Blown Awry

Damon Winter/The New York Times Brittany Gowan, 26, battled swirling winds in Manhattan on Thursday as she worked to restore the Standard Hotel’s ice skating rink, which had been damaged by rain the night before.

Alan Cumming\'s \'Macbeth\' Will Join a Crowd of Solo Stars on Broadway

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times From left, Ali Craig, Alan Cumming and Myra McFadyen in the Lincoln Center Festival production of “Macbeth” in 2012, in which Mr. Cumming portrayed every major role.

Broadway producers have always relied on star actors to generate ticket sales for shows, but this spring some stars are the shows, with four plays now on tap that are essentially solo performances. The latest is an avant-garde production of “Macbeth,” with the Tony Award winner Alan Cumming (“Cabaret”) performing most of the characters in the Shakespeare classic; it will beginpreview performances on April 7 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater and open on April 21, the producer Ken Davenport announced on Thursday.

The play is a late entry for the 2012-13 Broadway season, and the fact that it is going into a prime location like the Barrymore reflects the dismal fall on Broadway, where several flops created more vacancies than usual among Broadway’s 40 theaters. The musical “Chaplin” closed at the Barrymore on Jan. 6 after only four and a half months; other productions that closed quickly were the musical “Scandalous” and the plays “Dead Accounts,” “The Performers” and “The Anarchist.” The musical “Rebecca” fell apart even before starting performances this fall, and the revival of “Evita” closed this month, sooner than the producers had hoped.

This “Macbeth” is also unusual because the producer, Mr. Davenport, has never actually seen this version; he missed the show last summer at the Lincoln Center Festival, where it arrived after an acclaimed run at the National Theater of Scotland. But Mr. Cumming’s agent has been shopping “Macbeth” to Broadway producers, and Mr. Davenport said he was intrigued by the pitch.

“It’s a chance to see one of the most versatile theater actors in a unique performance of one of the greatest plays ever written,” Mr. Davenport said of Mr. Cumming, who is also a television star on the CBS series “The Good Wife.” “I think there will be an audience for that.” He also noted that one of the play’s directors is John Tiffany, the Tony winner last year for directing the musical “Once”; the other director is Andrew Goldberg.

Still, Mr. Davenport acknowledged that the production was risky financially. Mr. Cumming is only doing six performances a week, instead of the standard eight, becuse of the emotionally grueling nature of the production, which is set inside a psychiatric unit. Mr. Davenport said the production would cost roughly $2 million and run for 73 performances, and that he was working to reduce the show’s weekly running costs in order to give his investors a shot at turning a profit. Mr. Davenport said he is still raising money and declined to name the investors he had so far.

Generating revenue from a six-performance week will require significant audience demand for “Macbeth” as well as a good number of people purchasing premium-price tickets, which usually range from $200 to $300. But Mr. Davenport said he was optimistic.

“I’m thinking of this as a theatrical event,” Mr. Davenport said. “Some producers would say ‘no way’ to the six-performance business model, but I’m trying to turn it into a positive by saying, ‘You only have 73 performances to see this guy go through it.’” Such a strategy will rely on a strong advance ticket sale! , which i! s more common with musicals than with plays.

With investors increasingly cautious about putting money into Broadway, where only 25 percent of shows ever turn a profit, one-person productions usually have the advantage of selling tickets around a big star name. While this “Macbeth” is somewhat less expensive than more conventional Broadway plays with several actors, which usually cost $3 million or so, one-person shows are by no means cheap. Theater rents and marketing and advertising expenses - big-ticket items in a show budget - are usually the same no matter the number of actors, and star salaries (which can include a percentage of the box office) can add to the costs.

Similar shows coming this spring include “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers,” starring Bette Midler; “The Testament of Mary,” starring Fiona Shaw as the Virgin Mary; and “Ann,” starring Holland Taylor as the former Texas Gov. Ann W. Richards. Barry Manilow’s concert “Manilow on Broadway” is running now through early March.

Theater Talkback: The Rough Beauty of Everyday Speech

Reinhard Werner-Burgtheater A scene from the second episode of “Life and Times,” from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

Generally speaking, we don’t go to the theater to listen to conversations that we might just as easily hear while waiting on line at the grocery store or commuting on the subway. Among the essential gifts most great playwrights possess is an ability to take the dross of humble human speech and give it a silvering polish.

