Hammerstein Ballroom

The story

The Metropolitan Opera once paid Oscar Hammerstein I $1.2 million simply to stop competing with them. That was 1910, and it effectively ended the Manhattan Opera House as a serious opera venue — the elaborately decorated theater he'd built in 1906 drifted into vaudeville, then changed hands, then became a ballroom. Today the Hammerstein seats 2,000 for concerts, with two unusually low balconies that put the upper crowd closer to the stage than almost anywhere else in Midtown.