How NYC’s massive Palace Theater was lifted into the air: ‘An inch an hour’

nypost.com:

Putting up a Broadway show is hard enough. But try lifting a 111-year-old, 7,000-ton Broadway theater 30 feet in the air. That’s just what a group of intrepid engineers and designers have done to the Palace Theater, the iconic 47th Street venue that’s played host to such luminaries as Judy Garland, her daughter Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler and classic musicals like “Sweet Charity” and “La Cage Aux Folles.”During a painstaking process that took nearly nine years from signing the contracts to the May 2024 opening night of Ben Platt’s concert residency, the massive building — which has also acted as a vaudeville house and an RKO movie theater — was dramatically jacked up two stories to make room for a new 669-room hotel and retail spaces below.The Palace itself also got a much-needed spruce-up.

The lobbies, backstage areas and, most vitally, the bathrooms, are totally new.“We might argue, and some may agree, that it’s the most famous theater in the city of New York,” Nick Scandalios, Executive Vice President of the Nederlander Organization, told The Post. “And we’re really proud that at the end of this, it’s still the pinnacle of that.” After the Palace shuttered in 2018 with the closing of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” the long process of prepping the theater for the move began.

That step alone took several years.While the famous site is landmarked by the city, a designation that can lead to permissions hurdles, the team got lucky with a quirk.“The Palace is very unique because it was an encased brick box with no facade,” Scandalios said of the venue that previously had only a tiny marquee that was far newer than the house.“Many of our landmarked theaters are landmarked both inside and outside.