The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square Read Online Free Page B

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