On a changing block in Chelsea, a Broadway set designer’s 1904 studio still stands
The luxury architecture of today’s far West Chelsea is surrounded by ghosts: of former horse stables, converted warehouses, and the steel trestle of the elevated railway that once carried trains and is now traversed by pedestrians.
Some of these ghosts offer mysterious clues about their former residents. Case in point: the blond-brick building on the south side of West 29th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.
“John H. Young” a terra cotta plaque above the door at Number 536 reads. “Studios 1904.”
Who was John H. Young? His is not a name most contemporary New Yorkers would recognize. But if you were a Broadway theater-goer in the early 1900s, you would know Young as the celebrated set designer for some of the biggest productions in the city’s flourishing theater world.
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1858, John Hendricks Young moved to Chicago and became a painter of frescoes “dealing almost exclusively in Scriptural figure subjects,” according to askart.com.
He relocated to New York City in 1895, where he served as a scene designer for a play called The White Rat at the People’s Theater, a Yiddish theater on the Bowery.
By the early 1900s, Young (above) was a sought-after Broadway set designer, “a favorite of such distinguished producers as David Belasco, George M. Cohan, and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.,” states the Historical Dictionary of American Theater.
Young was talented and devoted to his craft, and both qualities earned him his stellar rep. “He was particularly known for presenting mechanical displays on stage—in one case, a race between cars and trains,” wrote Michael Pollak in a New York Times FYI column from 2009. “He often commissioned photographs of foreign locations, or paid American Consulates in far-flung places to send him photos and postcards, to ensure that exotic scenes would be accurate onstage.”
Though he was living in the Westchester town of Pelham in 1904, Young chose a studio location in Manhattan. He commissioned architect Arthur C.G. Fletcher, according to Pollak, to design his four-story studio—with its oddly placed oval window on the ground floor and Flemish bond brickwork on the facade.
Why Young chose West 29th Street for his studio isn’t clear. Perhaps it had a certain grit and rawness that appealed to him, so unlike the glamour and dreaminess of early 20th century Broadway—where electric theater marquees blazed from the upper reaches of the Tenderloin past 42nd Street to Columbus Circle.
Here Young created his celebrated sets and scenic paintings. Over his career he worked on more than 70 productions, including three Ziegfeld Follies, Little Nemo, and Babes in Toyland, according to the Internet Broadway Database. The wide stable-like doorway must have made it easier to transport his large set pieces to the theaters 10 to 20 blocks north.
Young’s last credit was for Sinbad in 1918, which opened at the Winter Garden Theater before moving to the Casino Theater on 39th Street and closing at the 44th Street Theater, per the Internet Broadway Database.
I’m not sure when Young left West 29th Street, if he ever did, but he passed away in Pelham in 1944.
For much of the 21st century, his former studio—still marked with his name in terra cotta above the entrance—has been home to another type of creative endeavor: a fashion brand. The studio building went on sale in 2018 for an astounding $18.5 million.
The New York Times has interior shots of this little-known space, where an artist created sets and scenes that delighted and enchanted early 19th century Broadway audiences.
[Third photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fourth photo: Theatre Magazine, 1908]
