Roseland Theater Seating chart

Roseland Theater
The Roseland Ballroom, or simply the Roseland Dance City, is a catering hall/music venue/dance hall which has been transformed into an ice skating rink with a colorful ballroom dancing pedigree in New York City's theatre district on West 52nd Street.

Brecker was to make Marathon dancing famous and gain considerable reputation until it was barred, staged female prizefights, yo-yo exhibitions, sneezing contests, and dozens of highly-proclaimed jazz weddings with couples who met at the club.

With the passage of time, Brecker attempted to celebrate the dancing more by having hostesses dance for $11 per dance or $1.50 a half-hour with bouncers in tuxedos, responsible to maintain order and discipline. It was to work its way into stories by Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara.

In 1956, the original New York Roseland was demolished and relocated to its new location i.e., on West 52nd in a building that Brecker previously had converted from an ice skating rink to a roller skating rink.Time Magazine cited its opening decor in the following words "purple-and-cerise tentlike d?cor that creates a definite harem effect."

Before Brecker relocated the venue, the 52nd Street building had its own history and prestige.It was built in 1922 at a cost of $800,000 by the Iceland ice skating franchise. On November 29, 1922, nearly thousand skaters showed up the inaugural night at the 80 by 200 foot rink. In 1932, Iceland went penniless and the rink opened as the Gay Blades Ice Rink.

In the 1950s, it was taken over by Brecker, who transformed it into roller skating. Brecker maintained its ballroom dancing style banning rock and roll and disco.In 1981, Brecker sold the building. Under the new owners, the Roseland held regularly scheduled "disco nights" which gave rise to a period when it was thought to be a hazardous venue and neighborhood menace.

In 1984 a teenager was shot to death on the dance floor. In 1990 a Utah tourist Brian Watkins was murdered in the subway and four of the eight suspects were found partying at the Roseland. Consequently Roseland was forced to eliminate the tradition of regularly scheduled "disco nights."

Its low rise 3-story structure on top of the dance floor in the center of midtown Manhattan has stimulated anxiety over it being torn down for redevelopment. In 1996 the new proprietor Laurence Ginsburg filed plans to demolish the venue and restore it with a 42-story, 459-unit apartment building. According to Ginsburg?s spokesman the filing was to "beat a deadline for new, more stringent earthquake codes, which went into effect earlier" in 1996. The interior space has been consequently modernized and furbished.