Hippodrome

1905. The Yankee Circus on Mars was in town. Cobs in endless procession clopped up Sixth Avenue. Black coachmen and white, in cockaded silk hats, with thorny whips at jaunty angles, fluttered the leathern ribbons that guided the cobs that drew glistening Brewster cut-unders to the theatre. Out stepped gay New York blades, boxed in smart, heavy tailcoats.

1914. Children with braces on their teeth; children with governesses on their arms, children with adenoids, children with doting aunts, harassed mothers, hearty uncles, self-conscious fathers. Children with questions on their lips: "Mother, don't the ladies dwown when they go down in the water, Mother?"

Charlotte pirouetted on artificial ice. . . . Houdini wore straitjackets . . . Annette Kellerman in black epidermal tights . . . Toto . . . Marceline . . . Perche-rons . . . choruses not as pretty but much harder-working than the later Follies.

1928. The Six Rizzardis, aerialists extraordinary . . . Welsh & Kaplan, divertissement . . . Maybella de la Maye, operatic star . . . the Smfth Brothers & Their Eight Musical .Cough Drops . . . Frenzo, master of legerdemain . . . newsreel. Roseribergs from Queens . . . Callahans from Brooklyn . . . Schmidts from Yorkville . . . Whites from Harlem . . . Rosenbergs, Callahans, Schmidts from the Bronx.

1929. Thus the Hippodrome, onetime (1904-1926) world's largest playhouse.* Last week it was sold and soon it will pass save from the memories of people who saw their first elephant there.

The seller: Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp. The buyer: Frederick Brown, realtor. The price: circa $6,000,000. The Hippodrome's fate: presumably to be demolished, a fraternal organization's Manhattan home to be built on the site.

*Hippodrome seats 6,100. Roxy Theatre, Manhattan seats 6,200.