Kings of Old New York in Portraits Maybe you want to be a king in New York. Think of the power, the perks, the crown, the parties in the Hamptons, where even bush-league royals make the gossip columns. If you're a king in New York and you ask some peasant how to get to Carnegie Hall, you think he's going to crack wise and answer "practice"? Not in this town. From the Latin Kings to the Papaya King, this town knows how to treat royalty. Accordingly, as a walk through The Times's photo archives shows, the great kings have come here to make their names in the theater, the opera or (some potentates being more desperate for attention than others) the Ice Carnival. Take Shakespeare's "King Lear," for example. Oh, how New Yorkers have turned out to see that king. Let's see: good name recognition, a devoted father to his daughters - a little overly doting in his paternal affections, maybe, but a king nonetheless, with his own fool to keep him company. Goes stark raving mad and finally dies miserably and ... But maybe that's a bad example. Luckily, the photo archives offer a panoply of crowned role models. How about Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov," the czar of Russia? Or Hermann the crowned landgrave of Thuringia in Wagner's "Tannhauser" - technically a count rather than a king, but no more modest in the imperial headgear? Of course, Boris, like Lear, ruled in sadness, haunted by ghosts and guilt over his murderous rise to become czar, until he finally died a broken man. It may be that such roles take a toll. The basso Herbert Witherspoon, who portrayed both Boris and Hermann, later became the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, only to have a fatal heart attack just two weeks after assuming the new job in 1935. In life, as in art, the mighty fall mightily. Need we go on? In Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," King Marke of Cornwall was the loving husband of Isolde - until she cheated on him with Tristan. The imposter John of Leyden, who wore a false but very stylish crown in Giacomo Meyerbeer's "Le Prophete," was devoured by flames in a fire that he set himself. Pollione, the proconsul in Bellini's "Norma"? Burned at the stake with the title character, his lover. In fact, what unites most of the power players shown here is that they went through horrible tragedies, night after night. Lacking kings of its own to torture for popular amusement, New York has imported them from abroad, then paid to watch them die. There is a symmetry to the spectacle. The royals and audience members alike arrive in appropriate power garb, wielding scepters or smartphones, showing their status by their altitude (monarchs on high thrones, urban hotshots in the expensive seats down low). For the poor rulers of abroad, New York's stage is platform for someone's pleasure through another's pain, with them on the losing end. And if death does not do the trick, there are always the critics, like The Times's James Gibbons Huneker, who serenaded Enrico Caruso's performance as Radames in "Aida" by noting that "Mr. Caruso has hardly the physical inches for a warrior" and that he "looked more like a decadent ruler of some half-forgotten Byzantine empire." Welcome to New York, Mr. Caruso. Tell your royal brethren where you got it, and how easy it was. Follow @johnleland and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.