Chatham Theatre

The story

A. H. Purdy created a dedicated seating section for African American patrons at a time when most New York theatres offered them nothing. The Chatham opened in 1839 on what is now Park Row, a neighborhood house built by Thomas Flynn and Henry Willard. It drifted into blackface minstrelsy by the mid-1840s before Purdy's staging of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 made it briefly essential. The show's success drove him to advertise heavily and reckon, however imperfectly, with who his audience actually was. The theatre was demolished in 1862.