It’s on with the shows at Times Sq.’s historic Hudson
A long run of theatrics, early ‘Tonight’ shows, ’70s porn & finally a rebirth
IN the spring of 1912, Henry B. Harris and his wife went to London, looking for plays to produce for the Hudson Theatre, the showpiece of his thriving Broadway empire. Built in 1903, the Greco-Roman jewel on West 44th Street was one of the most sought-after theaters in Times Square.
For Henry and Renee Harris, who were childless, the Hudson was their pride and joy. They lived above the auditorium in a 2,500-square-foot duplex apartment.
Sailing back to New York on April 14 on a spectacular new ocean liner, the couple was playing cards in their stateroom when Renee noticed something odd: Clothes that had been swinging from their hangers suddenly stopped.
Their ship was the Titanic, and it had just struck an iceberg.
Renee wanted to remain with Henry as the ship began listing. But he insisted she get into a lifeboat — the last one, as it turned out. She gave him her jewels for safekeeping. An hour later, Henry, the jewels and the Titanic were on their way to the bottom of the Atlantic.
For the next year, she was in mourning. But then she remembered something her husband had told her: “You are a better businessman than I am.”
And so Renee took over the Hudson Theatre, becoming Broadway’s first female producer. Her string of hit shows included “The Noose,” featuring a chorus girl named Barbara Stanwyck; “Clarence,” starring Alfred Lunt and Helen Hayes; and “Hot Chocolates,” with Louis Armstrong.
She died in 1969, at age 93, but her theater survived. It narrowly dodged the wrecking ball several times and rode through a series of reincarnations, including a ra- dio studio, TV studio and porn house.
TODAY, Broadway’s oldest theater is now its newest and, once again, one of its most beautiful. The Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG), which leases the theater from the Millennium Hotel Group, spent tens of millions of dollars restoring it to its original splendor. Last month, the Hudson reopened as a legitimate theater with “Sunday in the Park with George,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal — it’s the first show to grace its stage in nearly 50 years.
The modest four-story Renaissance facade gives “few clues to the riches to be found inside the playhouse,” Nicholas van Hoogstraten writes in his 1997 book, “Lost Broadway Theatres.”
The Hudson’s outstanding feature is the lobby’s glass ceiling, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. Restorers spent more than a year removing every
piece of glass and cleaning it by hand. Today the ceiling glows.
More Tiffany designs are found inside the butterscotch-colored auditorium, which has 975 seats, all with ample legroom. Tiffany tiles — pink, green and gold — line the boxes and the front of the balcony. In the 1950s, when the theater was used as a TV studio, the mosaics were plastered over. Those that weren’t ruined have been painstakingly restored.
Under Renee’s direction, the Hudson was so successful that, in 1929, a rival producer offered her $1 million for it. She turned him down. Three years later, after the Wall Street stock-market crash, she was wiped out. She lost the theater to the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, which sold it to CBS for just $100,000.
RENEE Harris remarried three times and faded into obscurity, cropping up from time to time whenever a reporter needed a quote from a Titanic survivor. She grew wary of the role, however. Nobody, she complained, ever wanted to know about her career in the theater.
“You were on the Titanic?” someone once asked her. “Yes,” Harris said. “Were you saved?” “No,” she replied. CBS used the Hudson as a radio studio in the ’30s. A memento from its radio days was discovered during the theater’s renovation: a door, just behind the box office, marked “Tex and Jinx Productions.” That was the company owned by Tex McCrary and his wife, Jinx Falkenburg, a model and actress. In the ’40s, they created and hosted America’s first talk-radio show.
Playwriting team Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (“Life With Father”) took over the Hudson in 1943. Among the theater’s hits in the 1940s were “Arsenic and Old Lace,” “Detective Story” and Lindsay and Crouse’s “State of the Union,” which won the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1950, NBC bought the theater for $595,000 and turned it into a television studio for the “Tonight” show, first with Steve Allen and then Jack Paar. It was on the stage of the Hudson that Elvis Presley sang “Hound Dog” to a real hound dog wearing a top hat. A photo of that momentous event hangs in the theater’s upstairs bar. Presley does not look happy.
When “Tonight” decamped to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in 1959, NBC refurbished the Hudson — and discovered it had a tenant.
Since 1942, a producer named Robert Breen had been living in the Harris’ old apartment with his wife, Wilva, their kids and a ragtag band of theater people. Breen paid very little rent, made his own repairs and had light and heat only when the theater was in use. When it was empty, he used electric space heaters and the apartment’s four wood-burning fireplaces.
NBC, which needed the apartment for office space, tried to evict him, but Breen refused to leave. A court ruled in his favor. After he died, his wife continued to live in the apartment, successfully battling every effort to evict her.
Up until the 1990s, members of the Breen family squatted in the apartment while running a small theater company.
The nine-room apartment is empty today but for two enormous marble claw bathtubs that the Harrises installed a century ago. The tubs are too heavy to be removed.
AS Times Square slid into sleaze in the 1960s and ’70s, so, too, did the Hudson. It became a porno house. The theater that once housed Lillian Hellman’s “Toys in the Attic” was now showing “Boys in the Attic.”
The situation grew more dire in the ’80s, when the Hudson was nearly demolished at several points to make way for a parking lot, then considered a more valuable use of space than a theater.
It was landmarked in 1987, then bought by real-estate mogul Harry Macklowe, who used it as a conference center and banquet hall for his adjoining Macklowe Hotel.
Plans to turn the Hudson back into a legitimate theater never got off the ground until ATG took over the lease in 2015 and began renovating, turning it into the showpiece it is today.
Back in the ’60s, when the Hudson was a porn house, a reporter reached out to Renee Harris for a comment.
“When I’m on 44th Street, I turn my back on the Hudson,” she said. “It’s a movie house with sex pictures.”
She certainly wouldn’t turn her back on her theater today.