Located at the southeastern corner of Broadway and 47th Street in bustling Midtown Manhattan, TSX Broadway—named for its location at the crossroads of Times Square—stands as an indelible part of the Times Square experience and the New York City skyline. But this eye-catching, 46-story glass structure with mammoth LED panels surrounding its exterior wasn’t always the iconic part of the city’s famed theater district that it is today.

Electrical contractors B&G Electrical Contractors of New York Inc., Amityville, N.Y.; H&L Electric Inc., Long Island City, N.Y.; SJ Electric Inc., Lynbrook, N.Y.; and Striano Electric Co. Inc., Garden City Park, N.Y., spent time working on the project. B&G did theater fit-out work.

“The building previously located in this space was a DoubleTree Hotel, which was built above the historic Palace Theatre, one of the oldest landmark theaters on Broadway,” said Rick Brownstein, project manager and account executive with H&L Electric, a family-run electrical and communication construction firm that’s been specializing in work at hotels, museums, data centers, offices, retail stores and other commercial projects in New York and New Jersey since 1989. “Ultimately, the late 1980s/early 1990s-era DoubleTree Hotel had become outdated, and the building owners decided to develop the entire complex into a mixed-use hotel and retail mecca and renovate the Palace Theatre back to its original glory.

“When we first came on-site during the hotel’s demolition in 2019 [and] 2020, the general contractor overseeing the upgrade of the Palace Theatre had drawings from the theater’s original 1912 construction,” Brownstein said of the iconic building, which first opened to the public in 1913. 

With the original theater sitting on ground level without a basement, “the project design involved raising the theater more than 30 feet in the air in order to open up the ground floor for occupancy by retail establishments,” he said. 

In a monumental effort, a team of electrical contractors, excavators and other providers employed a system of hydraulic pistons to raise the 400-ton theater.

For H&L’s part, Brownstein said that two main general contractors, both based in New York, were responsible for the entire project—Pavarini McGovern for the core and shell and Structure Tone for the interiors.

“The first part of the project involved demolition of the back half of the old DoubleTree. While the initial demo was underway, our team came on-site to rough in the fire alarm in the theater while its walls were open and other mechanical work was being done,” he said. 

Luckily, he noted, H&L team members finished their preliminary work by the time the pandemic hit in March 2020, and the demolition continued. Though the pandemic stalled the project for a while, H&L was back on the job by 2022.

A multifaceted project

“We started out with two jobs in the project—installing the fire alarm in the theater, hotel and retail area and doing all of the electrical installations for 15 floors of the 31-story hotel, which features 661 rooms from the 16th to the 46th floor,” Brownstein said.

In terms of installing the building’s fire alarm, “the theater, hotel and retail area each required their own fire alarm system, fire command station and devices, but they all needed to be networked together [as required by the FDNY] to ensure that all occupants would be made aware of a fire emergency,” he said. “The theater was the most complicated area in which to install a fire alarm, because it had so many nooks and crannies between the backstage and the open auditorium areas.”

Other theater-related nuances added layers of complexity for H&L’s team. For example, “some stage productions require smoke, but they didn’t want the smoke detection system going off for a stage effect, so the design team helped set up the theater’s system to recognize a stage effect from a real fire,” Brownstein said. “There were a lot of loops to navigate, but we came up with a system of multiple risers that all came back to the fire command station, and the entire theater upgrade was done beautifully by our fellow contractors.” 

The H&L team was also responsible for the building’s auxiliary radio communication system, an internal wireless two-way radio system that was mandated after 9/11 to ensure that radio communications work for fire department use.

“The ground floor through the 10th floor are designated retail spaces under and on the side of the Palace Theatre, and the 11th floor is the Sky Lobby, which houses guest check-in and bar and restaurant facilities,” Brownstein said. “Our team completed all of the electrical work for the Sky Lobby—including its lighting as well as the electrical connections within a kitchen that supports all room service requests and the lobby’s snack area, bar and outdoor terrace—and 15 floors of rooms. The general contractor had each of our teams work in blocks of four floors at a time to keep each of our crews local while also enabling our dual teams to remain involved at the same time because the shell was all there.”

H&L had 120 crew members working on-site at the height of the project in 2022–2023. 

