Gramercy Theater Loge
View from the Gramercy Loge
My lovely young wife took me to see night seven of Elvis Costello’s 10 night run at the Gramercy Theater in New York City. The loge in the Gramercy Theater is the balcony rather than a box. As you can see from the picture, the view is terrific. The theater holds about 500 people, but it feels smaller.
Gramercy Theater seating chart
The seats themselves a bit worn, and the rows pretty crowded. I’m 6’ 2” and was lucky to be on the aisle so I could stretch my legs. My lovely young wife is not as tall as I am by a fair bit, and even she felt a little crammed in.
The theater was built in 1937 and has had several lives. It’s now a Live Nation venue and a good place to see a show.
Unrelated to the Loge or show, we had a couple conversations before the performance that stick with me. Before the show we sat at the bar of a French restaurant for dinner, and were soon joined by a middle-aged woman who struck up a conversation with my wife (pretty typical experience). The woman said she was going to the show, and was Costello’s friend and neighbor. But, as she told us she told him, she’d never seem him live. So he slipped two tickets under her apartment door, and she and a friend were off to see him perform. Very NYC. About an hour later, standing in line to get into the theater we struck up a conversation with the guy in front of us. He said he was from Dorchester, Massachusetts, a neighborhood in Boston that can be a bit rough and tumble. This was his third show in the 10-night run. Once he stayed over, taking the train down, staying in NYC, and taking a 2:45am bus back after the second show. This time he was down and back in the same night.
Not sure what to do with those conversations, but the contrast of the casual fan who lives in the same building as a pop star who has sold more than five and half million records, and a devoted fan who dropped whatever the tickets cost and spent close to 24 hours to train down and bus back to Dorchester was pretty striking.
Loge in the Gramercy Loge