The Beacon Theatre opened as a movie palace on Christmas Eve 1929 and hosted the Allman Brothers Band for multi-night runs in most years between 1989 and the band's final concert there in 2014.
Unlike the city's standing-room rock clubs, the Beacon is a fully seated theater spread across three levels, so every ticket comes with an assigned seat.
The theater was built in 1927-28 to designs by Walter W. Ahlschlager, a Chicago architect whose interior here borrows from Greek, Roman, Renaissance and Rococo sources rather than anything Midwestern. Samuel Rothafel, the showman known as Roxy, was engaged to run it and the house was to be called Roxy's Midway; his corporation sued its way out of the lease, the developer went bankrupt, and Warner Bros. finally opened it on Christmas Eve 1929 with the film Tiger Rose. The city designation granted in December 1979 covers the interior rather than the plain Broadway frontage.
Roxy's sequence of rooms survives, and it is the best reason to arrive early. An open-air outer lobby is set back from the building line around a freestanding gilded ticket booth; then a low, marble-walled inner lobby; then the ceiling lifts into the rotunda. The compression was deliberate — Roxy wanted a patron to feel the spell of the theater before reaching a seat. The auditorium carries murals of traders unloading galleons and plaster figures drawn from several mythologies, and the stage has three elevators, one of them for the Wurlitzer organ.
A restoration completed in 2009 stripped up to ten layers of paint, redid the gold and aluminum leaf, replaced seating and carpet from historic photographs, and repainted a lost foyer mural from a 1930 trade advertisement; Paul Simon reopened the house. In 2022 an immersive loudspeaker system was installed covering orchestra, loge and both balcony levels, unusual technology for a room this old.
The Allman Brothers Band played the Beacon from 1989 until their final concert, on October 28, 2014 — 238 shows in total, including a run of 237 consecutive sellouts — and recorded Peakin' at the Beacon and One Way Out here. Capacity is around 2,800 across three levels, all of it assigned seating, which makes the Beacon the opposite proposition from the standing rooms downtown: you know exactly where you will be standing, and you will not be.
2124 Broadway, New York, NY 10023 · Official site ↗
The Beacon Theatre is an entertainment venue at 2124 Broadway, adjacent to the Hotel Beacon, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. Opened in 1929, the Beacon Theatre was developed by Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel and built as a movie palace, with 2,894 seats across three levels. It was designed by Walter W. Ahlschlager with decorations inspired by the Renaissance, Ancient Roman, Ancient Greek, and Rococo styles. The theater is designated as a New York City interior landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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