Program for Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Passing of the Third Floor Back.”

Program for Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Passing of the Third Floor Back.”

Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, New York,

October, 1909.

Maxine Elliott was the first woman to build her own Broadway theater, a neoclassical pavilion at 109 West 39th Street (razed in 1960). This program is for a play that Zoe reviewed in The East Side, starring Maxine Elliott’s British brother-in-law, Johnston Forbes-Robertson. He played “Third Floor Back,” an angelic figure improving lives of London boardinghouse dwellers. Zoe, who had often lived in rundown boardinghouses and knew Forbes-Robertson’s actor niece Beatrice, deemed the production “very beautiful!” 

From the Collection of Eve M. Kahn.