Eyewitness: 1950 -- The first Nixon closes; long live the Nixon
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Mae West with W.C. Fields
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As Mayor David Lawrence saw it, sentiment could not stand in the way of "Pittsburgh's march of progress."
He and Mae West shared the stage of the Nixon Theater on April 29, 1950, after the final performance of her play, "Diamond Lil." The 47-year-old theater was scheduled for demolition, making way for the new headquarters of the Aluminum Company of America.
But the mayor also offered hope to the 2,256 people who came to the closing-night performance. "The Nixon is not dying," he told the crowd, according to the May 1 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "We didn't come here to bury the Nixon, but to praise it and move it."
Pittsburgh had a long tradition of renaming and even relocating landmark structures, the mayor said. "He recalled how St. Paul's Cathedral, which used to be at Fifth Avenue and Grant Street, had been razed to rise again in Oakland," reporter Gene Jannuzi wrote. "[H]ow St. Peter's Episcopal Church had been moved stone by stone from Diamond and Grant to Forbes and Craft to make way for the Frick Building."
The Nixon, too, would get a new address. It would relocate from Sixth Avenue into the soon-to-be-renamed Senator Theater on Liberty Avenue, a distance of about three blocks.
"Diamond Lil" was a short three-act play linked to "one of the longest curtain-calls on record," Mr. Jannuzi wrote. Mae West offered the crowd "about 10 minutes of rehearsed coyness" as she took her bows.
In the audience for that final show Mr. Jannuzi found two women -- Mrs. Arthur Sheets and Mrs. J.W. Henry -- who had attended the opening night performance at the Nixon "in the winter of 1903 as young girls."
"Mrs. Sheets had with her the sheepskin-bound program that had been a first-night souvenir," he wrote.
Pittsburgh theatergoers were determined to collect some of their own souvenirs from that last night.
First Published May 2, 2010 12:00 am
