Studio 54, West 54th Street NYC

Studio 54 is a Broadway theater and former nightclub at 254 West 54th Street in Midtown Manhattan, between 8th Avenue and Broadway. The venue opened as the Gallo Opera House in 1927. The modern-day theater has 1,006 seats on two levels:

The Italian-born producer Fortune Gallo (1878-1970) announced plans for an opera house in 1926, hiring Eugene De Rosa as the architect. The original theater contained 1,400 seats and the facilities included lounges, restrooms, and promenades on three stories, as well as an opera museum below the main floors.

The Gallo Opera House opened November 8, 1927, with the San Carlo Company's large-scale production of La bohème. In 1928, Philip Goodman leased the theater for five years, but the theater went bankrupt and was bought at a foreclosure auction in December 1929 by the Hemphill Realty Corporation. Then the theater was renamed the New Yorker Theatre. By 1933, the venue operated as the Casino de Paree nightclub, then the Palladium Music Hall, before the Federal Music Project staged productions at the theater for three years starting in 1937. CBS began using the venue as a soundstage in 1942, then as a television studio until 1975. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened the Studio 54 nightclub, retaining much of the former theatrical and broadcasting fixtures, inside the venue in 1977. The club closed in 1986 and became a venue for rock concerts until it eventually closed completely in the late 1980s. The space remained vacant until 1998, when Roundabout Theatre Company renovated the space into a Broadway house and moved its production of Cabaret into the venue.