Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [902]
This was particularly evident at Brighton and Manhattan Beach, which even more than West Brighton represented substantial investment by large-scale capitalists. Most East End amusements were dignified and genteel, to be sure, but the racetracks, on which much hotel patronage depended, were (in the opinion of reformers) nearly as subversive of public morals as the Gut. In 1877 state legislation had banned the old auction betting system, in hopes of curbing racing. Instead it nourished a new variety of betting, done by at-the-track bookmakers. The growing ranks of professional gamblers, together with the rich horsemen of the Coney Island Jockey Club, formed another influential constellation in favor of cultural laissez-faire.
Both ends of Coney, moreover, had powerful political protectors. The island was beyond the jurisdiction of either New York or Brooklyn—legally an appendage of the independent town of Gravesend, which was the bailiwick of John Y. McKane. A stoutframed, red-bearded man, McKane had been born in County Antrim in 1841, had been brought up in Gravesend from 1843, and worked as a farmhand and as a clam digger in Sheepshead Bay, then opened his own carpentry shop. He went into politics and with the help of fellow Irish immigrants supplanted the old Dutch town leaders. Between 1878 and 1893 McKane was Coney’s government. He was effective at delivering water and electricity and disposing of sewage. He was also corrupt, assisting those businesses that hired his construction firm, which is to say virtually every hotelier on the beach. McKane permitted gambling throughout West Brighton—making the occasional raid, to quiet moral critics, after warning the targets he was coming. He also protected the tracks from overzealous enforcement of the penal codes, in alliance with sportsmen and gamblers who had their own lines to the Democratic Party.
All these phenomena—the growing vigor of a multiethnic popular culture, the rapid commercialization of entertainment on a hitherto unmatched scale, the emergence of novel kinds of mass amusement forms, the loosening during leisure time of constraints that governed elsewhere in the city—were present elsewhere in the New York’s far-flung and fast-flowering world of entertainment. In Manhattan, as in Coney, the clashing and blending enclaves of commercial culture were laid out quite tidily along a spatial axis. Here the journey from “low” to “high” ran south to north, rather than west to east. A tourist determined to grasp the city’s complete range of entertainment possibilities would have to begin in the raunchy and interethnic precincts of the Bowery; travel to the Union Square Rialto, now home to the novel and interlinked phenomena of vaudeville and pop music; head on to the peculiarly multipurpose, multiclass venue of Madison Square Garden; and finally reach “Broadway,” the newly transplanted center of the “legitimate” stage (unless a wrong and westward turning had plunged the unwary into Satan’s Circus).
ALL THE WORLD’S ONSTAGE
The Bowery, long the heartland of working-class amusements, had been flagging a bit, weakened by competition from new forms of entertainment, amusement parks among them. Melodramas, downtown’s favorite performance style, were still in evidence, to be sure. Each night on the Bowery boards, working-class heroes triumphed over rich men whose pockets were stuffed with bonds, and poor but pure shopgirls or seamstresses escaped the villain’s machinations (as in Charles Foster’s Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl). Many plays, as before the war, used the city as backdrop, with offerings such as The Waifs of New York, Outcasts of a Great City, and the inspirational Tom Edison the Electrician. But what revivified Bowery theater in the 1880s and 1890s, infusing it with terrific new energy, was the establishment of zestful new immigrant communities, which had imported new cultural traditions and the audiences to sustain them.
Yiddish theater, born in Odessa and Bucharest in the late