No Complaint

Marcus" Loew has purchased for $850,000 the Lexington Avenue Opera House, Manhattan, which was built by the late Oscar Hammerstein, and which has been used off and on for the production of lyric dramas. Mr. Loew will turn this theatre into a motion picture house. You might expect doleful complaints and bitter comments from the partisans of Art, but Mephisto in Musical America takes the transaction rather philosophically. Says he:

" I, for one, shall not regret the passing of the Lexington Avenue Opera House as a temple of the muse. Its acoustics were bad; the orchestra sounded overloud and seemed to be almost a veil between the singers and the audience. Furthermore, it was almost as bad as trying to make your way to a Yale-Harvard football match to get to the entrance of the house. The street cars ran ceaselessly past the front, and there was usually a great jam of automobiles, pedestrians. And once you had got in it was equally difficult to get away."