In a message Twybil writes:

<< I have visited the Am [New Amsterdam Theater on West 42nd] pre and post
[renovation] as well and the feeling it evoked was that of my early black and
white photographs which, after developing, I would dip in diluted coffee for a
"aged" effect. Has Mr. Hardy ever heard of dimmer switches? >>

I have not visited the New Amsterdam; from modern photographs it looks
spectacular.  I have repeatedly visited the New Victory, across the street,
once with Hugh Hardy himself; he gave a vibrant and interesting tour and he
was extremely conversant with the history of the place - more even than most
historians, and with a wider eye.  It became clear to me that no change had
taken place without thoughtful consideration, and there were no assumptions
that hadn't been checked.

My first visit to the New Victory was when it was the (old) Victory, about
1980.  I forget the title bill, but upon first glimpse the ragged movie screen
was fully occupied by, on the diagonal, a large, pink, quivering shaftlike
object.  The room was lit only by the red exit signs.  The audience was
dispersed through the theater with scientific precision, no occupied seat
being closer to another occupied seat by less than a radius of 6 seats.  The
wall hangings were in tatters, the paint, peeling.  The three-tiered 1900
interior - a sort of compressed Carnegie Hall - seemed like an astounding
discovery, nothing like which survives in New York.  Even the hard-boiled real
estate attorneys I was with gasped in astonishment (at the architecture).

The New Victory, although celebrated as a rescue, eliminated that "discovery"
but what architect could have saved it?   It was the intervention itself, the
act of "preserving", which killed that special sense.  Even dimmers couldn't
have saved it.

That's why I said (on P-L) let the restaurants put in their exhaust fans -
those fans are authentic.

Christopher Gray