Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [389]
But the Bowery was far bigger than its competitors. It could hold a thousand more spectators than the Park. Usually it didn’t, as patrician fare didn’t lure plebeian audiences. So the management adjusted the entertainment mix to include more spectacular offerings. It ran equestrian events. (One paper noted that though the Bull’s Head had been evicted only recently, “now horses are again prancing where they were formerly.”) Tubes transported water to center stage for aquatic displays. Novelty acts abounded, including one in 1828 during which sixteen Indian warriors did the Pipe Dance on stage. The narrator-chief was shockingly nude from the waist up, but one newspaper assured New Yorkers that the “difference in color removes all the idea of indelicacy, which a similar exposure of white men would occasion.”
Charles Gilfert, the Bowery’s manager, also found that tragedies seldom drew audiences sizable enough to cover the large salaries required to win top actors—already known as “stars”—away from rival theaters. So he turned to melodramas, a recent British import that provided blood-and-thunder action, spectacular mechanical enhancements, and starkly moralistic plots. Melodramatic heroes and villains—their characters written all over their faces—battled to an invariably happy ending, in which the forces of evil were overcome.
The Bowery nurtured America’s first master of the form, the Manhattan-born Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest. Though he made his debut at the Park in 1826, Gilfert won him away to the Bowery for the next several years. Forrest’s bombastic, muscular style matched the demands of melodrama and the proclivities of the workingclass portion of the Bowery’s audience. Their roars of approval lofted him to heights of fame unmatched by any contemporary American actor.
Gilfert tried to keep his elite attendees happy too, with English dramas and English stars, who worked in the British style featured at the Park, but the balancing act proved difficult to sustain. Gilfert died suddenly in 1829 and was succeeded in 1830 by Thomas Hamblin, who wholeheartedly cast his lot with the Anglo- and Irish-American artisans and laborers who peopled the surrounding neighborhoods. The Bowery ostentatiously promoted “native talent,” and its hyperpatriotism, lower prices, stage pyrotechnics, and shrewd choice of plays (Hamblin immediately doubled the number of melodramas) garnered an intensely loyal and vociferous audience of shopkeepers, small masters, wage-earners, and prostitutes. The elite decamped. By the time Mrs. Trollope arrived, it was evident that although the Bowery was “as pretty a theater as I ever entered,” it was decidedly “not the fashion.”
JUMP JIM CROW
New York’s theaters and working-class communities nurtured into vigorous life a peculiarly American cultural product: the minstrel show, a racially charged entertainment form that would eventually sweep the nation and much of Europe. Minstrelsy had many seedbeds, but one of the most important lay in black Manhattan.
In the summer of 1821 William Henry Brown opened a pleasure garden in his back yard. Brown, a West Indian black, had served as a steward on Liverpool packets before giving up the sea and buying a house at 38 Thomas (between Chapel and Hudson), a street well known for its brothels. Now he dispensed brandy and gin toddies, porter and ale, ice cream and cakes to black patrons, who were barred from the other private gardens in town. The African Grove, as Brown called it, was a smashing success. As the National Advocate noted, “black