NPS Photo / Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress
The Metropolitan Opera House, also known as the “Old Met,” was a large opera house on Broadway in New York City. In the years following the Civil War, the “new moneyed” aristocracy began to feel that the old, 1850s-era Academy of Music no longer met the necessities of New York high society. The Metropolitan Opera House, built in the early 1880s, addressed these concerns. It was much larger—its five-balcony auditorium could house 3389 people—and its design spoke to postbellum American attempts to bypass the standards of European artists. As a result, the opera house was visually representative of the needs of a rising upper class.
Structurally, the five balconies and main floor, with box seating and space for 380 standees, was imposing. The two tiers of boxes and a row of baignoires, together called the “Golden Horseshoe,” contributed to this sense of classed, social display—this section sat 210 people, including the high-profile Vanderbilts, Morgans, Goulds, and the other original seventy stockholders, and visually and physically separated them from the standees. Nicknamed “The Warehouse,” the yellow-brick façade was in the Italian Renaissance style with Romanesque panels. The architect, Josiah Cleveland Cady, had never designed a theater (and even boasted that he had “never entered a playhouse”), and therefore, the opera house’s structure, while impressive, had several functional faults and was considered antiquated even at its opening. As such, consistent efforts to start construction of a new opera house were commonplace until the mid-twentieth century.
NPS Photo / Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress
The Metropolitan Opera House, owned and administered by the Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc., opened on October 22, 1883, with a performance of Gounod’s Faust, featuring Christine Nilsson and Italo Campanini. At its beginning, the opera house featured almost exclusively European artists and composers—dominated Wagnerian and other German operas—but as it grew, it showcased many distinguished Americans. The list of artists and conductors includes the famous Enrico Caruso, Madame Schumann-Heink, Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Walter Damrosch, Arturo Toscanini, Leopold Stokowski, Sir Thomas Beecham, Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Giulio Gatti-Casazza. During Gatti-Casazza’s period, the Metropolitan Opera House hosted the world premieres of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West and Humperdinck’s Goose Girl.
In the early to mid-twentieth century, attempts to demolish and replace the Metropolitan Opera House to resolve its functional issues were met with the multi-million dollar “Save the Met” historic preservation campaign. While Secretary of the Interior Stewart Lee Udall had determined the Metropolitan Opera House eligible for National Historic Landmark designation in December 1962—and despite the best efforts of “Save the Met”—the Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc. declined Landmark designation due to its plans to replace the opera house. Ultimately, it demolished the “Old Met” in 1967 as part of its construction of the current Metropolitan Opera House in the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts, which had opened the previous year, permanently preventing Landmark designation.
Last updated: August 30, 2018