by Sam Roberts
Gustave oversaw out-of-town productions and focused on other minstrel groups. Daniel and Charles were the impresarios of the Frohman family. Asked once to define the characteristics of a leading actor, Charles replied: “If in casting a play you find an actor who looks the part you have in mind for him, be thankful; if you can find an actor who acts the part, be very thankful; and if you can find an actor who can look and act the part, get down on your knees and thank God!” Charles managed the Lyceum. Daniel managed the tiny Madison Square theater and later succeeded his brother at the Lyceum. Despite, or because, of Daniel Frohman’s refusal to profit from vaudeville or films rather than devoting the theater solely to legitimate stage plays, the Lyceum barely survived the Depression. In 1939, when it was threatened with demolition, a rescue party that included the playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart and the producers Max Gordon, Marcus Hyman, and Sam Harris not only spared it, but kept it on life support long enough to book Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday, starring Judy Holliday and Paul Douglas, which opened in 1946 and ran 1,642 performances, the house record. The new owners also arranged for Daniel Frohman to remain in his penthouse apartment at the Lyceum for one dollar a year in perpetuity (which, as donors of big gifts in return for naming opportunities often discover, is a subjective term).
“It was probably the first penthouse to be built in town, for through the French doors one may walk out onto the roof,” Frohman recalled in his autobiography. “I was years ahead of my time and now time has caught up with me. Sometimes I think that all I have to live for is that which is past.” One year after his friends rescued the Lyceum and Frohman’s studio sanctuary, he died, in 1940 (so much for perpetuity). The Lyceum was sold to the Shubert Organization in 1950 and later became the home of the APA-Phoenix Repertory Company and Tony Randall’s National Actors’ Theater. Harvey Fierstein’s Safe Sex opened there in 1987 I Am My Own Wife, which ran for 360 performances there and win the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award in 2004.
While Charles never wrote a script and appeared in a play only once, he produced more than seven hundred shows, including Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up with Maude Adams, and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Charles was also a founder in 1896 of the Theatrical Syndicate, which monopolized the industry for two decades until the Shubert brothers swooped in to challenge its control. For nearly fifteen years, he also managed the Lyceum, owned 60 percent of it (David Belasco owned the rest), and scouted the United States, Britain, and the Continent for new productions. In 1915, despite the war raging in Europe, Charles reserved passage to Europe on a ritual voyage, coveting talent, plots, productions, and inspiration. He had already booked what would be his last play at the Lyceum, The Heart of Wetona (a melodrama about the aggrieved daughter of an Indian chief and a white mother; Norma Talmadge starred in the silent movie version). On April 22, the imperial German embassy in Washington placed warning advertisements in fifty American newspapers that British vessels traveling in international waters would be liable to attack. Frohman’s colleagues had specifically cautioned him, but, unfazed as usual, he disregarded their advice. On May 1, Frohman embarked on the RMS Lusitania. Five days later, the unarmed ship (which was, despite denials, carrying munitions) was sunk by a German U-boat eleven miles off the Irish coast. Frohman drowned, one of 128 American citizens among the 1,198 passengers and crew who lost their lives. His famous last words, before a wave swept him off a lifeboat, a fellow passenger reported, were uttered with a smile. “Why fear death?” C. F. said. “Death is only a beautiful adventure.” He had brought along a manuscript of a new French play to read on the voyage. It was titled La Belle Aventure.
The Lyceum Theater remains the oldest commercial playhouse in New York City still serving the legitimate stage. (George Samoladas)
17
SIXTY-NINTH REGIMENT ARMORY
The Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory’s defiance of the fortresslike architecture of the city’s other armories was a harbinger of the avant-garde art that would be displayed inside. (1913)
A decade before what would be placed inside the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory shifted the direction of art in America and established New York as its cultural capital, the exterior of the massive drill hall was breaking new architectural ground. The immense rectangular-shaped redoubt that conceived to fill an overlooked gap in Lower Manhattan’s defense was “not of the castellated style consecrated to armories,” the New York Times wrote. In contrast to its predecessors, which were modeled on medieval fortresses, the armory at 68 Lexington Avenue between East Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Streets, in what was known as Rose Hill, was designed as a Beaux-Arts-style bastion.
