The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub Read Free Book Online Page A

arrested for indecency.
    The Victoria was scarcely Times Square’s only great experiment in popular culture; the Hippodrome, on Sixth Avenue at 44th, offered fantastic extravaganzas to six thousand spectators at a time. But the Victoria, located literally on top of the Times Square subway, offered entertainment that even an unlettered immigrant could enjoy—and it was identifiably American, unlike the Yiddish or Chinese or German theater downtown. You could teach yourself English at the Victoria, and you could keep up with the news of the day. Willie never lost contact with his audience. Joe Laurie, Jr., says that in its seventeen years of operation the Victoria grossed $20 million, of which $5 million was profit.
    Almost directly across the street from the most tumbledown and loutish theater in Times Square lay the most beautiful and refined theater in Times Square—indeed, in the country. The New Amsterdam, designed by two gifted young architects, Henry B. Herts and Hugh Tallant, and completed in 1903, was the first example in the United States of art nouveau design, from the horticulturally accurate roses carved into the woodwork to the Shakespearean figures peering from jade-colored terracotta balustrades to the great mural over the proscenium illustrating the progress of the arts. The sinuous line and stripped-down ornamentation of art nouveau was the very look of modernity for the forward-thinking aesthetes of the early years of the century, and the New Amsterdam was considered a building of the first importance—a building that might well “mark an epoch in the history of art,” as one penetrating if breathless account put it. This was also, of course, an era of opulence and show, and the New Amsterdam was intended to dazzle even the most blasé theatergoer. The gentlemen’s retiring room featured a “fireplace of Caen stone, floor of Welsh quarry tiling, wainscot of nut-brown English oak,” while that of the ladies was rendered “in tones of the tea rose, with decorations and carvings of conventionalized roses with leaves and stems entwined.”
    Opening night was a magnificent affair, with carriages disgorging a steady stream of men in top hats and tails and women in furs and long gowns. The New Amsterdam’s owners, Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger, two of the most powerful men on Broadway, had chosen to open with
A Midsummer Night’s Dream—
an apt choice, for the architects had said that they intended to evoke that play’s sense of magic. And indeed, one critic who attended the opening described the theater as “the most airy, fairy beautiful thing in the way of a playhouse that the New York public has ever seen.” The play, on the other hand, received fairly poor reviews, and gave way after three weeks to
Mother Goose,
a Christmas pantomime. Soon the New Amsterdam was showing dopey musicals like
Miss Dolly Dollars.
In fact, nothing produced at the New Amsterdam during the first decade of its existence demonstrated anything like the creativity and daring of the building itself. Franz Lehár’s
The Merry Widow
was a huge hit in 1907–1908, and set off a waltz craze that lasted for several years; but their other big successes were mostly harmless froth.
    By 1910, the passion for playgoing had reached such a pitch that forty first-class theaters were operating in and around Times Square; and yet few, if any, of them showed more distinguished fare than the New Amsterdam. A combination of stifling Victorian respectability and the absence of a sophisticated urban culture ensured an endless tide of mediocrity. Though figures like Dreiser and Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Stephen Crane were forging a new kind of American literature at the time, Broadway showed no interest in their work. The art of playwriting, and for that matter the etiquette of theatergoing, remained stuck in the high artifice of the Gay Nineties. Audiences hissed the villain and shouted warnings to the endangered hero. Though Klaw