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New York City Sights – Radio City Music Hall
By Brian | May 20, 2009 | Share on Facebook
As you can see in this handy, dandy map, my office building (50 Rockefeller Plaza) is actually the same physical building as Radio City Music Hall.
That made this set of pictures pretty easy to come by:
If you Google around, you’ll learn that the music hall holds almost 6,000 people and boasts a stage 20 meters deep and 44 meters wide (66.5 feet x 144 feet). You’ll also read that it used to be a movie theater (the largest in the world at the time), and that it houses the “Mighty Wurlitzer” pipe organ (4,410 pipes – the largest ever built for a movie theater). And, of course, you’ll read about the Radio City Rockettes, all 200+ of whom must be between 5’6″ and 5’10” to participate.
But what you won’t find out is this: how do they change that sign every day? No, no – for that information, you need to come here to Familygreenberg.com (“providing useless knowledge to the masses since 2005”). Just about every morning, I pass this plain, yellow cart filled with plastic panels engraved with letters:
and then two guys (both of whom are clearly not Rockettes, even if they are between 5’6″ and 5’10”) move slowly around the sign with a ladder and change each letter by hand.
I find this fascinating, since Radio City could probably put in an electronic LED display that could be changed from a laptop in their ticket office for less than the combined annual salary of these two guys. And yet, the cart, the letters, and the ladder live on.
Tradition!
Topics: New York, New York | Comments Off on New York City Sights – Radio City Music Hall
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