Arguably, the several-century leap from the Middle Ages heralded other profound metamorphoses: of a battle-scarred Civil War–era infantry regiment schooled in hand-to-hand combat into a mechanized fighting machine that would make the world safe for democracy and cement America’s supremacy; of a city where the Woolworth Building would soon become the world’s tallest and where Grand Central Terminal, a transformative transportation hub, would help establish New York as a global capital; and of armories themselves, from protective military enclosures to sites of public pageants where a surging superpower could also flaunt its growing influence in automobile and aircraft manufacturing, fashion, and even modern art.
The Sixty-Ninth Regiment was formed at least as far back as 1851 (although it can trace its roots to the American Revolution), mostly by Irish immigrants (as opposed to Manhattan’s Seventh Regiment, whose blueblood ranks earned it the “Silk Stocking” sobriquet). The Irish Brigade was dubbed the “Fighting Sixty-Ninth,” supposedly by Robert E. Lee during the Civil War. Joyce Kilmer immortalized its nickname, the “Fighting Irish,” in his World War I poem “When the Sixty-Ninth Comes Back.” (“God rest our valiant leaders dead, whom we cannot forget; / They’ll see the Fighting Irish are the Fighting Irish yet. / While Ryan, Roe, and Corcoran on History’s pages shine, / A wreath of laurel and shamrock waits the head of Colonel Hine.”) The Sixty-Ninth occupied quarters above the Essex Street Market until the early 1880s, then moved to the Tompkins Market Armory on Third Avenue before billeting temporarily in the armory at Seventh Street and Third Avenue, which became available when the Seventh Regiment moved uptown to Park Avenue in 1880. A decade later, with all the city’s residential military headquarters anchored north of Fifty-Ninth Street, the city’s Committee on Sites of the Armory Board warned, the Times reported, that “in case of trouble necessitating the use of troops down town much valuable time would, in the opinion of the committee, be lost in moving them.”
The pitfalls that city officials encountered in finding a suitable site and in finally getting from the drawing board to a groundbreaking foreshadowed a century of not-in-my-backyard controversies over public and private development. The first hurdle was that the Armory Board, in providing for the battle-primed soldiers and the war-weary veterans, had been overly generous or underestimated the cost of the amenities, or both. The lowest bid submitted by contractors to build what the architects Horgan & Slattery had proposed was $666,394, or $200,000 more than the board had budgeted. Horgan & Slattery was fired (the firm sued, of course). The board agreed to increase the building budget by $100,000 and commissioned Richard and Joseph Hunt, whose father, Richard Morris Hunt, designed the Statue of Liberty pedestal and the entrance facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hunt & Hunt’s design was also over budget—projected to cost about $600,000—but it was considered breathtaking. The Lexington Avenue facade of their three-story 177,438-square-foot brick behemoth was punctuated with gun bays, stone panels commemorating the Sixty-Ninth’s battlegrounds, and a recessed, arched entrance capped by a sculpted eagle keystone. A glass and steel roof arched 126 feet above the 212-by-168-foot drill hall. The design provided space for rifle ranges, band practice, a quartermaster, and bowling alleys.
The Armory Board selected a 1.45-acre parcel that was occupied mostly by boardinghouses, but finding comparable
apartments for displaced tenants proved to be problematic. “In many cases persons were too ill to be removed, and, in one instance, a death resulted from catching cold while looking for another apartment,” the Times reported. “Some of the persons who endeavored to secure new apartments were told they would have to get references, but they were unable to do so, as for the last six months the rents have been paid to the city.” Still, compared with conditions today, the relocation process was swift. Tenants were startled to learn on January 16, 1904, that they would have to leave just a month later. Despite the problems of displacement, the cornerstone was laid on April 23 in a ceremony festooned with American and Irish flags. Joseph I. C. Clarke composed a poem that concluded: “Then here let the deathless Celtic race, / In rank and file, take their fathers’ place. / And prouder their spirit, since longer here / They’ve drunk the strong air from Freedom’s hills; / And stouter their hears that their blood runs clear, / From the fount that Freedom’s bosom fills. / And their souls on stronger wings shall soar, / And glory shall wait by the open door.”
