In 1908, Oscar Hammerstein (Oscar II’s grandfather) opened a grand opera house on North Broad Street in Philadelphia. A bravura performance, the Philadelphia Opera House filled an entire city block, had the largest stage in the city, and out-seated the cross-town competition, the Academy of Music by some 1,000 seats. Grand it may have been, but disastrously unprofitable. Despite selling out its first two seasons, the place nearly bankrupted Hammerstein. In 1910, he sold it to his arch-rival, the Metropolitan Opera Company, and thus began the building’s slow decline. The Met (the name change came with the change in ownership) hung on as an opera house for another decade or so, but the Great Depression more or less killed the place. The last operas produced there, a double billing of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, were performed in 1934.
From then on, the Met’s fate reads like a Hollywood weepie where the last reel finds the once-fabulous star used-up and drunk in a dive somewhere on the very wrong side of the tracks. From 1934 on, the grand old lady saw use as a movie theater, ballroom, basketball court, and wrestling and boxing ring.
In 1954, the Reverend Thea Jones bought the Met for the Philadelphia Evangelistic Center. Again, despite SRO crowds, Jones didn’t have the funds to maintain the building. Plaster began raining down on the congregants and the balcony seats had to be sealed off with tarps. In 1988, Jones and his church moved on, and for the next six years, the Met stood empty and silently disintegrated.
In 1995, another church group, the Holy Ghost Headquarters Revival Center, came to the rescue when the Reverend Mark Hatcher received a vision to restore the Met and help revitalize the neighborhood. A year later, he bought the building and raised funds to stabilize the rapidly decaying structure. Plans for a full restoration have been made but the timeline is anyone’s guess.
The sanctuary, confined to the orchestra seats, has been painted a pristine white, and congregants gather at what the center’s website describes as “an end-time Kingdom building” to profess their faith in the immaculate conception, a sin-less life, the Crucifixion, burial and Resurrection, Holy Communion, and Water Baptism.
Meanwhile, the tarps remain and the balconies, hidden from sight, crumble into dust.
The Philadelphia Sublime
Ever since moving to Philadelphia in the late 1980s, I’ve been hearing about the Met and wanting to get inside.
In May 2009, I got the chance when the Hidden City Festival opened the upper reaches of the theater to public view. The building was one of nine sites showcased during the month-long festival, which commissioned artists to create performances and installations in forgotten historical and architectural landmarks around the city.
You enter not from the grand boulevard of Broad Street but rather from the diminutive side street. The lobby, too, is on a modest scale, but presents a scrubbed-clean face, providing a glimpse into the white-washed sanctuary, just beyond the concession stand.
The first hint of what awaits you comes as you ascend the stairway up to the balcony seats. The stairwell soars but, for all its height, constricts. Part of the claustrophobic effect comes, no doubt, from the sad condition of the place. The walls are shedding paint and the ceiling dripping plaster. The lighting is dim.
But more is at work than mere decay. Even back in its glory days, that narrow chamber must have seemed too small to accommodate all those crowds, and the long slog up to the balcony must have been wearying.
But then, at the top of the long flight of stairs, you would have entered into a magnificent, glittering space—or, today, into a magnificent ruin.
Before you is an enormous room that seems to be melting away before your eyes. The muted lighting gives the place a golden cast, and the blue tarps that protect the orchestra seats seem almost like shrouds. Plaster has fallen away from the lathing, from the housing of the box seats, from the ceiling medallions. Here and there, the ghosts of the murals that decorated the walls peer out at you, and the arches that define the proscenium are decaying away to skeletons.
The whole physical experience – following that cramped staircase into the vast chamber – reminded me of my visit, nearly 30 years ago, to Carlsbad Caverns. There, you make your way along a narrow passageway into what they modestly call the Big Room (at more than 350,000 square feet, the size of six football fields) – and gasp.
It was, I suppose, my first experience of the sublime – that peculiar confusion of terror and beauty we experience before the ineffable. To me, Carlsbad seemed the best proof of the Old Testament God, the one who thought nothing of unleashing a deluge on the world or demanding a blood sacrifice from Abraham. The hard lesson of the sublime is one of our cosmic insignificance. Spend too much time at Carlsbad, and you’d obey a divine order to kill your son too.
On the sublimity scale, the Met doesn’t attain Carlsbad status but it’s as close as you’ll find in Philadelphia. A place in its death throes, the Met offers only the prospect of its demise. Contemplating the wreckage, you’re hard-pressed to imagine how the engineers and conservators can possibly resurrect the place.
The Temple Rots
Returning to the ground floor, I studied a display of photographs that documented the lives of the faithful. The Holy Ghost Headquarters Church practices full-immersion baptism and some of the most moving pictures showed Reverend Hatcher plunging initiates into the baptismal pool.
I peered again into the pristine sanctuary and saw it as a kind of refuge, a psychic space as much as a physical one. An immaculate place where the faithful gathered each Sunday to worship, welcoming the new congregants, taking Holy Communion, striving for a pure, sin-less life.
Above them all the while, the upper reaches of their temple rots.
Final Installment: Black Acid Coop and Concerto in Black and Blue
