



In the late 1800s, the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway was known as Longacre Square. By day, it was the center of the city’s horse carriage business - but at night, it was a red-light district with the largest collection of nightclubs, casinos, strip clubs, and brothels in the city.
By the early 20th Century, the renamed Times Square district had emerged as the hub of the city's entertainment scene, home to "high-society" hotels, movie palaces, and majestic theaters showcasing musicals, vaudeville, and burlesque.
The Columbia Amusement Company building was built in 1910 on the corner of 47th Street in the heart of Times Square. The upper floors served as the company’s headquarters, while the ground floor housed The Columbia Theater, the “home of Burlesque de luxe.”
In 1930 the theater was converted into an Art Deco-style cinema and renamed the Mayfair Theater, famous for its eight-story wraparound billboard.

The Mayfair Theater with a poster for RKO Radio Pictures Inc. "Underwater", 1955. © Unknown.
Mayfair Recording Studios was opened in 1965 and was run by a young engineer named Gary Kellgren, whom Frank Zappa recalls “drank beer, smoked menthols, and worked incessantly.”
The peg-board walled studio was poorly lit, badly isolated, and much of the equipment was hand-built. “The place had a beautiful wooden floor that was all ripped up, and there were holes everywhere – you had to step around to set up, a real fucking hassle,” remembers John Cale.
However, the studio was considered one of the best in the city, and the first to have an eight-track Ampex tape machine The main wall in the control room was autographed with comments like “fantastic sound” and “wonderful experience” from artists such as Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix.

Verve Records promotional photograph of The Velvet Underground, 1966.
In April 1966, The Velvet Underground’s manager and producer, Andy Warhol, fronted $1500 to record nine songs in four days at Scepter Studios in New York with the hope of getting the band a record deal.
With lyrics about sadomasochism, prostitution, and waiting on a drug dealer to show up to buy heroin, the album was rejected by Columbia, Atlantic, and Alektra, but producer Tom Wilson persuaded the band to sign with Verve Records.
Guitarist Sterling Morrison recalls Wilson saying that “at Verve we could do anything we wanted. And he was right.”
The deal gave the band enough money to re-record three songs, “Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin,” and “Venus in Furs”, with Wilson taking over production from Andy Warhol.
“Not to minimize Andy Warhol’s presence, but his many talents did not include being a music producer,” recalls Lou Reed. “He didn’t know anything about record production—but he didn’t have to. He just sat there and said “Oooh, that’s fantastic,” and the engineer would say, “Oh yeah! Right! It is fantastic, isn’t it.”
Wilson also wanted the band to write a radio-friendly song featuring German model Nico on vocals that had the potential to become a hit single.
“Andy said, ‘Why don’t you just make it a song about paranoia?’” recalls Reed, “ I thought that was great so I came up with ‘Watch out, the world’s behind you, there’s always someone watching you,’ which I feel is the ultimate paranoid statement in that the world cares enough to watch you.”

In October 1966 the band recorded “Sunday Morning” at Mayfair Sound Studios.
Everything about the sessions was last minute. Despite having written the song for Nico, Reed decided to record the vocals himself. Cale noticed a Celesta in the studio and decided to use it to play the songs dreamy melody throughout. The track was literally pencilled in as the first track on the master tape of the album.
The single was released in November 1966 and failed to chart. When the album was released in March 1967, it was banned from record stores, radio stations refused to play it, and magazines refused to carry advertising for it.
It only sold 30,000 copies, but as Brian Eno famously said, “Everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”
Fifty years after its release, the album remains an icon of countercultural cool. It is considered to be one of the most influential records of the late twentieth century. In 2006, the Library of Congress inducted it into the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."


The Columbia Amusement Company building was demolished in the spring of 2015 to make way for a 42-story skyscraper with the vanity address of 20 Times Square.
The building contains 70,000 sq.ft. of ground-floor retail and a 450-room Marriott EDITION hotel, which developer Ian Schrager declared "the first luxury hotel ever in Times Square."
A 17,000-square-foot LED display wraps around the building, reminiscent of the huge billboard that covered the Mayfair. At the time of installation, it was one of the largest continuous exterior displays in the world, and the largest in New York.
In 2019, just ten months after the hotel opened, French bank Natixis, which had provided $2 billion dollars in financing for the project, foreclosed on the property, citing the developer's inability to secure ground-floor retail tenants.
In August 2020, with the COVID pandemic grinding tourism to a halt, the hotel announced it would close.
Today, Hershey's Chocolate World is the only retail tenant in the building, and foreclosure looms again with $650 million in outstanding loans.
Real Estate magazine The Real Deal called the building “one of the biggest disasters in New York real estate history.”