The armory, which took more than two years to complete, was dedicated with befitting fanfare and huzzahs from the hundreds of well-wishers from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, and even the rival Seventh Regiment, which graciously marched behind the Sixty-Ninth as it arrived at its new headquarters and its band played “Home, Sweet Home.” When the marchers reached the armory, they were joined by Brigadier General Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father’s ninety-one-year-old grandson, who had served in the war with Mexico and the Civil War. The Sixty-Ninth would again distinguish itself in combat overseas, but troops would never be mustered at the Lexington Avenue armory. Like all the rest in the city (except during the 1863 Draft Riots), it wasn’t needed to defend New York against an enemy, foreign or domestic.
Instead, the armory became a Manhattan multipurpose room. Promoters staged events there, ranging from roller derbies to Knicks basketball games (the cavernous drill hall, the city’s largest at the time, could accommodate nearly eight regulation NBA courts). After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, it became a central place for families, friends, and colleagues to register information on the missing and to receive counseling. As early as 1911, on Christmas Eve, the philanthropist Frederick Townsend Martin; Chauncey Depew, former United States senator and president of the New York Central Railroad; and Depew’s wife, Mary, were among the prominent New Yorkers who distributed baskets of food and gifts at the armory to the poor (homeless New Yorkers were sheltered there during the Depression and again early in the twenty-first century). By the end of the decade, the Aeronautical Exposition of the Manufacturers’ Aircraft Association alighted, trumpeting the success of planes as “liberty’s surest weapon of defense” (as a headline in the New York Tribune described them). In 1918, the annual Automobile Show encamped there, exhibiting brands ranging from the dependable Nash to models of the all-steel Hupmobile, which, despite their reputations for craftsmanship, proved to be less durable than the paintings and sculpture that, in 1913, even more than the armory’s architecture, made the building synonymous with modern art.
At eight P.M. on February 17, 1913, the first of about four thousand guests began arriving through the mawlike brick arch on Lexington Avenue to judge for themselves whether what was already being billed as an act of cultural sabotage would, indeed, shake America from its parochial Rip Van Winkleian reverie. They made their way into the drill hall, which was divided by ten-foot-high partitions into eighteen octagonal galleries. Nobody, including the editors of the catalog for what was official called the International Exhibition of Modern Art, seemed to know for certain, but it was estimated that roughly thirteen hundred works by three hundred artists, two-thirds of them American, were displayed on the twenty-four hundred linear feet of gray burlap wall space. Shortly after ten P.M., Arthur B. Davies, the president of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, a rogue group of about two dozen young artists, introduced the art patron John Quinn. He declared that the works New Yorkers were about to witness would “be epoch-making in the history of American art.” A trumpet fanfare sounded, and what would forever be remembered as the Armory Show officially opened.
New York was exploding with contradictions in the second decade of the twentieth century. The Gilded Age was over. Teddy Roosevelt was busting trusts. Progressives were demanding safeguards for factory workers. Women wanted the right to vote and were poised to win it. Europe was on the brink of a devastating war that would transform the Old World into debtors and the United States, for the first time, into a creditor nation that had come to the rescue of its allies. Ragtime was reverberating, its syncopated beat giving voice to subversive social rhythms. In the world of art, until the Armory Show, modern paintings and sculpture had not been widely disseminated. If they had been seen at all, it was largely secondhand, in formats that sapped their potency to stupefy. Color photography was rare. Newspaper reproduction was poor. Until then, art in America had been dominated by the National Academy of Design. “The Armory Show demolished the power of the Academy,” Elizabeth Lunday wrote in Modern Art Invasion: Picasso, Duchamp, and the 1913 Armory Show That Scandalized America (2013). “The stage was set for New York to rise—relatively quickly—from provincial backwater to capital of the art world.”
