![]() ![]() Immediately popular, rooftop gardens shook up the summer scene. ![]() With a stage and café on the roof, revenues kept coming in. Theaters sat on valuable real estate, yet in the days before air-conditioning they went unused in the summer. The marriage of theater rooftop and garden, as any developer would acknowledge, was genius. He was already building the Casino Theater at 39th and Broadway, so he put a roof garden on top of it. While in Paris, an image came to him: the Ambassadeurs cafe-concert on the Champs-Elysees transported to a New York rooftop, adorned with shrubbery and fountains. He wanted to replicate the garden theaters he'd seen in Europe but knew there was no space for them in Manhattan. Rudolph Aronson, a composer and producer, came up with the idea of urban rooftop terraces. There was even, yes, an actual rooftop farm-with fresh eggs delivered to tenants-at the Ansonia Hotel. On city rooftops a century ago, you'd find acrobats, grottoes, Russian swans, monkeys, cows, waterfalls, duck ponds, lobster Newburg, vine-wrapped arches, pagodas, and Herr Techow and his performing cats. But one look through the archives and it's clear that our Gilded Age predecessors had us beat. We're seemingly in a golden age of the rooftop, thanks to the likes of Brooklyn Grange and Rooftop Films.
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