Radio City Music Hall

The story

The plot Radio City Music Hall stands on was meant for a Metropolitan Opera house — a plan scrapped in 1929. What opened instead, on December 27, 1932, became something grander in popular imagination: a 5,960-seat Art Deco monument designed by Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey, nicknamed The Showplace of the Nation. By the 1970s, declining audiences nearly drove it to bankruptcy. Landmark designation in May 1978 saved it. Restored, renovated in 1999, it remains the headquarters of the Rockettes — rescued from the wreckage of someone else's canceled dream.