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turning out a series of full-length plays that developed the character of Dan Mulligan, along with his family, friends, and ethnic neighbors—the “prominent types,” said Harrigan, “which go to make up life in the metropolis.” In fashioning his characters, who were of far greater range and depth than the traditional stereotypes, Harrigan took to the streets to catch “the living manners as they rise.” His daughter, Nedda, remembered him following people around, learning their walk and talk, observing how and where they lived, at times buying the clothes off their backs to use as costumes. Harrigan used realistically painted backdrops to set his scenes on Lower East Side streets, in the Mulligans’ dining room, in black-run barbershops where men gathered to talk sports.

Harrigan and Hart’s comedies were no more into a grim realism than was melodrama or minstrelsy, nor did they completely transcend stereotyping. Harrigan’s Irish were rowdy, garrulous, quick tempered, intemperate; his Germans were slow witted, stubborn, coarse eaters, heavy drinkers; his blacks loved to dress up in overly elaborate costumes, use long words, and mangle syntax. Yet all these characters had redeeming qualities. The Irish came off best, no doubt: Paddy, though given to drink and disorder, was also witty and generous, hardworking and brave. Remarkably, Harrigan’s black barbers and servants were equally complex and, though played for laughs like everyone else, weren’t subjects of ridicule. The Chinese came off much the worst: rat-eating, opiumsmoking, pidgin-English laundrymen with a penchant for stealing clothing.

Perhaps most significant, Harrigan and Hart’s assorted characters got on with one another—rather as did many of their real-life contemporaries at West Brighton, or in the CLU, or in the George campaign, or on the Tammany picnics organized by Big Tim Sullivan. H&H’s Lower East Siders also exuded a collective sense of downtown’s selfworth and power, particularly in relation to the snooty uptown sorts, that appealed to heavily ethnic working-class audiences.

SEX REDIVIVUS

As ethnicity reigned in the melodrama and variety houses, burlesque was ruled by raunch. Lydia Thompson and her impertinent “British Blondes” had created an uproar back in 1868 as much for their streetwise language, male impersonations, and mockery of bourgeois culture as for their revealing costumes. Since then burlesque had been stripped of its more radical components and gone downtown, downscale, and downhill. The dozens of troupes that sprang up in Thompson’s wake eliminated cutting-edge criticism and stuck to displaying female bodies to male audiences—the “leg business”—though women on Bowery stages “peeled” only down to their tights.

A Bowery concert saloon, with a “re-fined singing and dancing act” in progress, c. 1890. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

Sex was the mainstay of concert saloons too, like old Harry Hill’s, on Houston and Mulberry, which still offered alcohol and licentious entertainment to male audiences, attracting rugged Bowery types, celebrities like Bennett Junior and Edison, and slummers out for a walk on the sinful side, hoping to pick up immigrant girls. But the Bowery’s range of sensual possibilities—like the diversity of its ethnic-based offerings—was expanded in this era by new arrivals on the scene, the men called “Nancys” and “fairies.” Ralph Werther, who occasionally went by the name of Jennie June (the celebrated fashion magazinist), moved to the metropolis in 1882 in part because “in New York one can live as Nature demands without setting every one’s tongue wagging.” Werther, a middle-class student, attended college uptown but spent much of his free time, usually in drag, at the Columbia Club on the Bowery at 5th Street. Better known as Paresis Hall—paresis being a medical term for the insanity one could supposedly contract by consorting with fairies—the establishment resembled most working-class variety haunts. It had a modest barroom and a small beer garden out back and offered nightly music and comedy routines.