HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Cecil B. DeMille

New York, New York, New York

Marker Inscription

Cecil B. DeMille 1881-1959 The director and producer of silent and sound epic films lived here from 1906 to 1913. He directed the first Hollywood feature motion picture, The Squaw Man (1913). Known for his multimillion-dollar spectacles, he produced 70 films including The Ten Commandments.

Erected by Historic Landmarks Preservation Center

The Story

Filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille lived at this New York address from 1906 to 1913, in the years before he headed west to help invent Hollywood. In 1913 he directed 'The Squaw Man,' celebrated as the first feature-length film made in Hollywood, launching a career of some 70 pictures. Famed for lavish spectacles like 'The Ten Commandments,' DeMille became one of the defining showmen of American cinema.

Why it matters

DeMille's move from this house to California mirrors the birth of Hollywood itself, marking the moment American filmmaking became a defining industry and art of the modern age.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

At the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City was the beating heart of American entertainment. This was the world of the stage — of Broadway theaters, touring companies, and a bustling professional community of actors, writers, and producers. A young person with theatrical ambition came to New York because New York was where the work and the reputations were made.

Motion pictures, by contrast, were still a novelty in these years — short, silent, and widely regarded as a cheap amusement rather than a serious art. The idea that films might one day rival or eclipse the stage would have struck many theater people as far-fetched. Yet the technology was advancing fast, and a restless energy was gathering around it.

The address marked here belonged to the years when Cecil B. DeMille lived in the city, from 1906 to 1913. That span sits right on the hinge of the change — the last moment before the young medium of film would pull ambitious talent away from the Eastern stage and toward a sun-drenched corner of California that barely existed yet as an idea.

People & events

The marker honors Cecil B. DeMille, who lived at this New York home in the years before he became one of the founding figures of American filmmaking. Here he was still a man of the theater, immersed in the stage world that shaped his instinct for drama and spectacle.

The turning point the marker records came in 1913, when DeMille directed The Squaw Man — celebrated as the first feature-length motion picture made in Hollywood. It was a leap in more than geography. Where films had been brief novelties, a feature was a full story told at length, and making it in California helped establish a place that would soon become the capital of an entire industry.

From that beginning, DeMille built a career of remarkable scale, producing some seventy films across the silent and sound eras. He became known above all for lavish spectacles — the great crowd scenes and grand set pieces that defined the popular idea of a "Hollywood epic," including his famous telling of The Ten Commandments.

Its place in the American story

The move this marker commemorates — from an East Coast home to the founding of Hollywood — mirrors one of the great shifts in American cultural life. In a single generation, the movies grew from a sideshow amusement into a defining industry and art form, and one of the country's most powerful exports to the world.

DeMille stands as a symbol of that transformation. His work helped teach audiences what a feature film could be: not a brief diversion, but a full-scale story capable of awe. The showmanship he perfected shaped expectations that Hollywood has answered ever since, whenever it reaches for scale and spectacle.

There's a fitting symbolism in a marker like this standing in New York. It captures the before — the stage world and the Eastern city — at the very address a man left behind to help invent the after. The birth of American cinema wasn't only a story of California; it began with people and places back East, and this home is one of them.

If you visit

This is a city marker on a building, the kind of plaque that rewards the walker who looks up and reads. Standing before it, the pleasure is in the imaginative leap — connecting an ordinary New York doorway to the vast, sunlit world of the movies it helped set in motion.

Let the dates do their work. Picture DeMille coming and going here between 1906 and 1913, still a theater man, with the whole Hollywood era still ahead of him and unimagined. The gap between this modest address and the spectacle he would later be known for is the real story the marker tells.

If you're exploring the city's layers of history, this plaque makes a great small discovery — proof that the origins of Hollywood trace back to Eastern streets like this one. It's a reminder that even the most sweeping American stories often begin at a single, quiet address you might otherwise walk right past.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

Plan your visit

Nearby

Make a day of it — museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.

Museums & culture

Attractions

Food & drink

Places to stay

Places data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Hours and details change — call ahead.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • · Cecil B. DeMille

Themes & tags

Industry & InventionInnovation & FlightHome

Nearby & related markers

Nikola Tesla

New York, NY

This plaque marks the room in Manhattan's Hotel New Yorker where Nikola Tesla, the visionary Serbian-American inventor, spent his final years and died alone in January 1943. Decades earlier Tesla had helped win the 'War of the Currents,' championing the alternating-current systems that made it practical to transmit electricity across long distances and light entire cities. By the time he died in near-poverty, the AC power grids he pioneered had become the invisible backbone of modern life. The marker turns an ordinary hotel address into the last chapter of one of history's great inventive minds.

Industry & InventionInnovation & Flight

Nikola Tesla Death Site

New York, NY · est. 1977

On January 7, 1943, the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla died in New York City at the age of eighty-six. A pioneer of alternating-current electricity, Tesla's discoveries in the field of AC power helped carry the United States and the world into the modern industrial age. This marker was placed in 1977 by the Yugoslav-American Bicentennial Committee.

Innovation & FlightIndustry & Invention

Thomas Edison

New York, NY · est. 1938

On an April night in 1896, a New York vaudeville house called Koster & Bial's Music Hall hosted something audiences had never seen: images that moved on a screen for a paying crowd. Using Thomas Edison's Vitascope projector, the program threw flickering scenes larger than life before a Broadway audience, marking the American debut of projected motion pictures. The tablet was later affixed by the motion-picture industry itself, honoring the spot where its business was, in effect, born.

Innovation & FlightIndustry & Invention

Unisphere

New York, NY

This 140-foot stainless-steel globe rose over Flushing Meadows as the theme symbol of the 1964–65 New York World's Fair, an exposition themed "Peace Through Understanding" that drew millions to Queens at the height of the Space Age. Donated and engineered by U.S. Steel, its open latticework of continents and orbiting rings captured a moment when Americans looked hopefully toward space exploration and a shrinking, more connected world. After the fair closed it remained in the park, and today it endures as one of the most recognizable landmarks of the New York City skyline's borough of Queens.

Innovation & FlightIndustry & Invention