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 1855, and Patti made her début in 1859. The hall was managed in 1855 by Laura Keene and in 1856–1858 by William E. Burton, and in it in 1864 the three Booths played Julius Caesar, and Edwin Booth played Hamlet for one hundred nights. It was burned in March 1867. In Booth’s Theatre (1869–1882; managed and afterwards leased by Edwin Booth), Sarah Bernhardt made her American début (November 1880); and in the Park Theatre (Broadway and 21st Street; 1875–1882) Stuart Robson and William H. Crane first played together. Light opera was first introduced in 1864, opera bouffe in 1867, and Gilbert and Sullivan light opera in 1879; and The Pirates of Penzance was produced in New York before it was seen in London. Most of the older theatres still in existence have become houses of vaudeville, melodrama or moving pictures, as, for example, the Academy of Music (14th Street and Irving Place; opened in 1854), until about 1883 the home of the best opera, in which Christine Nilsson, Parepa-Rosa, Salvini and Emma Nevada made their American débuts. The Broadway (1888) was the scene of Edwin Booth’s last performance, as Hamlet, in March 1891. In connexion with the Empire Theatre (1893) is the Empire Dramatic School. The two largest places of amusement are the Madison Square Garden (opened in 1890) and the Hippodrome (Sixth Avenue and 43rd-44th Streets). The principal concert halls are Carnegie Music Hall (1891; built by Andrew Carnegie for the Symphony and Oratorio Societies) and Mendelssohn Hall. The Metropolitan Opera House (1882; burnt 1892; immediately rebuilt) gave in 1884 the first season of German opera in America, under the direction of Leopold Damrosch. The Manhattan Opera House (built in 1903 by Oscar Hammerstein as the Drury Lane) was opened as an opera-house in December 1906. In 1910 grand opera ceased to be given except in the Metropolitan. Grand opera in New York has always been dependent for financial success on season subscriptions, and (like the great museums and the zoological and botanical gardens) has been supported by millionaires. The New Theatre (1909) is practically an endowed house.

Music.—Musical societies were formed in the 18th century, an Apollo Society as early as 1750, a St Cecilia Society, which lasted less than ten years, in 1791, and the Euterpean Society, which lived a half century, in 1799. A New York Choral Society was established in 1823, a Sacred Music Society in the same year and a Philharmonic Society in 1824, succeeded in 1828 by the Musical Fund Society. The present Philharmonic Society, composed of professional players, was organized in 1842 by a New York violinist, Uriah C. Hill (d. 1875). In 1847 was formed the Deutscher Liederkranz, which has given much classical German music; a secession from the Liederkranz in 1854 formed the Arion Society, which has been more modern than the Liederkranz, furnished in 1859 the choruses for Tannhäuser, the first Wagner opera performed in America, and brought from Breslau in 1871 Leopold Damrosch (1832–1885) as its conductor. He founded the Oratorio Society in 1873 and the Symphony Society in 1877, and was succeeded as conductor of each of these societies by his son Walter (b. 1862). Musical instruction in the public schools has been under the supervision of Frank Damrosch (b. 1859), another son of Leopold, who formed in 1892 the People’s Singing Classes, picked voices from which form the People’s Choral Union.

Art.—Many private collections have been given or lent to the public galleries of the city, in which are held from time to time excellent loan collections. The largest public art gallery is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for which a committee, including art patrons and members of the National Academy of Design, drew up a plan in 1869, and which was chartered in April 1870. General (q.v.) became its director in 1879 and was succeeded (1905–1910) by Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, director of the South Kensington Museum, and in 1910 by Edward Robinson (b. 1858). In April 1871 the legislature appropriated $500,000 for a building for the Museum in Central Park: in 1878 the trustees took possession of the building in a tract of 18 acres in Central Park on Fifth Avenue between 80th and 85th Streets; and in March 1880 this building was opened. Additions were made to the south (1888) and the north (1894). In 1902 the central part of the E. front of a new building was opened, and under an appropriation of $1,250,000 in 1904 the building was again enlarged in 1908. Among the benefactors of the Museum have been: its presidents, John Taylor Johnston (1820–1893), (q.v.), who gave it his collection (old masters and English school), and J. Pierpont Morgan, and Miss Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, who gave the Museum $200,000 and her collection of paintings, Jacob S. Rogers (1823–1901) who left the Museum about $5,000,000, Frederick T. Hewitt, who gave more than $1,600,000, and John S. Kennedy (1830–1909), who left it $2,500,000. Besides paintings and statuary the Museum has collections of glass, Egyptian antiques, Babylonian and Assyrian seals and cylinders, tapestries, ancient gems, porcelain and pottery, armour, musical instruments, laces and architectural casts. The New York Historical Society since 1858 has had the collection of the New York Gallery of the Fine Arts; in its art gallery are several examples of Van Dyck and Velazquez, the best collection in the United States (except the Jarves collection at Yale) of the primitives and the early Renaissance of Italy and the Low Countries, and a good American collection, rich in portraits and in the work of Thomas Cole. There is a small collection of paintings with some statuary in the Lenox Library and there are many private collections of note. The National Academy of Design (organized in 1826; incorporated in 1828) has an art library, and students’ classes. The Society of American Artists (1877) was a secession from the Academy which it rejoined in 1906. This Society with the Art Students’ League (1875), and the Architectural League of New York (1881) formed in 1889 the American Fine Arts Society. In its building on W. 57th Street there are good galleries, it is the headquarters of the American Water Color Society (1866), the New York Water Color Club, the National Sculpture Society (1893), the National Society of Mural Painters and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects; and the exhibitions of the National Academy of Design and of the Society of American Artists are held here. The National Arts Club and the Municipal Art Society (1893) have club houses in Gramercy Park. The Decorative Art Association (1878) has classes and sales-rooms for women artists. There are art classes at (q.v.). Columbia University has a School of Architecture (1881).

