Encore, Encore

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It was, wrote Walter Lippmann a few days after Radio City Music Hall opened its doors in 1932, "a pedestal built to sustain a peanut." Describing the entire Rockefeller Center complex in which the Music Hall sat, Lewis Mumford called it "the sorriest failure of imagination and intelligence in modern American architecture." And they were among the kinder critics.

Come the Music Hall's "gala reopening" on Oct. 4, the people who operate the place--Cablevision Systems, through its Madison Square Garden subsidiary--will be hoping that today's judges will be a bit less cranky. After a seven-month restoration that stripped it to its bones and then rebuilt it virtually from ruins, the grand old theater will look strikingly unfamiliar to nearly anyone who has been there before. It will look the way it did 67 years ago.

The Music Hall had three sires--John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the world's richest man, whose eponymous Depression-defying venture in urban optimism was the greatest accomplishment of his life; S.L. ("Roxy") Rothafel, a monomaniacal showman whose idea of appropriate scale ranged from enormous to gargantuan; and Donald Deskey, a design buccaneer whose best-known work, eclipsing even the Music Hall, would be the Crest toothpaste tube. But what these three unlikely collaborators built, and what renovation architect Hugh Hardy and his colleagues at Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates have now reinvigorated, changed the course of American interior design.

Given that Deskey had first been inflamed by the idea of the modern at the epochal Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in 1925--whence the term (and style) Art Deco--the clothing he draped over the muscular lines of the Music Hall was surprisingly American. He commissioned paintings from America's leading modernists, designed hundreds of furniture pieces in novel forms and added new materials--tubular steel, Bakelite, aluminum foil--to the design vocabulary. Up to that point, the fashion in theater decoration might have been characterized as Italian Baroque Moorish Greek Renaissance Pagoda. Pick any two, and you had a movie palace. Deskey resisted Rothafel's bludgeoning insistence on "Portuguese Rococo" and instead dressed the place for Fred and Ginger, crafting a sleek temple dedicated not to Old World solemnity but to machine-age speed and sheen.