The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (3 page)

For all his knockabout life, Pastor was a rough-hewn gentleman, gracious and accommodating as well as thoroughly good company, his assiduously maintained mustache always waxed to fine points. Pastor understood that so long as variety was presented in the riotous, blowsy atmosphere of the concert saloon it would remain a minor adjunct to male carousing. He recognized that decency could be good for business; his goal, as he put it in one of the innumerable interviews he later granted as the grand old man of Broadway, was “to make the variety show successful by dissociating it from the cigar-smoking and beer-drinking establishment.” Pastor opened a variety house of his own on the Bowery in 1865, and ten years later moved to the more respectable location of 585 Broadway, in what is now SoHo. There some of the great figures of the late-nineteenth-century stage, including Lillian Russell and May Irwin, made their debuts. At 585, drinking was permitted in an adjacent saloon, but not in the auditorium.

Pastor moved northward with the theater district, finally settling at 14th Street in 1881, just as the area was becoming New York’s entertainment capital. The location alone signified a new level of prestige for variety. Pastor charged as much as $1.50 for a reserved seat, then the priciest variety ticket in town, and he secured the best acts. The bill of fare for one typical evening included Ryan the Mad Musician, “who plays on the xylophone without looking at the instrument”; the Sisters Hedderwicke, “character duettists and dancers”; Clark and Williams in “a funny Negro sketch”; Martha Wren and Zella Marion in an Irish operetta called “Barney’s Courtship”; and Professor John White, “with his mule, monkey and dog.” Pastor himself often came out to sing one of his sentimental tunes, which almost invariably brought down the house. But the most distinctive feature of Pastor’s was that no liquor was served. Pastor encouraged a family atmosphere; as one wag said, it was the kind of variety “a child could take its parents to.” There was a Ladies’ and Children’s Matinee, where the management gave out bouquets and wax dolls; door prizes on other nights included barrels of flour and even dresses. And it worked: Pastor’s became both the most respectable and the most popular variety house in New York. Pastor had raised the variety show almost to the level of legitimate theater, as he himself was wont to say. As a singer he was a traditionalist, but as a promoter and entrepreneur Pastor was one of the creators of early-twentieth-century Broadway.

A combination of competition from “continuous houses,” in which patrons could come and go as they pleased in the course of an all-day show, and the further migration of the entertainment district, ultimately stranded Tony Pastor. By the mid-nineties, he was being consulted by newspaper reporters as a sage of Broadway, a graybeard who had graced the sideshow at Barnum’s as a lad. He was stout and lovable, a Broadway character with his collapsible opera hat and the diamond solitaire that glittered on his shirtfront. But Pastor’s remained an important stop on the vaudeville circuit. In 1905, a twelve-year-old Jewish ragamuffin named Izzy Baline got a job at Pastor’s as a “song-plugger,” a kind of itinerant marketer of new ballads. He sang “In the Sweet By and By” with the Three Keatons, the youngest of whom went on to become one of the greatest silent comedians. And Izzy Baline went on to become Irving Berlin.

BY THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the distinction between “legitimate theater” and popular entertainment, even the sort of relatively genteel popular entertainment that Tony Pastor offered, was growing sharper, a fact recognized in the city’s geography. Downtown, where the poor immigrants lived in their squalid warrens, you could see Yiddish or Italian or Chinese or Irish dialect theater. The Bowery was chockablock with vaudeville houses, and there were more around Union Square. The neighborhood known as the Tenderloin, in the West Twenties and Thirties, was the city’s most notorious den of vice: prostitutes openly strolled along Sixth Avenue, and both sides of 27th Street west of Sixth were lined with whorehouses, one side for white patrons and the other for black. The Tenderloin was home to many of the city’s biggest and most notorious concert saloons.

