11. The Princess
The Princess, located on Thirty-ninth Street, was among the smallest Broadway theaters when it opened in 1913. The outside of The Princess may have been reminiscent of a tall office building but the theater’s musical comedies from 1915 to the early ’20s were anything but boring. The inside of the building was a sharp contrast to the outside with its Georgian and French Renaissance styles, antique French tapestries, and neoclassical plasterwork.
The Princess was built for one-act dramatic plays, but also showed musical comedies, and then switched back to dramas in its final seven years before it was sold to The New York Assembly. It had a brief stint as the Assembly Theatre before it closed within a year. The Princess went through several different owners and functions after that. It was turned into a movie theater, a recreation center, a performance theater once more, and finally a movie theater again until it was torn down in 1955.