The Elizabethans did not address each other in iambic pentameter, after all, and few marital set-tos burn with the coruscating wit of the brawl between George and Martha in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” The language we thrill to onstage is often a more literate or stylized expression of human speech, whether it’s the filigreed lyricism of Tennessee Williams’s characters, the eloquent dialectics that perfume Shavian drawing rooms, or the staccato fireworks with which men flay each other in the best of David Mamet’s work.

But since the late 19th and early 20th century, at least, there has been a countervailing trend: an attempt to bring the halting, admittedly unbeautiful way average men and women communicate onstage without dressing it up in decorous or flashy colorings. Chekhov probably set the standard for this more earthbound approach to listening in on human nature, although his character still often engage in reveries that are hardly likely to have naturally fallen from the lips of real-life equivalents of his gentrified Russians.

Since then innumerable playwrights have brought th! e rhythms and colors of everyday speech to the stage, to match the drab wallpaper and the proverbial (if not literal) kitchen sink. Some of the playwrights I most admire today - like Annie Baker and Amy Herzog - are particularly adept at finding the poetry in the faltering, arrhythmic manner in which people really address each other, with unfinished sentences, overlapping dialogue and plenty of natural pauses.

But the Nature Theater of Oklahoma takes this aesthetic appreciation of everyday discourse to fascinating, funny, even perverse new extremes. Their marvelous new production, “Life and Times: Episodes 1-4,” which ends its run at the Public Theater on Saturday, draws its text from that most everyday of occurrences, a phone conversation (several, actually) that te directors of the company, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, conducted with one of its members, Kristin Worrall.

From the opening moments of this opus - which totals about eight hours of stage time â€" it becomes clear that Ms. Worrall was not chosen for the manicured eloquence of her speaking style, or a preternatural ability to turn thoughts into elegant paragraphs. Recalling her life experience, from hazy memories of childhood through to adolescence and beyond, she sounds like just about anybody you might grab from a suburban mall and plant in front of a microphone.

That’s not meant to be a knock: Ms. Worrall, who I guess to be somewhere in her late 30s, speaks in much the same way most college-educated, suburban-raised Americans of her age do, which is to say her conversation is digressive and meandering, and amply stocked with meaningless interstitial words and phrases like “um” and “you know” and “yeah” and, most memorably and repeatedly, “like.” What makes the show s! o remarka! ble is that these conversational tics that we all hear and mostly tune out are all included in the text of the show, as if each fumbling digression were as worthy of immortality as Blanche DuBois’s immortal observation about the kindness of strangers.

What are they up to Mr. Liska and Ms. Copper are not just interested in everyday language for its own sake, of course: their shows are not transcriptions of random conversations. They are intrigued by how people recollect and process experience through speech. “Rambo Solo,” an earlier production, consisted of a single performer recounting the plot of the Sylvester Stallone movie “First Blood,” and the company’s version of “Romeo and Juliet” ignored Shakespeare’s text and replaced it with often-hilarious descriptions or recollections from a variety of people, many with distinctl fuzzy memories.

In their inspired hands, the most unbeautiful, sometimes maddeningly hazy and imprecise language takes on a distinct and surprising appeal. Set to music, as much of it is in “Life and Times,” the rambling recollections of Mr. Worrall become their own form of stylized theatrical speech, simply by being presented without editing. Those endless reiterations of the word “like” become musical notes seasoning the text.

Language unshaped by an aesthetic formula is shown to have its own funky fascination by being presented in a context in which we expect to encounter an aesthetic experience. Trimmed with the traditional adornments of theater â€" music and dance, colorful costumes, or in the case of the last two episodes of “Life and Times,” declaimed in the melodramatic style of a creaky stage mystery along the lines of Agatha Christie’s “Mousetrap” - the ! artless b! ecomes artful.

Nature Theater is not the only young company to employ what you might call “found speech” as the building blocks of their artistry. The Civilians, another young New York company, uses the texts of interviews with real people to create their clever theatrical collages like “Gone Missing” and “In the Footprint.” There may be a generational component to this new appreciation of messy everyday speech: the dialogue on the terrific HBO show “Girls” likewise hews closely to strict naturalism, including all those extraneous “likes” that English teachers find so maddening.

