The alley was a loading lane. Somewhere to back a wagon in off 44th and get flats through a door without carrying them past the box office, plus a strip of open air between two buildings so the fire people would sign the thing. The Shubert name settled onto it afterwards, the way names do.
Constance has the plaster still wet from the fourth row, and I'd believe it — Herts had two houses rising on that block at once in 1913, the Shubert and the Booth either side of the lane, brick and terracotta in an Italian Renaissance key, Lichtenauer's murals going up overhead while somebody was still smoothing the ground under them. Whoever ran that ceiling finished it on a Thursday because Hamlet was Thursday. Stand in the alley now and the picture is that: marquees, a wall of posters, people walking through on their way to somewhere else.
The plaster can't be three weeks dry, and from the fourth row you'd still smell it. Onstage a man of sixty is saying goodbye in a dark doublet — Forbes-Robertson, farewell tour, Hamlet once more, this was 1913 — and out in the lobby Lee and…
Fabien, that lane stopped being a loading dock the minute dancers worked out the casting offices were right above it — they'd stand in Shubert Alley in coats and practice shoes waiting to be called up, in all weathers, and someone would bring coffee out. A wagon entrance that turned into a waiting room.