People in the room
Mary Pattison, Pattison Brothers, Claude L. Hagen, Arthur FalkenerThe record says the electrical equipment throughout the building was designed and executed under the direction of Pattison Brothers.
1909 / Theatre and spectacle
The New Theatre
The New Theatre is beloved family memory meeting the discipline of the record. It keeps the drama, but moves the credit to the right machinery.
A Library of Congress photograph of the New Theatre gives the corrected family story a real facade.
Central Park West between 62nd and 63rd Streets, Manhattan
What this place asked the work to do.
A theatre was an electrical organism: audience light, stage light, elevators, appliances, and spectacle. The contemporary paper gives Pattison Brothers that world while refusing to hand them the revolving stage mechanism.
What it can carry
This can carry the firm's real theatre work and the corrected boundary around the revolving stage.
What remains careful
It cannot carry the older family remembrance that Frank or the firm invented or engineered the stage mechanism itself.
Architectural project article / 1909
A beloved story receives its boundary
The contemporary record gives Pattison Brothers important electrical work, but gives the revolving stage mechanism to Hagen and Falkener. The correction does not weaken the family story; it makes it honorable.
Where this page comes from The Architect, 1909
Why it changes the telling This is the kind of honesty that lets descendants trust the whole telling. We keep what is true and release what the record will not carry.
How far it carries us It supports the firm's electrical role and corrects the older family memory about the revolving stage mechanism.