I certainly glory in the language of Williams and Albee and Shakespeare, and would not want every other show I attended to consist of verbatim conversations. But I also share Mr. Liska and Ms.Copper’s delight in the rough, rumpled sound of contemporary talk. And while their approach inevitably has its maddening aspects - eight hours is a long time to listen to someone natter on about him or herself, to be sure - you come away from their shows with an ear freshly attuned to how you and everyone around you actually speaks, and perhaps a heightened appreciation of that immemorially addictive pastime, eavesdropping.

What do you think of everyday speech put on stage If you’ve seen any (or all) of “Life and Times,” please share your thoughts on the company’s unique aesthetic.

New Paul Taylor Work to Premiere at Vail International Dance Festival

The latest new work by Paul Taylor, 82, the modern dance choreographer, will see the light of day in Colorado. The Vail International Dance Festival said on Thursday that Mr. Taylor’s 139th work - so far unnamed and performed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company â€" will have its premiere on Aug. 5 at the festival, which runs from July 28 through Aug. 10 in Vail and Beaver Creek, Colo. Larry Keigwin, Brian Brooks and Charles “Lil Buck” Riley are other choreographers who will have new pieces on the program, the festival said.

The festival, which is celebrating its 25th-anniversary season and is led by Damian Woetzel, will also feature Pacific Northwest Ballet, an evening of dances by George Balanchine, the New York City Ballet dancers Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild, the Russian dancer Sergei Polunin, the Taiwanese dancer Fang-Yi Sheu and the tango masterGabriel Misse from Argentina. Tickets will go on sale on Mar. 13.

New Paul Taylor Work to Premiere at Vail International Dance Festival

The latest new work by Paul Taylor, 82, the modern dance choreographer, will see the light of day in Colorado. The Vail International Dance Festival said on Thursday that Mr. Taylor’s 139th work - so far unnamed and performed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company â€" will have its premiere on Aug. 5 at the festival, which runs from July 28 through Aug. 10 in Vail and Beaver Creek, Colo. Larry Keigwin, Brian Brooks and Charles “Lil Buck” Riley are other choreographers who will have new pieces on the program, the festival said.

The festival, which is celebrating its 25th-anniversary season and is led by Damian Woetzel, will also feature Pacific Northwest Ballet, an evening of dances by George Balanchine, the New York City Ballet dancers Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild, the Russian dancer Sergei Polunin, the Taiwanese dancer Fang-Yi Sheu and the tango masterGabriel Misse from Argentina. Tickets will go on sale on Mar. 13.

After Reshuffling Funds, \'Breakfast at Tiffany\'s\' Producers Plan to Proceed

The Broadway producers of “Truman Capote’s ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’” have sorted out money problems that had the potential to derail the show’s planned opening in March, a spokesman for the show said on Thursday. One of the “Tiffany’s” investors, who had been responsible for about $1 million of the show’s $4 million budget, had told his partners that he was bowing out, and the show’s cast and creative team was notified on Sunday that the producers needed to replace the money quickly or the play might be canceled.

This led agents for some of the “Tiffany’s” actors to start calling producers of other shows to say their actors might be available for work this spring. But the show’s spokesman, Rick Miramontez, said Thursday that the investor was now sticking with the play, but providing less money, and that the other producers and investors wee making up the difference. Mr. Miramontez declined to identify the investor. Based on Capote’s 1958 novella, this “Tiffany’s” adaptation is by the Tony Award winner Richard Greenberg (“Take Me Out”) and stars the British actress Emilia Clarke (HBO’s “Game of Thrones”) as New York society girl Holly Golightly. The lead producers are Colin Ingram Productions Limited, Donovan Mannato and Dominic Ianno.

Koch in Intensive Care

Yana Paskova for The New York Times Edward I. Koch at his 88th birthday party last month.

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who has been hospitalized since Monday with lung problems, was placed in the intensive care unit on Thursday afternoon, his spokesman said.

Mr. Koch’s lead doctor “said he wanted to monitor the former mayor more closely,” said the spokesman, George Arzt, who declining to elaborate.

Mr. Koch, 88, is at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, where he has been afrequent visitor lately for a series of health problems.

He was treated for anemia in September, for a lung infection in December, and earlier this month for a buildup of fluid in his lungs. He was released last Saturday after being treated for the lung ailment, only to return on Monday because fluid in his lungs had built up again.

