100 Third Avenue

Built about 1880, the Lyric Theatre began as a restaurant and was converted into a music hall before its 1910 renovation as one of New York’s earliest motion picture houses. Originally holding 274 seats, the theater doubled its seating in 1923 in response to the growing taste for movie-going. By the 1930s, the Lyric’s clientele consisted chiefly of transients from the Bowery, a few blocks to the south, who paid ten cents to see two features (one a western), a newsreel, and a short subject.