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By Root 8209 0

war when the Cercle Français de l’Harmonie started hosting wild parties at the Academy of Music, New York’s sanctum sanctorum of high culture. Nouveau riche Wall Street brokers in fancy dress rubbed elbows and much else with the city’s assembled demimondaines, attired in costumes that exposed much, if not all, of their persons. As the champagne flowed, modesty was abandoned and the parties escalated to Mardi Gras levels. In the words of an amazed World reporter attending one such event, women were caught up and tossed in the air, then fallen on by a “crew of half-drunken ruffians, and mauled, and pulled, and exhibited in the worst possible aspects, amid the jeers and laughter of the other drunken wretches upon the floor.” There was, he recounted, “not a whisper of shame in the crowd,” nor did such press strictures halt the carryings-on. Indeed they expanded, as clubmen and courtesans flocked to the frolics—in 1876 over four thousand attended one event—and they would grow even larger in succeeding decades.

Public theaters too became sites of sexual display, the likes of which had not been seen since “living tableaux” had been suppressed before the war. In 1866 Niblo’s Garden booked The Black Crook, a balletic musical spectacle. The unprecedented display of female flesh by lightly clad “coryphees” packed the house, night after night, until nearly five hundred performances had shattered all box office records in New York City—and the sale of men’s opera glasses had reached an all-time high.

Two years later the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Company arrived at Wood’s Museum (Broadway and 30th Street), four British blondes who sang, danced, winked, leered, and satirized conventional manners with raucous impertinence. These prototypical “showgirls”—voluptuous departures from the ethereal feminine ideal—were soon followed by dancers of the opera bouffe companies, fresh from the boulevards of Paris. Offenbachian events climbed steadily in popularity, capped, during the 1874 winter season, by the triumphant arrival of the cancan. Crowds came to see dancers expose their colorful garters and ruffled drawers.

With the showgirl came the man-about-town, as wealthy, famous, and often married men vied with one another for the attentions of dancers or singers. The richest—the Belmonts and Jeromes—openly “sponsored” singers, showering them with flowers and jewelry, investing their money for them, and driving them around town, while their wives looked the other way or, as in Jerome’s case, were packed off to Paris. Jim Fisk, whose wife languished in Boston, did things in his usual spectacular way. Apart from his many liaisons, culminating in a soon-to-be-fatal affair with Josie Mansfield, Fisk set up entire companies in his Grand Opera House, becoming the city’s first “angel.” Soon the playboy-showgirl nexus was as prevalent in Manhattan as it was in Paris.

“Paris in New York,” from Van Every, Sins of New York. “The shameless antics and contortions indulged in by the lively damsels of la Belle France, at the Cercle de l’Orpheon masquerade ball at the Academy of Music—free champagne and Offenbachian music puts life and mettle in feminine heels.” (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Churchmen fulminated against “French indecencies” and attempted to suppress the “leg shows,” but they flourished, ironically, in response to the successful prewar crackdown on immorality in conventional theaters, with “disreputable” women expelled from audiences now popping up onstage.1 An equally unintended consequence of suppressing “third tier” prostitution was the birth of the concert saloon, forerunner of the New York nightclub. These boozy and licentious variety halls thrived on the patronage of civil War soldiers on furlough, prompting moralists to persuade the city to require in 1862 that all theatrical and musical performing spaces be licensed and that the sale of liquor and employment of “waitresses” be banned wherever a curtain separated performers from customers. Entrepreneurs of leisure promptly dove