Report Faults German Governments and Museums on Handling of Nazis\' Loot

The German newspaper Der Spiegel has published a devastating indictment of German governments’ and museums’ handling of an enormous amount of valuable art, jewelry, land and more looted by the Nazis, calling it “a moral disaster that began in the 1950s and continues to the present day.”

The report, published Wednesday, is based on an extensive search of public and private documents and details how a succession of German governments ignored or actively blocked attempts to return property worth hundreds of millions of dollars to its rightful owners or organizations that represent Jewish victims.

Some objects decorate the walls and halls of museums and government buildings, including a cherry desk that adorns the president’s office.

The newspaper discovered that in the wake of some feeble resttution efforts in the 1960s, the government misled the public into believing the issue had been fully investigated and resolved. Der Spiegel said that it, too, had been taken in by the government’s assurances at the time.

Even now, the government has devoted so few resources to provenance research that it would take several decades to search through the inventories of cultural institutions, the article said. Museums have often responded to requests for information from the families of victims with charges that the questioners are money-grubbers.

The paper extensively details how Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman - classified as a “Major Offender” by the Allies in 1947 - nonetheless managed to reclaim after the war a huge portion of the valuables he stole.

The article exhorts the government to fully finance provenance research.

Report Faults German Governments and Museums on Handling of Nazis\' Loot

The German newspaper Der Spiegel has published a devastating indictment of German governments’ and museums’ handling of an enormous amount of valuable art, jewelry, land and more looted by the Nazis, calling it “a moral disaster that began in the 1950s and continues to the present day.”

The report, published Wednesday, is based on an extensive search of public and private documents and details how a succession of German governments ignored or actively blocked attempts to return property worth hundreds of millions of dollars to its rightful owners or organizations that represent Jewish victims.

Some objects decorate the walls and halls of museums and government buildings, including a cherry desk that adorns the president’s office.

The newspaper discovered that in the wake of some feeble resttution efforts in the 1960s, the government misled the public into believing the issue had been fully investigated and resolved. Der Spiegel said that it, too, had been taken in by the government’s assurances at the time.

Even now, the government has devoted so few resources to provenance research that it would take several decades to search through the inventories of cultural institutions, the article said. Museums have often responded to requests for information from the families of victims with charges that the questioners are money-grubbers.

The paper extensively details how Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman - classified as a “Major Offender” by the Allies in 1947 - nonetheless managed to reclaim after the war a huge portion of the valuables he stole.

The article exhorts the government to fully finance provenance research.

SXSW Film Festival Announces Its Feature Lineup

A vintage drag queen and Richard Nixon will both be on screens at this year’s South by Southwest film festival.

The annual film conference and festival in Austin. Tex., has usually ranged far  and wide, from the quirky to the Hollywood flashy to the horror-nerd friendly. In the Visions category, which  includes some films that the programmers consider boundary-pushing, festivalgoers can find “Our Nixon,”  made up of Super 8 footage recorded by three of  Nixon’s closest aides. And this year’s selections include several addressing gay, lesbian bisexual or transgendered themes, like  “I Am Divine,” a look back at the life of Harris Glenn Milstead and how he became Divine, the drag star of several John Waters films.

Also included are the documentaries “Before You Know It,” about three gay seniors; “Mr. Angel,” on the transgender porn performer and educator Buck Angel; and “Continental,” which tells the story o New York City’s Continental Baths.

“There are a plethora of L.G.B.T. films this year,” said Janet Pierson, the film festival producer, speaking by phone from Austin. “All these films struck us one after another.”

Ms. Pierson said the programmers were looking  for  diversity in budget sizes and tone.

“We want some films that are funny, we want some films that are scary. We want some films that are thought-provoking, we want some films that are super-arty,” she said. “But mostly, we’re looking at these thousands of films that come into us and we’re looking for what grabs us and engages us.”

Of those thousands of submissions, the festival chose more than 100 features, including 69 world premieres, like Adam Rifkin’s  television satire “Reality Show,” and films that played at other festivals but fit  into the SXSW mold, like Harmony Kor! ine‘s “Spring Breakers.”