“We completed the build-out of all rooms with lighting, power and fire alarms,” Brownstein said. “All of the furniture was prefabbed with the lighting built in, enabling the whole unit to be plugged into a receptacle, which involved a lot less work than in hotel projects in the past. And we used all LED lighting, which limited the number of circuits required.”

While the fire alarms, Sky Lobby and room build-outs were initially H&L’s main responsibilities, the team was soon asked to work on the property’s immense exterior LED signage.

“Digital sign contractor SNA Displays [New York] contracted with us to handle two aspects of their sign,” Brownstein explained. “The first was to power the six-story-high digital LED sign that wrapped around the property’s sides on 47th Street and Broadway, which required two 1,200A services. Each panel is 2 feet by 2 feet, and they all plug into each other to form a huge screen that has moving images and running ads, which is a huge revenue stream for the property.

“Built into the sign from the 3rd to 5th floors facing Broadway are two doors that open up to create a stage, which overhangs Broadway and enables celebrities to do pop-up shows,” he said. “We were also contracted to provide the power and controls for those huge hydraulic doors with LED screens on the exterior, which were built by Canadian motion-control system manufacturer Niscon. It took a year to complete this aspect of the job from start to finish because there were a lot of motor control elements and conduits involved with the doors and a limited amount of room in which to work across the sign.” 

Team members from H&L Electric applied power and control to TSX Broadway’s two huge hydraulic exterior doors, which open up onto a concert stage overlooking Broadway.

The hydraulic doors open inward onto the 4,000-square-foot “TSX Stage,” allowing performances to occur “within” the LED wall.

Luckily, Brownstein said that his team encountered few major challenges during the 4-year-long project, which they ultimately completed in fall 2023.

“During the pandemic, electrical panels and transformers for the hotel rooms were difficult to get. We were limited as to how many people could go up in a freight car due to social distancing requirements, and we were impacted by other trades on the project whose work got delayed,” he said. “Along the way, the arrival of some fire alarm panels was also delayed, but that didn’t slow us up, because we’d ordered everything as early as we could.”

Shining bright on Broadway

TSX Broadway’s 18,000-square-foot exterior LED screen was illuminated for the first time in January 2023, with members of the public invited to buy 15-second advertisement slots for $40 each. Rapper and singer Post Malone played the first concert on the TSX Stage in July 2023, followed by such artists as Shakira, Snoop Dogg and Charli XCX in 2024. 

The newly upgraded Palace Theatre—which now brings the number of operational theaters in New York’s theater district to 41—officially opened in Fall 2024 with the musical “Tammy Faye” (based on the life of 1980s-era televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker) and will host a star-studded cast in a revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross” beginning in March 2025. B&G also worked on the theater.

“This was a great project to be involved in based on its scope, unique and complicated elements, and historic nature,” Brownstein said. “The hotel has nice, clean, modern lines, and the theater is spectacular in terms of the high-tech methods used to raise it. The whole project was an amazing feat of engineering and electrical work. There was a ton of pressure on us to get the project done and get the fire alarm system signed off for a temporary certificate of occupancy, but we accomplished it on time and on budget. It was extremely rewarding, and the general contractor and owner both appreciated our work.”

TSX Broadway under construction

“We had a fantastic relationship with the construction management team, who were incredibly clear, knowledgeable and pleasant to work with,” Brownstein said. “We had to tie in a lot of dampers and sprinkler systems throughout the property, but they understood fire alarm systems and what we needed to accomplish, so they were able to help us integrate with the other mechanical subcontractors on the job. They were the bridge between all of the trades working together and contributed so much to the project’s success.”

“There’s something to be said for being able to stand back and look at your work, and the beauty of the electrical contracting business is that you can actually see your product in a tangible way,” he said, himself a native New Yorker. “I’m so proud of this project, and it’s great for H&L Electric’s legacy as well. We do a lot of work in hotels in New York City, most recently at the St. Regis, Waldorf Astoria, Four Seasons and the New York Hilton, and TSX Broadway is an iconic flagship project that successfully positions us for more work in that specialty niche.”

Header image: The TSX Broadway mixed-use property stands as a new part of the Times Square experience in New York City. 

Rick Brownstein / H&L Electric Inc.