It is interesting to note that the early "theater district" in New York City once faced on perhaps the "oldest street in America" (Encyclopedia Americana) Bowery and today the oldest arts organization in America the small "Amato Opera" house and the Bouwerie Theatre are still on it today. The music venue CBGBs used to be there, once an important part of "punk" music. A "Germania Hall" was also once there torn down since where Kate Mullaney, her house in Troy, NY is now on the US National Register of Historic Places, was elected there to a union the first woman to, sitting next to Susan B. Anthony, who once was arrested for voting dressed as a man. The Yiddish Theater was nearby for awhile but most of the NYC theater moved up to mid-town into larger and safer theaters.
There is a serious effort to turn the circular Fort Williams on Governors Island into a Shakespearean Theater, in the round. I wonder if there will be or not to be groundlings? I worked shortly there in geoarchaeology and the Coast Guard groundskeeper said Walt Disney had once been kept in it (a prison in the Civil War for Confederates) when he missed the steamboat and was found AWOL. Eagle symbols there face left and right due to its use by the Army and the Coast Guard, where Orville Wright first took off and flew over the Hudson River and ran what was America's first flight school launched by catapult. Fort Jay was built by appreciative Columbia University (formerly Kings College) students. It's named after John Jay, the first Supreme Court Justice who had negotiated the treaty that ended the American Revolutionary War. It was former President Clinton who offered it back to NYC for $1.
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