Often without intention, some similar threads emerge. In the narrative and documentary competition lineup, two films share Branson, Mo., as a location. In “Awful Nice,” from Todd Sklar, two brothers travel there when their late father leaves  them  his lake house. And the documentary “We Always Lie to Strangers,” from AJ Schnack and David Wilson, focuses on the appeal of the Ozarks town as a tourist destination.

There are fewer star-driven Hollywood offerings than usual, but  the opening-night comedy, “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone,” does feature Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi, and  Joe Swanberg‘s film,  “Drining Buddies,”  with Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston, is starrier than the work he is known for.  The cast of “I Give It a Year,” a comedy about the first year of marriage from Dan Mazer, a writer of “Bruno” and “Borat,”  includes Rose Byrne, Anna Faris and Simon Baker.

And as usual, music and musicians factor into the lineup: including the documentary “Good Ol’ Freda,” which looks at the Beatles through ! the eyes ! of the woman who served as their secretary. Documentaries about Green Day (“¡Cuatro!”), funk music (“Finding the Funk”) and Snoop Dogg (“Reincarnated”) are also on the schedule.

The film conference and festival runs March 8-16. An extended listing of films can be found here.

A Reprise for \'Bad Jews\'

The Roundabout Theater Company announced on Thursday that its production of Joshua Harmon’s “Bad Jews,” which ran last year at the the company’s 62-seat black box theater, will return beginning Sept. 20 to the larger Laura Pels Theater.

The dark comedy, again to be directed by Daniel Aukin, will feature the show’s original cast: Tracee Chimo, Philip Ettinger, Molly Ranson and Michael Zegen.

“Bad Jews” received mostly positive reviews when it opened in October. The run was extended two weeks and played its final performance on Dec. 30, 2012.

New York Live Arts Launching Arts and Ideas Festival

New York Live Arts, the movement-based arts group led by the choreographer Bill T. Jones, is expanding its footprint by introducing an annual festival of arts and ideas. The inaugural festival will run from April 17-21 and explore the work of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Mr. Jones, the executive artistic director of Live Arts, is planning to announce on Friday.

“Perhaps more than anyone in recent history, Dr. Sacks has contributed to our growing understanding of the role of creative expression within the mind-body connection,” Mr. Jones said in a statement from Live Arts.

The “Live Ideas” festival will have a different theme each year that will be presented through conversations and performances, including film and dance. “The Worlds of Oliver Sacks” will begin with a conversation between Dr. Sacks and Lawrence Weschler, the director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University and the guest curator for this yearâ™s festival.

“We thought that the series would be a way of furthering our mission,” said Jean Davidson, chief executive officer of New York Live Arts, in an interview on Thursday. “A lot of the artists we present have something in common: they are known for their conceptual rigor and active engagement with social and political currents. In asking how do we build an audience and how do build an entry point we thought, what if we have a week-long festival more focused on ideas”

New York Live Arts was created in 2010, when the boards of Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company voted unanimously to merge their organizations.

The events confirmed for the festival include a newly commissioned short film by Bill Morrison; using original archival footage of Dr. Sacks working with patients; a production of “A Kind of Alaska,” a play by Harold Pinter based on Dr. Sacks’ book â! €œAwakenings”; a new dance-theater work by the choreographer Donna Uchizono that delves into the themes of perception; and a ballet score based on “Awakenings,” from the composer Tobias Picker with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

All events will take place at the New York Live Arts’ theater and studios in Chelsea. Some events are free and others range in price from $10 to $60. More information will be available at www.newyorklivearts.org, beginning Friday morning.

New York Live Arts Launching Arts and Ideas Festival

New York Live Arts, the movement-based arts group led by the choreographer Bill T. Jones, is expanding its footprint by introducing an annual festival of arts and ideas. The inaugural festival will run from April 17-21 and explore the work of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Mr. Jones, the executive artistic director of Live Arts, is planning to announce on Friday.

“Perhaps more than anyone in recent history, Dr. Sacks has contributed to our growing understanding of the role of creative expression within the mind-body connection,” Mr. Jones said in a statement from Live Arts.

The “Live Ideas” festival will have a different theme each year that will be presented through conversations and performances, including film and dance. “The Worlds of Oliver Sacks” will begin with a conversation between Dr. Sacks and Lawrence Weschler, the director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University and the guest curator for this yearâ™s festival.

