Around the time [William] Niblo sold his first Bank Coffee House, he acquired control of a large site partially occupied today by Housing Works, where he operated an outdoor pleasure garden, previously known as Columbian Gardens.

Elaborate fireworks displays drew enormous crowds to the entire block bounded by Broadway, Crosby Street, and Houston and Prince Streets, and a genteel saloon drew bourgeois folks from downtown. On July 4th, 1828 a theater opened in a pre-existing structure on the site, named Sans Souci, on what was otherwise mostly vacant ground, Before the Columbian Gardens opened in 1823, the site had been occupied by an equestrian facility with stables on Crosby Street, a girls’ riding academy, and a sometime circus grounds after its subdivision from the Bayard family farm. Niblo improved the property, hiring an army of carpenters to transform the old circus amphitheater into an enclosed “all-weather” proscenium stage theater. Ample outdoor space with lanterns, benches and plantings, together with saloon refreshment service and prices that catered to upper-middle class New Yorkers made Niblo’s Garden a pleasant alternative as a pleasure garden to the rougher entertainment precincts of the Bowery and other spots. Unaccompanied women were shunned at the gates. ... Though it was closed for a time, when Niblo’s re-opened, re-open it did in 1849, bigger and better than ever, and upon the construction, a few years later, of the Metropolitan Hotel on the easterly Broadway block-front where Niblo’s main entrance stood, the enterprise was physically incorporated in the luxurious new hotel lock, stock and barrel. Anyone who endeavored to be or stay a star of the New York and international stages, be they singer, thespian or ballet-artist, aeronaut or acrobat: all performed at Niblo’s to establish and maintain their reputations. ... It was at Niblo’s that the first American “musical” was staged in 1867.