Grand Opera House (Manhattan)

The Grand Opera House once stood on the northwest corner of Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue, occupying land purchased directly from Clement Clarke Moore, the man who wrote the famous poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas. In eighteen sixty-eight, a Cincinnati distiller named Samuel Pike built a million-dollar marble palace here, hoping to create a grand venue that would rival the city's established theaters. The building featured a massive foyer with a checkerboard floor of black and white marble and a grand auditorium that spanned seventy feet from the floor to the dome. Despite its beauty, it failed to attract the elite society crowds, who remained loyal to theaters further south.