“We thought that the series would be a way of furthering our mission,” said Jean Davidson, chief executive officer of New York Live Arts, in an interview on Thursday. “A lot of the artists we present have something in common: they are known for their conceptual rigor and active engagement with social and political currents. In asking how do we build an audience and how do build an entry point we thought, what if we have a week-long festival more focused on ideas”

New York Live Arts was created in 2010, when the boards of Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company voted unanimously to merge their organizations.

The events confirmed for the festival include a newly commissioned short film by Bill Morrison; using original archival footage of Dr. Sacks working with patients; a production of “A Kind of Alaska,” a play by Harold Pinter based on Dr. Sacks’ book â! €œAwakenings”; a new dance-theater work by the choreographer Donna Uchizono that delves into the themes of perception; and a ballet score based on “Awakenings,” from the composer Tobias Picker with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

All events will take place at the New York Live Arts’ theater and studios in Chelsea. Some events are free and others range in price from $10 to $60. More information will be available at www.newyorklivearts.org, beginning Friday morning.

Police Search for Teenage Suspects in Nunchucks Attack

Detectives on Thursday pressed their search for three teenage suspects, one wielding a pair of nunchucks, in a brutal beating of a 25-year-old man during an attempted robbery earlier this month in a Washington Heights subway station.

The attack, captured on a subway surveillance camera, occurred in the 157th Street station of the No. 1 train around 4 a.m. on Jan. 6, the police said.

The suspects, all between the ages of 17 and 19, approached the man near the station’s turnstiles and told him that they liked the jacket that he was wearing and wanted it, the police said. The man refused to give it up, and the three teenagers then set upon him, punching and kicking the man.

One of the teenagers, wearing a red baseball cap with a white brim, then pulled out a pair of nunchucks - illegal to carry in New York State - and began beating the man as he fled through the turnstiles.

The man, who was not identified by police, was treated for lacerations to the head at nearby NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and was released, the police said.

The video shows at least six hard strikes with the unconventional martial-arts weapon, also known as nunchakus or chuka sticks, which consists of two sticks held together with a chain or rope.

Arts Center at Trade Center Gets $1 Million in Seed Money

The organization overseeing the redevelopment of lower Manhattan on Thursday authorized $1 million for the Performing Arts Center that is planned for the World Trade Center site.

The vote by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which was reported in the Wall Street Journal, will enable the Performing Arts Center to hire staff and begin construction by 2017. The allocation had been held up by the development corporation’s concerns about the project’s cost and about how to raise the money for it.

“There was some question as to whether or not the numbers made sense,” said David Emil, president of the corporation, in a telephone interview on Thursday.

The center, designed by Frank Gehry, is expected to have the Joyce Theater, which presents dance, as its anchor tenant.

Center offiials declined to estimate the project’s cost but earlier estimates had said it was likely to cost about $300 million, with $100 million of that already committed by the development corp. In addition, the center has raised $25 million privately.

Asked to respond to Thursday’s vote, Kate D. Levin, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, said: “This marks important progress on a significant project for Lower Manhattan’s future.”

Maggie Boepple, president of the center, said: “We”re getting down to work. Downtown wants this.”

100 Years Later, a Railroad Landmark Is Revived

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Mercury, the swift god of travel, appears on the facade of the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway Administration Building in the Bronx, as he does at Grand Central Terminal.

You already know. A notable New York City train station â€" ornamented with a handsome figure of the god Mercury, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, once daunted by bad fortune but handsomely renovated not long ago â€" has reached its centenary.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Entrance arcade.

What you may not know is that the centenary was last year.

Because this isn’t a post about Grand Central Terminal. It’s about the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway Administration Building at East 180th Street and Morris Park Avenue in the Bronx, built in 1912. The railroad went out of business in 1937, but its distinctive home serves as the entrance to the East 180th Street station for No. 2 and No. 5 trains.

And it received a kind of 100th birthday gift last year: a $66.6 million renovation by New York City Transit.

“It’s not often that we get the opportun! ity to do work at a facility that has the historical and architectural significance of the East 180th Street station,” said Thomas F. Prendergast, the president of New York City Transit, the arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that is in charge of the city’s subways and buses. “There was a collective effort to achieve the objective, to restore it to historical significance.”