Many critics savaged the show; works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso, and Van Gogh became causes célèbres. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase scandalized many spectators, but the writer of a “Topics of the Times” editorial essay was relatively unfazed. “The canvas is one which could be hung up in a Methodist Sunday school, and if it did any harm there it would be to the minds of the pupils, not their morals,” according to the writer. “What the Post-Impressionist eye sees in it, if anything, is not for the uninitiate to repeat. To others it looks like almost anything except a nude descending a staircase, and most—though not much—like an explosion in a shingle mill.” The painter Bolton Brown sniffed that “savages and children practice this art sincerely, and get over it as fast as they can.” His fellow artist Kenyon Cox said that “expression, no matter whether the medium be a painting, a sculpture, a novel or a poem, must either be in a language that has been learned, or it is a pure assumption on the artist’s part that he has expressed anything at all.” Cox added: “With Matisse, with the later work of Rodin, and above all, with the Cubists and the Futurists, it is no longer a matter of sincere fanaticism. These men have seized upon the modern engine of publicity and are making insanity pay.”
By the time it closed, on March 15, the show had delighted, mystified, stunned, intrigued, or reviled more than eighty-seven thousand visitors. Virtually no one had left unmoved. By one measure the profit on eighty-two thousand dollars in sales was an estimated $4,000, which was less than hoped for, but better than a loss for the group of young organizers who had depended largely on charitable gifts to raise the upfront costs, including about $140,000 in today’s dollars to rent and maintain the armory. The show had been designed to shock. It succeeded. “The link between insurgency and notoriety was not lost on the organizers,” Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney, wrote in a companion book to a centennial retrospective at the New-York Historical Society, “who adopted as the show’s motto ‘The New Spirit’ and, as its emblem, the Pine Tree flag flown during the American Revolution.” The Armory Show triggered “a reordering of the rules of art-making—it’s as big as we’ve seen since the Renaissance,” said Leah Dickerman, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. “And I don’t think we’ve seen as great a transformation in the 100 years that follow—where the foundations of how art is conceived are totally shaken.”
When Duchamp was interviewed decades later, he suggested that television, mass circulation publications, and airplane travel have made latter-day audiences worldlier and, therefore, less likely to be jarred by unconventional artists. “There’s a public to receive it today that did not exist then. Cubism was sort of forced upon
the public to reject it,” Duchamp said. “Today, any new movement is almost accepted before it started. See, there’s no more element of shock anymore.” Still, the introduction to the Armory Show catalog a century ago declares a truth that has remained a constant in a world where the pace of change has accelerated exponentially. “To be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar, is to be afraid of life,” the catalog preface said. “And to be afraid of life is to be afraid of truth.”
Like New York’s other armories, the Sixty-Ninth Regiment was never crucial to the city’s defense, but the vast drill hall got plenty of use nonetheless. (George Samoladas)
18
THE AMERICAN BANK NOTE PLANT
The South Bronx was largely undeveloped until the early twentieth century, when a subway delivered workers and residents who lived near new factories like the American Bank Note Plant. (Irving Underhill Collection/Museum of the City of New York, 1911)
Morrisania, in the South Bronx, named for the family that included a signer of the Declaration of Independence (Lewis Morris) and an author of the Constitution (Gouverneur Morris), was annexed by Manhattan as far back as 1874. But fully three decades later, barely a single street on the Hunts Point peninsula, part of the Morrises’ former two-thousand-acre estate, had been graded, much less paved. Many, if they existed at all, appeared only on maps. Hunts Point Avenue, the major north-south thoroughfare, had never grown beyond a forty-foot-wide lane.