Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [791]
Popular theaters—including the old Bowery, still going strong—offered melodramas like The Three Fast Men, or New York by Daylight and Gaslight and dramatized stories from the New York Weekly like Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl. Many featured elaborate special effects and mechanisms, such as trains, fires, and live animals. Some houses specialized in Irish dramas in which virtuous peasant girls and high-minded patriots joined forces to confound designing English dukes. As in prior generations, actors engaged in colloquies with the peanut-and sausage-munching audiences (families held mini-picnics in the second tier). Marching down front after a particularly patriotic speech, they would demand, “Isn’t that so, boys?” and receive an earsplitting affirmation. Other houses presented musical extravaganzas, burlesque, and French opéra bouffe.
Bowery dime museums presented mechanical contrivances, flea circuses, and wax figures: one such establishment had a fake Dante’s Inferno peopled by the likes of Tweed, Gould, and Henry Ward Beecher. A panorama building housed a Gettysburg cyclorama where audiences stood while unfolding canvases depicted the clash of armies (accompanied by narration from a uniformed veteran). Lent’s New York Circus at 14th Street (just across from the elite’s Academy of Music) boasted equestrian rings—larger than Astley’s in London or the Cirque Napoleon in Paris—where one could see horseback riders, high-wire artists, clowns, and animal acts.
“Variety” shows refused to specialize in any one popular entertainment form but mixed them all. Starting in 1865 Tony Pastor, a former clown and veteran concert saloon entertainer, ran one out of an old Bowery theater. Tony Pastor’s was known as a bar-free family house, a place to take one’s maiden aunt. It mixed blackface minstrelsy, clog dances, magicians, acrobats, tableaux vivants, sing-alongs with Tony, and plays presenting idealized pictures of life on the Lower East Side (like The Little Fraud, in which Ned Harrigan and Tony Hart made their first appearance in September of 1872).
Tammany Hall merged politics and entertainment, already stylistically similar, in its new headquarters (1868) just off Union Square at 141 East 14th Street. The Tammany Society kept only one room for itself, renting the rest to entertainment impresarios: Dan Bryant’s Minstrels, a German theater company, classical concerts and opera. The basement—in the French mode—offered the Café Ausant, where one could see tableaux vivant, gymnastic exhibitions, pantomimes, and Punch and Judy shows. There was also a bar, a bazaar, a Ladies’ Cafe, and an oyster saloon. All this—with the exception of Bryant’s—was open from seven till midnight for a combination price of fifty cents.
All-male audiences could enjoy raunchier entertainments. After 1874 Robinson Hall presented the cancan—“funny, frenchy, spicy and sparkling”—which was such a hit the theater changed its name to Parisian Varieties. This inspired the Columbia Café to open in 1875 with “the Latest Parisian Novelties,” including risqué pieces like Cleopatra’s Amours and Fifty Nice Girls in Naughty Sketches. The competition soon generated full-fledged girly shows—“spicy French Sensations” such as Beautiful Minnet Dances from the Jardin Mabille, Paris and The Sultan’s Harem, or Secrets of the Seraglio.
Raunchier still—and far more participatory—were the concert halls at the Bowery’s lower end, in the Five Points, or along the waterfront. Many were gas-lit basement dives—like Sailor’s Welcome Home or the Jolly Tar—which cajoled sailors through their red-curtained doors down to rooms where pianos rolled and drinks