Lyceum Theatre

The story

The oldest continuously operating legitimate theater in New York City has an apartment built into it. Impresario Daniel Frohman lived above the lobby when the Beaux-Arts house opened in 1903, watching his stage through a peephole — a detail that gives the whole building its particular character. Designed by Herts & Tallant, the Lyceum still holds most of its original ornament: groin-vaulted ceilings, murals, an elaborate proscenium. That apartment is now the Shubert Archives. The facade was landmarked in 1974, the interiors in 1987 — the city's formal insistence that some places must not disappear.