Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [513]
With Brother Jonathan launched, Benjamin departed to start up a rival, the New World. Each now vied to include the most material. The sheets grew larger and larger, winning the name “mammoths.” The New World, eventually six-feet-seven by fourfeet-four, comprised forty-eight columns of small type and was best read on the floor. The mammoths also issued “extras” or “supplements,” which crammed entire books into this format. They offered melodramas and high romances, English novels and French fiction in translation, as well as books by local authors, such as Franklin Evans, a temperance novel by the journalist Walter Whitman. Newsboys hawked them on the streets and delivered them to subscribers’ doors, offering premiums (Bibles) for quick renewals. Profit margins were slim, but volume was enormous. Circulation soared past that of all other magazines, even that of most penny papers, forcing book prices ever lower.
Suffering publishers loudly protested the ruinous competition. In 1842, Harpers decided to do battle. Slashing prices on its own English knockoffs, it overcame the attendant deficits with steady profits from schoolbook sales. Then, in 1843, postal authorities ruled that the mammoths’ “supplements” had to be mailed at the more expensive book rate. The newcomers—undercapitalized and overextended—collapsed, succumbing at last to the depression they had up till then ridden so masterfully. What remained was a meaner, leaner New York book trade, geared more than ever before to low-cost, high-volume production.
A similar trajectory characterized the development of New York’s theatrical life in these years. The panic devastated city playhouses. Ticket prices plunged, without attracting patrons. Some smaller theaters closed their doors; larger ones cut wages sharply. At the Bowery Theater, manager Hamblin hoped spectacular effects might improve attendance. In an 1840 drama, The Pirates’ Signal, he replaced the stage with a tank of water, upon which a full-rigged ship sailed from rear to footlights, actors declaiming on deck. Equestrian spectacles followed, among them The Battle of Waterloo, which boasted fifty horses, two hundred supernumeraries, and cannons. Neither fared well; both were too expensive.
Elsewhere along the Bowery and Chatham Street new approaches were percolating. Taverns and small hotels provided free entertainment to draw in drinkers. These venues—known as “free and easies” or “varieties” or “vaudevilles”—offered an everchanging if incoherent assortment of music, dance, magic, ventriloquism, comedy, skits, and tall tales, frequently provided by the audience itself. Hamblin discovered that his Bowery Theater, too, did best when it ran circus shows, comic routines, and lowbudget acts appropriated from the streets and marketplaces. William Mitchell followed suit, halving his Olympic Theater’s admission prices and focusing almost exclusively on what he called “tragico-comico-illegitimate” productions: travesties of local events, topical commentaries, and Shakespearean burlesque (Julius Sneezer and Dars-de-Money).
Shipbuilders and cartmen, butchers and firemen, tradesmen and laborers, domestics and launderers—the vast numbers of single men (and growing numbers of single women) who lived in nearby boardinghouses—began packing their way into such shows. New theaters (the Franklin, the Chatham) went up to house the overflow. The plebeian fare fit comfortably into the expanding spectrum of Bowery entertainments, which included scores of cheap dance halls, dime museums, brothels, billiard rooms, bowling alleys, saloons, oysterhouses, and amphitheaters offering bare-knuckle prizefights or cockfights. At the district’s northern end, the shabby but genial Vauxhall Gardens, one-eighth its former size, still offered substantial food at reasonable