Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [753]
RIALTO
As department stores relocated to the Union-Madison Square area, another flock of northwardly migrating institutions, the city’s theaters, were touching down in the same terrain. Theaters and emporiums coexisted amicably, in part because each increasingly resembled the other. Stores had a new dramatic flair, and theaters, induced by new opportunities out west, adopted the latest marketing techniques.
Railroads wrought a revolution in the New York stage. For over a century, the basic unit of theatrical business had been the stock company. A Broadway or Bowery manager—often a prominent actor—would buy a theater, equip it with sets and costumes, and engage a resident company to perform plays in repertory. Such companies did survive in the postwar world. Lester Wallack’s theater, on Broadway and 13th Street, was considered by many the finest stock company in town, and it offered a steady diet of British Restoration comedies and the occasional romantic melodrama. Edwin Booth, who had retired temporarily after his brother John Wilkes assassinated Lincoln, returned to the New York stage in 1866 to thunderous ovations. He used his profits to open Booth’s Theater on Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, a technologically sophisticated and magnificently florid Second Empire temple to Shakespeare. Another prewar giant fared less well: the younger generation wrote off Edwin Forrest as a “ranter,” and he gave his final New York performance in 1871.
Stock companies themselves were on the way out, along with the minstrel outfits. The future lay with the “combination” system. A star or manager would pull together an ensemble for a single play. It would showcase in New York, then take to the road on the new rail networks and tour the country. When the run was over, the company disbanded, and the promoter reinvested his profits (if any) in another New York production. The city had become a manufacturer of dramatic commodities.
This transformation of the entertainment industry affected the theater district’s location and structure. Before the war, playhouses had been beaded along Broadway and the Bowery, with the Academy of Music on 14th Street at the apex. Now entrepreneurs—drawn by the crowds of shoppers in Ladies’ Mile—opened playhouses between Union and Madison squares, along Broadway and Sixth Avenue, with the idea of renting them out for the length of a booked run.
The new combination system also required a complex array of support services. Since the tools of the theatrical trade—costumes, props, scenery—were no longer owned by each house, they had to be rented for each particular performance. Specialized businesses met the need, beginning with the Eaves Costume Company, formed by a former actor, which furnished wigs and beards, boots and shoes, tights and swords.
Actors too had to be assembled on a show-by-show basis. At first this was done in an impromptu way, with deals cut on benches in Union Square (known to some as the “slave market”) or in nearby restaurants. Then professional talent brokers emerged, theatrical agents who mediated between actors and impresarios. They too set up offices around the square (the first being the Simmonds and Wall Dramatic Agency in 1875). To stay near the action, hundreds of young actors settled into theatrical boardinghouses nearby.
Actors aiming for the big time, and stars who kept their image brightly burnished, both turned to stage photographers like Napoleon Sarony, who opened his famous Union Square studio in 1871. Here actors posed in costume, with arresting props, before painted backgrounds, while the “father of artistic photography” worked his flamboyant magic, deepening New York’s