REAL ESTATE: Exit Center Theatre

When the Rockefellers opened Rockefeller Center in mid-Manhattan in 1932, they assumed that the Center could support two big theaters: the 6,200-seat Radio City Music Hall and the 3,500-seat Center Theatre. The plan was for the Music Hall to have vaudeville while the Center, only a block away, would show movies. The plan fell through when vaudeville died, and the Music Hall also began showing films.

Unable to meet the competition of its bigger brother, the Center Theatre turned to stage extravaganzas (one was The Great Waltz) and an occasional opera or ballet, but did little better. It had a profitable respite with the Sonja Henie ice show from 1940 to 1950, then became NBC’s biggest television theater (Milton Berle show, etc.). But its income did not keep pace with Manhattan’s rising real-estate values. Last week Rockefeller Center’s Chairman Laurance Rockefeller pronounced a death sentence on the relatively young building. When NBC’s lease expires next May, workmen will tear down the Center’s vermilion doors, mahogany walls, its six-ton, 400-bulb chandelier, once the world’s biggest. On the theater’s site will rise a new $11 million, 19-story office building that will connect with the U.S. Rubber Co. building and bear the same name.