By Pamela Newkirk

Seventy-five years after the former Hurtig & Seaman Theatre opened its doors to a white-only audience, I was among the glitzy crowd there to celebrate the iconic Apollo Theater-which for decades has hosted a long line of legendary African-American performers.

No name is too big for the theater that in 1934 abolished its white-only policy and made way for 16-year-old Ella Fitzgerald, so it was fitting at a June 8 fundraiser that Bill Cosby, Quincy Jones, Prince, Mariah Carey, Jamie Foxx, the O’Jays and Patti LaBelle graced the stage that had launched the careers of Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Stevie Wonder, James Brown and Michael Jackson.

As the crowd paid homage to this cultural mecca that Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie had filled with music, I wondered how many in the audience knew the Apollo of my youth, where week after week my sister and I entered the building around noon, and left late in the evening after three performances by some of the greatest performers of our era: The Stylistics, the Four Tops, The Five Stairsteps, Little Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips and the Jackson Five.

For my sister and me, the Apollo was a second home where we whiled away the days in music heaven. It was there where we watched the torch pass from the Five Stairsteps to this up-and-coming boy band called the Jackson Five, and where James Brown strutted and split and sweated his way into our collective hearts. It was where a pre-”Cosby Show” Bill Cosby made us cringe in our seats with his biting humor as we prayed we would escape his notice and where weekly on Wednesday nights unknown artists tried to claim an elusive greatness.

I wondered how many of this year’s 75th anniversary revelers had actually walked, as I had, from behind that curtain, rubbed the tree of life for luck and gone before that infamous audience that had broken many a heart? And how many experienced the rush of excitement when they wowed the crowd? For weeks the Baby Dolls, a singing group my sister and I belonged to, won amateur night, benefiting, no doubt, from the assistance of our large and hearty extended family.

While the Apollo was long a personal treasure for many New Yorkers, it is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is visited by more than one million people a year. For that, a debt is owed to former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, who in 1981 had the foresight to rescue the shuttered theater from further decline by purchasing it and launching a campaign to revive it. His efforts resulted in the theater’s landmark status and a 1985 grand reopening gala and the nationally broadcast television special “Motown Salutes the Apollo.”

Since 1987 “Showtime at the Apollo,” based on the original amateur night made famous by Ella Fitzgerald, has aired in syndication and is in 119 national markets.  Even as the Apollo widens its reach, it will always be an important part of my personal history and an even greater part of the history of African American artistic excellence.

Long live the Apollo.

Pamela Newkirk is an Associate Professor of Journalist at New York University and the author of Letters from Black America; A Love No Less: Two Centuries of African-American Love Letters; and Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media.