Municipal Art, Monuments, Statuary, &c.—The city charter of 1897 established an art commission consisting of the mayor, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the president of the New York Public Library, the president of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, one painter, one sculptor, one architect and three lay members, the last six to be appointed by the mayor from a list presented by the Fine Arts Federation of New York. Without the approval of this commission no work of art can become the property of the city either by purchase or by gift. Whenever requested by the mayor and board of aldermen it must act in a similar capacity with respect to the design of any municipal building, bridge or other structure, and no municipal structure that is to cost more than one million dollars can be erected until it has approved the design. The City Hall contains a valuable collection of portraits. In front of the Custom House are groups symbolical of the continents by D. C. French. The Hall of Records has historic and allegorical statues by Philip Martiny, H. K. Bush-Brown and Albert Weinert. In the Criminal Courts Building are mural decorations by Edward Simmons. The statuary of the Appellate Court House is by T. S. Clarke, K. F. T. Bitter, M. M. Schwartzott, D. C. French, F. W. Ruckstuhl, C. H. Niehaus and others; and it has excellent mural paintings by E. H. Blashfield, Kenyon Cox, C. Y. Turner, H. S. Mowbray and others. Of the city’s great monuments the greatest is the tomb (1897; designed by John H. Duncan) of General (q.v.); this mausoleum is in Riverside Park, commanding the North river, at 122nd Street. In the same park at 90th Street is the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument (1900; C. W. Stoughton, A. A. Stoughton and P. E. Duboy), a memorial to those who fought in the Union army during the Civil War; it has marble and granite stairways leading up to a pedestal on which are twelve fluted Corinthian pillars arranged in a circle and covered with a white marble canopy. On Bedloe’s Island in the harbour is the colossal bronze “Liberty Enlightening the World” (F. Bartholdi; dedicated 1886; presented to the people of the United States by the people of France), which is 151 ft. 5 in. from its base to the top of the torch held in the uplifted hand of the female figure. On the N. side of Washington Square at the foot of Fifth Avenue is the granite Washington Arch (1889; by Stanford White) commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the inauguration in New York City of George Washington as first president of the United States. Among other public statues and monuments are: Augustus St Gaudens’s W. T. Sherman (1903), an equestrian statue in gilt bronze on a polished granite pedestal in Fifth Avenue at the S.E. entrance to Central Park, his D. G. Farragut (1880; with a granite exedra for pedestal, designed by Stanford White) in Madison Square, and his Peter Cooper (1894), a seated figure on a marble pedestal and beneath a marble canopy (designed by Stanford White) immediately below Cooper Union on the Bowery; F. W. MacMonnies’s Nathan Hale (1893) in City Hall Park; J. Q. A. Ward’s William Shakespeare (1870), Seventh Regiment Memorial (1873), “Indian Hunter” (1868), and “Pilgrim” (1885) in Central Park, his George Washington (1882) on the steps of the sub-treasury, his Greeley in front of the Tribune building, and his William Earl Dodge (1885) at Broadway and 34th Street; E. Plassmann’s Benjamin Franklin (1872) in Printing House Square; Alexander Doyle’s Horace Greeley (1890) in Greeley Square; K. F. T. Bitter’s Franz Sigel (1907) in Riverside Park at 106th Street, D. C. French’s Memorial to R. M. Hunt (1900), a bust with a semicircular granite entablature at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street; and a Columbus Memorial (1894; by Gaetano Russo; erected by the Italian residents), a tall shaft with a statue of Columbus, at 59th Street and Seventh Avenue. There are many other statues in the city, especially in (q.v.) and in Central Park. In Central Park on a knoll S.W. of the Metropolitan Museum stands the Egyptian obelisk, of rose-red Syene granite, the companion of that on the Thames embankment, London, and like it popularly called “Cleopatra’s Needle,” but actually erected by Thothmes III.; it was presented to the city by Ismail Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, in 1877, was brought to New York at the expense of W. H. Vanderbilt in 1880, and was erected in the park in 1881.

Scientific Collections and Learned Societies.—The New York Aquarium in Battery Park has excellent exhibits of marine life; since 1902 it has been under the direction of the New York Zoological Society (organized 1895), a private corporation which has relations with the Park Department and the city like those of the corporations in control of the Botanical Gardens, the Natural History Museum