George Keister was an American architect. His work includes the Hotel Gerard (1893), Belasco Theatre (1907), the Apollo Theater (1914), the Bronx Opera House (1913), the Selwyn Theatre (1918), now known as American Airlines Theatre, and the First Baptist Church in the City of New York. He also designed Woodbridge Hall at 431 Riverside Drive (1901), which faced demolition in 1996, and the Sigma Chi Fraternity at 565 W. 113th St. (1903). Preservationist Carolyn Kent helped save some of his work.Keister was a skilled but little known architect who was active in New York from the mid-1880s into the third decade of the twentieth century. He had a brief partnership with Frank E. Wallis (1887?88) and in the 1890s, served as secretary of the Architectural League. Although barely a score of his buildings have been identified, the collection indicates a gifted and innovative architect with facile design ability in a variety of styles. Prior to Belasco's Stuyvesant, he had designed three New York theaters: in 1905, the Colonial (Hampton's; at 1887 Broadway) and Loew's Yorkville Theater (157 East 86th Street), and the Astor Theater in the following year; all three have been demolished. Belasco's Stuyvesant Theater thus takes on the added significance of being the earliest extant theater of an architect who would later make theaters his specialty, executing at least a dozen others in New York by 1923.Among his most notable were the George M. Cohan (1911; demolished), the Bronx Opera House (1912?13), the enormously important Apollo Theater in Harlem (1913?14), Broadway's Selwyn Theater (1917?18, 229 West 42nd Street) and the Earl Carroll Theater at 753-59 Seventh Avenue (1923; 1931 Art Deco remodeling; altered).2Although the circumstances of his commission from Belasco are obscure, Keister was most likely known to the producer as architect of the Gerard Apartment Hotel (1893) which was located immediately west of the site ofBelasco's new theater. Rising 13 stories on West 44th Street, this fine neo-medieval/neo-Renaissance composite was one of the tallest buildings in the area.Among Keister's other notable commissions is the eccentrically massed First Baptist Church (1891) on the northwest corner of Broadway and 79th Street. Like Belasco's Stuyvesant, it features stained glass in its ceiling, although here rendered more boldly as a splendid stained glass barrel vault in appropriate ecclesiastical terms.Keister's other works include neo-Grec and neo-Renaissance tenements in Greenwich Village, an eclectic group of rowhouses known as the Bertine Block (1891) on East 136th Street in the Bronx, the McAlpin-Mil ler residence at 9 East 90th Street (purchased by a daughter of Andrew Carnegie and now part of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum), as well as a neo-Gothic office building from 1925, located several doors west of Belasco's Theater on West 44th Street (No. 156).
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