130. CITY CENTER
September 8, 2026
“The Rabinowitz family was on the way up: Harry was named a Master Mason in the Grand Lodge of the Most Ancient and Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons and bought a Packard to take his family on weekend drives, and Lena joined a host of social and religious organizations: Unity Link, the Order of the Golden Chain, the National Council of Jewish Women. When she wasn’t presiding over a tea or a meeting, she was spending time with the children, reading to them, encouraging them to memorize poetry, or playing games; in a favorite one of Jerry’s she would wipe a blackboard with a damp cloth and the children would rush to outline the wet patches with chalk before they disappeared.”
(Source: Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins by Amanda Vaill.)
“The artists, writers, composers, and thinkers who had come to tea or drinks with Kirk and Constance Askew—Paul Bowles, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Marianne Moore, Pavel Tchelitchew, Philip Johnson, E.E. Cummings, W.H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Willem de Kooning—came to its performances. In fact, New York City Ballet was developing into a substitute for the Askew salon as a gathering place for Uptown Bohemia. Its physical home, the former Mecca Temple of the Ancient and Accepted Order of the Mystic Shrine—a domed building on West Fifty-fifth Street that Kirstein described as having ‘the pasteboard exterior of a one-dimensional mosque’—housed thirty-five hundred patrons, but the tiered arrangement of the seats, and the narrow lobby and landings, made the theater seem almost intimate, a clubhouse for the initiated.”
(Source: Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins by Amanda Vaill.)
Before the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, The New York City Ballet was at 131 West 55th Street. Around the corner from Carnegie Hall.
