank Yuengling of the Yuengling beer family, then moved it to escape Philadelphia's blue laws, opening on the second floor of 1658 Broadway, at 51st Street, on December 31, 1919¹. Brecker popularized marathon dancing, until it was banned, and staged female prizefights, yo-yo exhibitions, sneezing contests and dozens of jazz weddings for couples who had met at the club¹. Its hostesses, the taxi dancers, would dance with a gentleman for $1.50 per half hour, and NBC recordings from 1940 catch a young Ella Fitzgerald fronting the Chick Webb band^{1, 2}.

In 1956 the original building came down, and Roseland moved to West 52nd Street, into a rink the Iceland ice-skating franchise had built in 1922 for $800,000 and Brecker had since converted for roller skating¹. Under new owners came regularly scheduled disco nights, the thing Brecker had banned, and in its last 25 years the stage held Phish, Gov't Mule, Nirvana, Metallica, Guns N' Roses and Oysterhead^{1, 3}. When we listed it, our complaint was the crowd: in a room that big, with all ages admitted, jockeying for a spot to hear the band could become as big a part of the night as the music.

Algin, the family company that bought the site in 1981, had apparently always meant to get rid of Roseland⁴. "We had a good time running it," said Hilary Feshbach, whose father, Allen Ginsberg, founded Algin, "but I think we were all ready for it to be a building"⁴. The closing was announced in October 2013, and on April 7, 2014, Lady Gaga played an added seventh show to close the place; the last song was "G.U.Y."¹.

Demolition began in 2014, and the site is now ARO, a wavy 62-story tower with two floors of retail and 426 apartments^{1, 4}. The name joins the first letter of Feshbach's late father's name to "RO," for Roseland, and some memorabilia, such as concert posters, was to be displayed inside⁴.