The legitimate theater increasingly clustered around Madison Square, the next in the nodal points created by Broadway. Occupying as it did the space between Madison Avenue, a rapidly developing upper-class district, and Fifth Avenue, which already enjoyed that status, Madison Square was a far grander and more glamorous setting than Union Square. It was here that the Gilded Age’s nouveaux riches went to preen their feathers in public. On weekend afternoons, society gathered among the flower beds and fountains in front of the great, pillared Fifth Avenue Hotel, at 23rd and Fifth. Madison Square was less a rialto than a
faubourg,
with the city’s finest jewelers, furriers, florists, and haberdashers. In 1876, Delmonico’s, the most famous restaurant in the country and perhaps the only one with a celebrity chef, the famous Charles Ranhofer, moved up from downtown to 26th Street, two blocks north of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Ward McAllister, Mrs. Astor’s social secretary, was a regular patron, as were many of the other members of the Four Hundred. In this refined and clublike setting, men of wealth and standing could gather with their own kind, and eat, drink, and spend with abandon.

Many of the new theaters that sprang up around Madison Square catered to this elite. At the socially exclusive Lyceum, the electric lights had been personally installed by Thomas Edison. The Madison Square Theatre, on Fifth Avenue, enjoyed an equal cachet; at a special benefit performance there in 1884, “pretty ladies of the most exclusive social circles of New York posed, elaborately garbed, in tableaux illustrative of Tennyson’s Dream of Fair Women.” The better theaters sometimes presented Shakespeare—though often in bowdlerized form—and one of the sensations of the age was the 1884 visit to Broadway by the company of London’s Lyceum Theatre, led by the great Ellen Terry, who showed Americans how to perform the classics. For the most part, “refined” drama meant translations of contemporary French and German farces. (The German variety was considered less indecent.) These were often presented as if they were original English-language plays. The most respected theatrical manager of the day, Augustin Daly, kept a steady stream of these productions going at his theater on Broadway and 30th. Most of them were, despite a surface air of sophistication, extremely creaky affairs. According to a plot summary of
The Undercurrent
of 1888, “the one-armed messenger (he is also one half-sister’s father) is tied to a railroad track by the villain (a wicked uncle), but the scheme is foiled by the heroine, the daughter, who luckily happens to be in a blacksmith’s shop nearby.”

The drama of the time was cartoonishly stylized, with a first old lady and a second old lady, a first comedian and a second comedian, a juvenile lead, and so forth. The gifts of the Gilded Age lay more in the direction of consumption than of production. And yet, for this very reason, Broadway became an increasingly delightful, pleasure-filled place. In 1883, the Casino Theatre opened at the corner of 39th and Broadway, at the time an extremely remote locale. The Casino was a giant piece of Moorish whimsy, with a great circular tower terminating in an onion-shaped dome; it was modeled on a Newport clubhouse designed by the famous architect Stanford White. The Casino was intended to be a sort of theatrical clubhouse, with all sorts of amenities provided for the wealthy patrons who would pay for membership. The theater had a street-level café and a gallery where theatergoers could enjoy refreshments while gazing down through big windows at the street. And on top of the Casino, gathered around the Moorish dome, was a facility unheard-of on Broadway— a roof garden.

The Casino was built by Rudolph Aronson, who, like Tony Pastor and many another Broadway impresario, began his career as a performer and left his mark as an entrepreneur. Aronson’s background was very different from Pastor’s. Born in 1856, Aronson was a classical pianist, composer, and conductor who traveled to Europe as a young man for further musical training. In Paris, he passed many a happy hour at the “concert gardens” that lined the Champs-Elysées. He dreamed of opening up just such a spot along Broadway, but was thwarted by the high price of land. Then he had a revelation, which he later recorded in his memoirs: “Why not utilize for garden purposes the roof of the building I hope to erect, and thus escape the enormous cost of valuable ground?” He even dreamed up the expression “roof garden.”

The Casino Roof Garden consisted of a circular open-air promenade trimmed in blue, white, and gold, like the theater itself. A tiled arcade, running from the tower to the corner of the building, allowed patrons to watch the pedestrians on Broadway’s blazing pavements. The roof garden featured a rustic theme, with embowered hideaways and shrubbery and plants scattered among the café tables; hidden gas jets cast a romantic glow over the scene, while the colored lights of the Casino lit up the street below. Patrons could listen to the orchestra up on a stage, or watch the performance downstairs through an opening in the theater roof. On opening night, July 8, 1883, the orchestra presented Johann Strauss’s operetta
The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief
while patrons enjoyed coffee, ice cream, and light beverages brought up from a restaurant downstairs. For New Yorkers accustomed to baking helplessly in the summer heat, it must have been a transporting experience. An obviously delighted critic for
The
New York World
wrote, “It is now possible to sit at a table and drink your beer or wine fanned by the night breeze and at the same time look down upon the performance of a comic opera or listen to the music of Mr. Aronson’s orchestra.”