The collective effort was led by Lee Harris Pomeroy Architects, which designed the renovation in association with Weidlinger Associates. “We thought of the restoration of this major historic landmark as a significant gesture of respect to the Bronx,” he said. “It is the only New York City subway station that is entered through a formal, landscaped plaza and free-sanding National Register building.”

Such a building posed many challenges, Mr. Prendergast said, including finding workers skilled enough to restore stucco walls and clay roof tiles. “They built public spaces well,” he said. “In the days when the railroads had money, it was easy for them to do it.”

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times The New York, Westchester & Boston Railway Administration Building in the Bronx now serves as the East 180th Street station on the No. 2 and No. 5 lines.

Money was indeed abundant on the New York, Westchester & Boston, which was controlled by the New York, New! Haven & ! Hartford Railroad, which was effectively controlled by J. P. Morgan. The Westchester had a Y-shaped route system. Its west fork ran as far as White Plains, its east fork as far as Port Chester. (Despite the name, it never went close to Boston.) The main stem was in the Bronx, terminating at East 132nd Street, with a connection to the Third Avenue el.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

Extravagant sums were spent on construction: about $36 million for a 20-mile line. The idea was to carry commuters in almost deluxe comfort aboard all-electric coaches traveling on carpet-smooth track beds, with no grade crossings, as far as the Bronx, where they would then pay only a nickel to complete their journey to work on the el. Underscoring its commitment to qality, the railroad hired Alfred T. Fellheimer, an architect who also worked on Grand Central Terminal as a partner in Reed & Stem, to design its four-story administration building. It resembles an Italian villa.

“Given a choice between Grand Central and a higher fare or the Bronx terminal and a lower fare, passengers by the thousands were expected to switch to the Westchester,” Stan Fischler wrote in “Uptown, Downtown: A Trip Through Time on New York’s Subways” (1976). It was also expected that the seemingly inexorable uptown march of commerce would reach the Bronx, placing the railroad’s handsome administration building near the heart of the city, rather than on the outskirts.

Neither vision materialized. The Westchester, which began running in 1912, never turned a profit. It was one of the first holdings to be liquidated when the New Haven filed for bankruptcy in 1935. Service on the line ended two years later.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times The lobby has two retail areas, including one at right.

But the ghosts of the Westchester endure, most prominently in the administration building and in the 4.25-mile right-of-way from East 180th Street to Dyre Avenue in the Bronx, which was acquired by the city in 1940 to serve as the Dyre Avenue line.

The building’s old upstairs offices are still used for railroad purposes, now by employees of the transit agency’s rapid transit operations, signals and structures divisions. Two attractive retail spaces with plate-glass fronts flank the ground-floor lobby. One is to be occupied this year. The transportation authority will issue a request for proposals for the other space.

The general contractor for the renovation was Citnalta Construction Corporation. The plaza was redesigned by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. The Arts for Transit program commissioned work by Luisa Caldwell.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times The newly renovated passage between the railroad building and the subway platform.

The project included rehabilitation of the existing building, reconfiguring the plaza to include a ramp, installing an elevator, ! improving! pedestrian circulation and reconstructing a dank passageway between the administration building and the passenger platforms into an inviting, light-filled corridor.

What the project did not include â€" at first â€"  was a clock under the figure of Mercury, where one had once been. No money was budgeted for this extra touch. But then Michael Gargiulo, the president of Citnalta, visited the site. “He didn’t think it looked right without a clock,” said Matthew Blitch, the vice president of the company.

The contractors learned that they could buy a 45-inch diameter clock with Roman numerals from the Electric Time Company of Medfield, Mass., for $8,000. That cost, and the labor to install it, were Citnalta’s extra contribution to the project. “It adds so much to the facade of the building,” Mr. Blitch said. Whether it adds to or subtracts from straphangers’ anxiety is another matter entirely.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times The new mosaic murals in the station are by Luisa Caldwell.

A Drummer on the Subway

Dear Diary:

While visiting our family in New York during the holidays, my wife and I were traveling downtown on the A train when suddenly a young drummer came into our car with a bucket and drumsticks.

As most of the “bucket drummers” whom I’ve heard, he was superb. However, since he was playing in close quarters, the sound was deafening, and since we’re both musicians concerned about our hearing, we put our hands on our ears to protect them.

When the time came to ask for contributions, we were ready to give him some money, but he refused it.

I can understand. We hurt his artist’s pride.

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