of elegant boxes to display the wealth of the city's new economic leaders. The new opera house was an instant success with New York society and music lovers alike, and the Academy of Music's opera season was canceled in 1886. In 1888 the Academy began to offer vaudeville. The Drury Lane import The White Heather had a successful 148-performance run for the 1897-98 season. Between 1895 and 1899, Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr., delivered sermons there. From January 28 to March 1901, a revival of Clyde Fitch's play Barbara Frietchie appeared there. The venue was rented by labor organizations in the early 1900s and used to stage rallies. In 1926 it was demolished, along with its neighbor Tammany Hall, for the construction of the Consolidated Edison Company Building. Movie theater On the south side of 14th Street across from the site of the opera house, a movie theatre opened in 1927 which took the name the Academy of Music. It was built as a 3,000-seat deluxe movie palace by movie mogul William Fox, and was designed by Thomas W. Lamb. It served as a venue for rock concerts in the 1960s and early 1970s, with its name being changed to "The Palladium" by promoter Ron Delsner in September 1976. In 1985, it was converted into the Palladium nightclub, designed by Arata Isozaki. The theater was bought and demolished by New York University, and replaced by the present Palladium Residence Hall, which opened in 2001. In Literature The second paragraph of Edith Wharton's 'The Age of Innocence' reads: "On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in 'Faust' at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection 'above the forties' of a new Opera House which would compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and incovenient, and thus keeping out the 'new people' whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music." References Notes Bibliography External links Various pictures of the Academy at the