No Elephants at the Garden Next Spring

For decades the blooming of circus cotton candy has been the surest sign of spring for city apartment-dwellers. But for the first time in 80 years the nation’s oldest continuously running circus will not arrive in Manhattan for a springtime performance at Madison Square Garden.

The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus will be dislodged from its March run by the renovation of the Garden, a project estimated to cost from $775 million to $850 million. Instead, the circus will add a week of extra performances to its Meadowlands run in New Jersey (it also plays in Newark and at the Nassau Coliseum) but this year customers from the five boroughs of New York will not be able to hop on the subway to see the show.

“The Greatest Show on Earth is also the largest arena show on the planet,” said Kenneth Feld, chief executive of Ringling, “and there isn’t enough room for our animals.”
Joel Fisher, a Garden executive vice president, explained that “there is building in the space” under the garden normally occupied by animals and circus props. And if the construction isn’t completed, Ringling could be exiled from the Garden for a second year. “We have to see what space will be available, and what’s possible,” Mr. Fisher said. He declined to estimate how much the Garden would lose in circus revenues. So did Mr. Feld, who said that “we might lose business this year, but we’ll be coming back to a better, transformed Garden where business will go up dramatically,” he said.

The springtime Garden circus run was not only a decadeslong institution, but also marked what the circus considered the traditional opening night for each year’s new show after it wended its way north following its January unveiling in Florida. Until the 2008 recession guests in tuxedos and formal dress were invited to the Garden opening night to mingle with circus performers at a catered party. This continued the decadeslong tradition of top hats, claw-hammer coats and Champagne libations in the old Garden.

The new show, the 141st edition of the circus, will be called “The Greatest Show on Earth, Fully Charged!” The circus has scheduled a week of performances at the Prudential Center in Newark, from Feb. 23 to 27, two weeks at the Izod Center in East Rutherford, N.J., from March 2 to 13, and a week at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., from March 16 to 21. “It’s just a 15-minute train ride from Manhattan to the Newark arena,” Mr. Feld said.

The multiphase renovation at the 42-year-old Garden began in 2009 and is not expected to be completed until 2013. It will include refurbished and reconfigured seats and V.I.P. suites, new locker rooms and dressing rooms for performers, upgraded public areas, a new Seventh Avenue lobby and pedestrian bridges spanning the arena.

Ringling’s Garden tenure has been longer than 80 years. According to the circus the combined Ringling show (aggregated from the circuses of the brothers Ringling as well as P.T. Barnum and James Anthony Bailey) first played at an arena named Madison Square Garden on March 29, 1919. That was, as Garden aficionados know, the second Madison Square Garden.

The circus played in the third Madison Square Garden until 1928, according to Ringling, and then, after a two-year hiatus the show played at the Garden from 1931 to 1967. Then the Ringling show played every year until last March at the new Madison Square Garden on Seventh Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets – the fourth incarnation of the facility – after the arena’s opening in 1968.

Courtesy of Mike Naughton