Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [907]
Union Square’s specialization in theatrical marketing, coupled with its proximity to genteel precincts, made it the crucible for the emergence of vaudeville, a new entertainment form that would soon sweep the city and the country. The impresario most responsible for this development was the fat, genial, and handlebar-mustachioed Antonio “Tony” Pastor, a master of the variety stage who set out in the 1880s to change its image. At the age of twelve, Pastor, born in Greenwich Village in 1834, gave his first paid performance, as a blackface minstrel singer, at Barnum’s Museum. Later he joined the circus as an acrobat, singer, and clown, then returned to New York, where he sang topical songs at a Broadway saloon. In 1865 he took over the old Volk’s Garden at 201 Bowery and rechristened it Pastor’s Opera House; there he ran a successful variety show for many years.
In 1881 he moved up to Union Square, opening Tony Pastor’s New Fourteenth Street Theater in Tammany Hall. Following in Barnum’s footsteps, Pastor decided to repackage variety—a brash, plebeian, and male-oriented entertainment form—and make it suitable for a broader and more profitable audience, one that crossed class and gender lines. Union Square was ideally situated for such an initiative, as vast numbers of respectable women came every day to the area’s shops and to Ladies’ Mile, thriving a scant few blocks away. The Sixth Avenue Elevated had poured customers onto the strip that ran from Macy’s at 14th Street up to McCreery’s at 23rd. More giant department stores went up in the 1880s and 1890s, each determined to outdo the others as a spectacular stage for marketing goods.
Pastor launched an ad campaign, aimed at wives, sisters, and sweethearts, announcing the birth of “clean variety.” He barred liquor, banned prostitutes, and sheared the entertainment itself of excessive vulgarity. Once again a cultural entrepreneur had set out to buff the rough edges off downtown culture in order to sell it to uptown audiences. A new form required a new name, and Pastor’s 1881 advertisements proclaimed “the first specialty and vaudeville theater of America, catering to polite tastes.” Variety was associated with drink, sex, and the working class; “vaudeville” had French associations and suggested respectability and “class.”
There was in fact no structural difference between variety and vaudeville, each being a series of acts strung together, but Pastor’s vaudeville was more “tasteful.” His offerings included demure dancers, blackface comics, spoofs of uptown light operas, Irish acts, magic lantern shows, puppetry, city sketches (“The Mysteries of Gotham,” “The Bowery by Day and Night”), and Tony himself, singing favorites like “Lula, the Beautiful Hebrew Girl” or “Sarah’s Young Man” (“On her I grew love sick / She was a domestic / And lived in a mansion / On Washington Square.”)
Pastor, though a great success, at first had little wider impact—most variety stages continued much as before—largely because the performer-manager had no ambitions beyond his own theater. It would take an empire builder to press the transformation farther. At the time Pastor was launching vaudeville, Benjamin Franklin Keith came to town to work at Bunnell’s Museum, one of the fifty dime museums flourishing in New York City in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Keith was not a performer but an entrepreneur, and after a year at Bunnell’s, displaying collections of human curiosities, wax figures,