1/4/73 issue. © 2021 Vox Media, LLC. The ad for the Mercer Arts Center took up a whole column of the left side of the page of the Voice, which listed the different venues at the arts centre. After Governor Cuomo classified live comedy as not “essential,” some NYC club owners decided to roll the dice. It was a faded icon, and the catastrophic collapse merely put it out of its misery. Check out the people, places, and events discussed in The Downtown Pop Underground, which examines the various arts scenes that thrived in downtown New York City from 1958 to 1976. Our B.A. and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) Kaback knew something bad was coming, too — for months, he’d been reporting fresh cracks and alarming bulges in the walls, and after a bunch of foot-dragging, the city had issued some violations. The Mercer Arts Center also included a boutique, a friendly bar, anexperimental film showcase. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, by Paul Zindel, had its New York premiere here in 1970, won the Pulitzer Prize the next year, and might have kept running indefinitely except the theater leaked so badly, the production had to move out. The culminating scene in Sunday night’s premiere of Vinyl centers on the collapse of the building housing the Mercer Arts Center, a music-and-theater venue in Greenwich Village. Later that year, the Vasulkas added music to their programming and … Bill, I too watched the two-hour premiere and had a lot of the same issues as you have. Within a couple of years of its opening, the Grand Central Hotel gained notoriety after a prominent gent, financier James Fisk, was shot in a second-floor corridor, apparently due to a love triangle. At 5:10, just twenty minutes before the first scheduled Friday evening performances, the hotel “fell like a pancake,” said fire chief John T. O’Hagan. The collapse of the Mercer Art Center — depicted at the end of the episode — is one such instance. None yet It later changed its name to the Broadway Central, housing servicemen during the Second World War. (For a sense of what it looked like, stop by the Grand Hotel, which still stands at Broadway and 31st Street, and was built by the same architect for the same owner.) The Mercer Arts Center was a group of live theatres in New York City, and was part of the Grand Central Hotel until its collapse in August 3, 1973.. Before the Mercer Arts Center collapsed in 1973, it was where underground theater, glam rock, video art, and performance art briefly intersected in the early 1970s—planting the seeds of … It happened in August of 1973, in the afternoon, before the evening's performances were to begin. Fire Department HQ 3030 78th Avenue SE Mercer Island, WA 98040 Phone: (206) 275-7607 Email: mi_fire@mercerisland.gov. McEachern Art Center No products were found matching your selection. But around the corner, on the West side of the building, lay a more promising casualty of the destruction—the rubble that once was the Mercer Arts Center, where a band of liberal theater producers had tried to create a Lincoln Center for downtown Manhattan. And MICA is listening. At 5:10, just twenty minutes before the first scheduled Friday evening performances, … May 5, 1972 Mercer Arts Center The Kitchen, New York City, NY (with The Magic Tramps & Satan the Fire Eater) May 23, 1972 Diplomat Hotel Palm Beach Room, New York City, NY May 29, 1972 Diplomat Hotel Palm Room, New York City, NY (supported by Shaker & the film "A Barbed Wire Soul" in 3-D) This very magazine suggested that Kaback was giving Joe Papp’s Public Theater a run for its money. Tubstrip opened off-Broadway on May 17, 1973, and ran for 100 performances at the Mercer Arts Center — until the building collapsed. With eight marble-faced stories and 600 rooms, it was a huge structure, going clear through the block from Broadway to Mercer Street with entrances on both ends. After receiving his Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) Log in or link your magazine subscription, Kellyanne Conway Accused of Posting Nude Photo of Teen Daughter Claudia, ‘We’ll Never Make That Kind of Movie Again’, Travis Barker Is Reportedly Kourtney Kardashian’s Punk Rock Prince, UCLA Gymnast Nia Dennis Is Back With More Beyoncé in a New Floor Routine, Halsey Announces She’s Pregnant: ‘Surprise!’. Mercer University is one of America’s oldest and most distinctive institutions of higher learning, offering rigorous programs that span the undergraduate liberal arts to doctoral level degrees. As often happens with aging hotels, the Grand Central slipped from luxurious to utilitarian. All rights reserved. In an Emergency, call 911 By the afternoon of August 3rd, 1973, the Mercer Arts operators urged that an engineer be brought in, but none could be found. SEATTLE - A fire that destroyed a Lake City strip mall on Tuesday has been ruled arson. FKA Twigs Teams With Headie One and Black Activists for ‘Don’t Judge Me’ Video, The video features Kara Walker’s installation. As the blogger Keith York City points out at the top of this excellent post, you can still see out the tar outline of the Grand Central Hotel’s mansard roof on the building next door, just as you can in the photo above. The Kitchen continued their eclectic programming at the Mercer Arts Center until the summer of 1973 when they began planning to move to 59 Wooster Street. THE REMARKABLE center was the dreamof dynamic, immensely lika-ble, and hopelessly stage-struck Seymour Kaback, andhemanaged it with an infec- It was renamed again, now the University Hotel, with an eye toward reinvention. 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