(Jewish group) How a Yiddish theater mecca became 'the church of rock 'n' roll'
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of the Fillmore East the iconic theater that early on was dubbed by a member of the Grateful Dead, as “The Church of Rock n Roll.” And, while the Fillmore is best known for the way it mainstreamed youth music, this rock ‘n’ roll church also has a Yiddish provenance.
It was built in 1922 by Jewish entertainment entrepreneurs Elias Meyer and Louis Schneider and began life as the Commodore Theater, a swank 2,200 seat revolutionary hybrid mixed-use space (movies and vaudeville) and just one of their 17 theaters on the Lower East Side alone).
Meyer and Schneider presented silent movies and vaudeville (both American and Yiddish) alongside night school, a popular and profitable method for fast-track Jewish acculturation. (For example, in the winter 1925 season, their Mt. Morris Theater in a formerly Jewish Harlem neighborhood, which was seeing a significant demographic shift of incoming African-Americans, Meyer and Schneider booked in Goldye Mae Steiner billed as “di shvartze khaznte, The World’s Only Colored Woman Cantor.”)
On the Avenue: The theater that became the Fillmore East was built in 1922 by Jewish entertainment entrepreneurs Elias Meyer and Louis Schneider and began life as the Commodore Theater,
To build the Commodore, Meyer and Schneider turned to architect Harrison G. Wiseman (1877-1945) whose neo-Orientalist and Deco- styled theater constructions were among the most literate and lavish of the day. Wiseman (who, incidentally, was not Jewish) found even more popularity in the late 1920s with the arrival of talking pictures and microphones. Theaters rushing to “wire” their houses for sound found that extant Wiseman theaters were eminently better suited than other theaters to the different needs of both amplified and acoustic sound.
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