The City Concealed: United Palace Theater - An Architect's Dream of Excess & Embellishment [video]

The City Concealed: United Palace Theater from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.

"Putting this piece together, I often found myself trying to describe the United Palace Theater to people who had never seen it. “It’s sort of Neo-Classical Cambodian, with influences of Hindu, Mayan, and Moorish architecture. Gilded and covered in red velvet.” I sounded ridiculous, but my description isn’t that far off the mark.

The United Palace is a fantasy, an architect’s dream of excess, embellishment, and more and more gold paint: a Greek goddess presides over a hall lined with meditating Buddhas, Indian ascetics share the wall with fat Renaissance cherubs. Nothing really makes sense here, but it all comes together completely, courtesy of Thomas W. Lamb.

Lamb was the preeminent theater architect for the first half of the 20th century. And while I’m no expert on his work, in researching this story I was fascinated by the way his buildings developed over time. In the 1910s when theaters were devoted to vaudeville and in need of legitimacy, Lamb designed buildings that were respectable Greek temples. In the first part of 1920s, art deco predominates. But I think it’s in the second half of the 1920s that Lamb comes into his own. Hollywood is entering its Golden Age and is proving to the world that any dream can be manufactured for the screen. Lamb’s challenge is to design theaters grand enough to contain those dreams, and he needs to borrow from every conceivable architectural style in order to do so. Historians call it the “Movie Palace Era,” and really these are palaces that Lamb is designing, buildings dedicated to the glamor of Hollywood and the prosperity of America right before the Great Depression..."

The City Concealed, an online video series exploring the
unseen corners of New York. Visit the places you don’t know
exist, locations you can’t get into, or maybe don’t even want
to. Each installment unearths New York’s rich history in the
city’s hidden remains and overlooked spaces.