Lyric Theatre

The story

One building quietly contains the bones of two others. When the current Lyric Theatre opened in 1998, it was built almost entirely from scratch on West 43rd Street — yet government regulations required preserving enough of what stood before that two prior theaters live inside it: the Apollo, built in 1920, and the old Lyric, built in 1903. Architect Richard Lewis Blinder stitched their facades into the new structure. Today the theater holds 1,622 seats across three levels, owned jointly by New York City and state, and has worn four different names in its lifetime.