Venue: Anco Cinema
Town: Manhattan, US

The Anco Cinema was a former Broadway theatre turned cinema at 254 West 42nd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues in Manhattan, New York City. It opened in 1904 and was originally named the Lew Fields Theatre. It continued to operate as a playhouse under various names until it was converted into a movie theatre in 1930. Its block was famous for its concentration of Broadway theatres turned cinemas. After World War II, the street declined and the Anco Cinema eventually became a pornography venue. It closed as a cinema in 1988 and was gutted for retail use. The building was demolished in 1997. In 1903, producer Fred R. Hamlin and producer/director Julian Mitchell had a big Broadway hit with The Wizard of Oz, a musical staging of the L. Frank Baum story, and they had another with Babes in Toyland, a Victor Herbert operetta, later in the year. In 1904, Oscar Hammerstein I announced plans to build his eighth Manhattan theater (after the Harlem and Manhattan opera houses, the Olympia and Victoria music halls, and the Columbus, Olympia and Republic theaters), on vacant land he had recently bought at 254-58 West 42nd Street, calling it the National. It would be designed by Albert E. Westover, a Philadelphia architect who designed several theaters in that city for vaudeville operator B. F. Keith and is credited with Hammerstein's Republic. The same year, comedians Joe Weber and Lew Fields ended their decades-long partnership, giving their final show May 28, at the New Amsterdam Theatre. On May 31, the new partnership of Hamlin, Mitchell, and Fields contracted to lease Hammerstein's (not-yet-built) new house. They announced they would name it for Fields and produce musicals and burlesques. Their first offering was a new Victor Herbert operetta, It Happened in Nordland, with libretto and lyrics by Glen MacDonough, starring Fields and Marie Cahill, together with a burlesque of The Music Master, a current hit play. The Lew Fields Theatre opened on December 5, 1904, eight days aft