The Academy's opera season became the center of social life for New York's elite, with the oldest and most prominent families owning seats in the theater's boxes. The opera house was destroyed by fire in 1866 and subsequently rebuilt, but it was supplanted as the city's premier opera venue in 1883 by the new Metropolitan Opera House – created by the "nouveaux riches" who had been frozen out of the Academy – and ceased presenting opera in 1886, turning instead to vaudeville. It was demolished in 1926 to make way for the Consolidated Edison Building.