Music: Opera Site Abandoned

Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera Company found itself last week in the predicament of planning to move and having no place to go. Since last winter it has been understood that a new Metropolitan operahouse would be the centre of a midtown development projected by John Davison Rockefeller Jr. (TIME, Dec. 31). But last week a joint statement issued by Realtor Rockefeller and the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company declared that the plan had been abandoned “with good will on both sides.” The proposed Rockefeller site is tied up with leasesuntil November 1931. The public was asked to believe that, after years of inaction, the Metropolitan was unwilling to wait two years more. Said the New York Evening Post: From 50 to 100 of the obstructing leases are held by speakeasies.