Within a decade, the city was said to be “roof-garden daft,” with theaters up and down Broadway offering entertainment beneath the stars. And as the roof garden became more popular it became less elegant and constrained, more democratic and informal; both men and women wore shirtsleeves, and many of the customers were out-of-towners treating themselves to a night on Broadway. The entertainment became far more populist as well. The roof gardens began offering variety shows, specializing in “dumb acts” like jugglers, acrobats, and animal performers, acts that could be enjoyed perfectly well amidst the noise of drinking and talking. There was a rage for “skirt dancers,” women who wore calf-length skirts and long underskirts and struck balletic poses and made sweeping gestures which showed off their bodies. Aronson himself lost control of his theater in 1892 but hung on to the roof garden, making a success of a high-class Parisian-style “revue.” The following year he lost control of the roof garden as well, and spent much of the rest of his life traveling the world, hobnobbing with the great composers he so much admired. He himself left behind no music of any importance, but he had invented something more important in the history of Broadway: a new and charming way of experiencing life. The roof garden was a delightful setting that put people at their ease, and that helped define the dreamy pleasure-world of Broadway for the next thirty years.

By the later years of the century, the whole experience of being in Broadway was becoming more open and fluid—more modern. Broadway was lined with electric streetlights, and all night long patrons and theater people, clubmen and chorus girls and gawking tourists, strolled up and down. The stretch between Madison Square and 42nd Street had come to be known as the Upper Rialto, and, as the author of
The New Metropolis,
a portrait of the city published in 1899, notes, “The best and worst of it is to be met here—stars, supers, soubrettes, specialists and managers alike. . . . The life of the street is as active at midnight as at noon, for the theatres create a constant patronage for the restaurants, which are crowded up to the early hours of the morning.”

And Broadway was becoming sexy—not crude, like the Tenderloin, but racy and suggestive. Popular theater revolved increasingly around the charms of nubile young women. By the nineties, a vogue had set in for “light opera,” an early form of musical comedy with only the sketchiest plot fleshed out with comic bits and elaborately costumed chorus girls. Carrie Madenda, the heroine of
Sister Carrie,
Theodore Dreiser’s great, bleak novel of 1900, is an aspiring actress who begins her career in an unnamed production at the Casino, at that time the reigning temple of light opera. Carrie’s role is to march at the head of a column of twenty girls in the “ballet chorus,” wearing a white flannel outfit with sword dangling from a silver belt. When the run of Carrie’s show ends, she finds another job in the chorus line of
The Wives of Abdul
at the Broadway Theatre, where she is assigned to “a group of oriental beauties who, in the second act of the comic opera, were paraded by the vizier before the new potentate as the treasures of his harem.”

Indeed, in 1900, just when Dreiser’s novel appeared, the Casino played host to a drama of giddiness and gratification that defined the culture of Broadway at the turn of the century. In keeping with its usual fare, the Casino offered a frivolous concoction called
Floradora,
a tale about a beautiful heiress cheated out of her inheritance. The play received poor notices, insofar as it was noticed. In one scene, however, six chorus girls, who had plainly been chosen for their beauty rather than their talent, paraded around the stage carrying parasols while their male partners did most of the dancing. A group of Yale men began coming to the theater in order to give the girls a standing ovation. Soon a cult developed over the “Floradora Sextette.” Diamond Jim Brady and Stanford White, boon companions and two of the leading celebrities of Broadway, ordered standing tickets for the show; within days, every playboy and clubman in town was gathering to worship before the altar of pulchritude. Broadway had never seen such a craze before. The Floradora Girls were inundated with flowers, gifts, and expensive dinners; each of them ultimately married a millionaire, the most famous match being that of Evelyn Nesbit to Harry K. Thaw. Six years later, Thaw murdered the man he believed was carrying on an affair with his wife: the casino’s architect, Stanford White. The Floradora Girls were the first chorines to go platinum, as it were. And yet these incarnations of the Platonic ideal of female beauty averaged five feet four inches in height, and 130 pounds. The Broadway ideal of female beauty was still evolving.