Lady Gaga admitted she cried before going onstage at New York’s Roseland Ballroom on Monday night – not strictly because it was the last performance before the beloved venue closed its doors permanently, but “because this city makes me feel so strong, suddenly you wake up and you just know who you are”, she said,
Roseland opened in New York in 1919 and hosted icons like Count Basie in the ’30s. It relocated to its 52nd Street home (a former skating rink called Gay Blades) in the late ’50s, where a display inside touted the number of couples who’d met there and married. In the ’70s and ’80s, the spot was a disco haven; in the Nineties its 3,500-capacity crowds moshed to Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers. It will be torn down to make way for an apartment complex.
