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in the evening, he is already disgusted by the spectacle: “Motherly dowagers in ball costumes bumped and caromed from the ample forms of procuresses.” By the end of the evening, with exhaustion erasing inhibition, he concludes, “There was no mistaking the intention of some of these dancers. It was vile, provocative and, since it was public, hideous.” And yet Forbes eventually becomes perfectly inured to the idea of locking knees, arms, shoulders, with a woman whom he wishes to place on a pedestal and worship. The pedestal thing, he understands, is gone with the wind.

The city ultimately tried to control the passions unleashed by dance by passing an ordinance—this is still 1913—requiring cabarets to close at two A.M. But the law was no match for unleashed appetite. Cabaret owners simply opened up private “clubs,” which came to be called nightclubs, and which could remain open all night long. One could dance at Castles in the Air, the rooftop cabaret of the 44th Street Theatre, to which the Castles moved in 1914, and then go down to the “Castle Club” in the basement for still more drinking and dancing, perhaps with Vernon and Irene themselves. And so before long the old lobster palaces had spawned not only cabarets and dance floors, but nightclubs as well.

In 1915, Florenz Ziegfeld, still very much the patron saint of the sexual frisson, created a companion to the Follies known as The Midnight Frolic, staged on the New Amsterdam’s terribly glamorous roof garden. This was the ne plus ultra of Times Square nightlife. The “garden” was an immense enclosed space, perhaps forty feet high, with great windows running up the sides and a skylight set into the roof. It accommodated as many as six hundred people, and featured a special roll-away stage that allowed the whole crowd to dance before and after the Frolic. It was a select crowd: the cover price of $5 kept out the pikers and the college freshmen, and the late hour attracted that part of the Broadway set which prided itself on never going to bed before dawn.

This was not the shirtsleeved rooftop crowd of 1892; the women wore narrow, clinging dresses and the men wore top hats and tails. They drank champagne and ate pistachio nuts while the masterful Ziegfeld ran his sparkling parade of beauties across the stage and into the crowd, including Sylvia Carmen and Her Balloon Girls, who sang “I Love to Be Loved” while they invited gentlemen to pop their balloons with lit cigars. The show, with admirable candor, was called Nothing but Girls; it featured songs like “My Tango Girl,” “My Spooky Girl,” and “My Midnight Girl,” as well as the wild gyrations of Mlle. Odette Myrtill, “Apache Violinist.” A glass ramp led up to a glass parapet lining three walls; sometimes the girls would march up the ramp, cast lines over the edge and go “fishing” for gentlemen; once they were on the parapet, their undergarments could be plainly seen from below. The sexiness, the frivolity, and above all the liberating sense of silliness that Ziegfeld had mined in the Follies reached its zenith in the midnight revels atop the New Amsterdam. Each table came equipped with wooden mallets, and patrons were encouraged to bang the mallets and rattle their silverware in a merry din; revelers could use telephones to call one another. The tables also included dolls and funny hats and other toys. It is safe to assume that many of the patrons got merrily plastered. Here was a setting in which not just conventional morality, but adulthood itself, had been temporarily suspended.

The Times Square of 1915 would have been practically unrecognizable to the denizen of 1905. The rules of self-restraint and delayed gratification—that is to say, the Protestant ethic—that had been drilled into generations of Americans had been lifted, if not quite obliterated. Barriers that had governed relations between men and women, the rich and their “inferiors,” high and low culture, tottered and often toppled. A new subculture of cosmopolites had appeared; Julian Street called them the Hectics. These were the terribly fashionable, giddy