The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square

by James Traub

  Thus was born—or by some other means was born—the cabaret. Soon almost all the great restaurants of Broadway had cleared out space for performances. The Folies Bergère opened its doors in 1911 as New York’s first full-time cabaret, a theater with strolling orchestra, circulating waiters, a balcony promenade, and a series of shows mounted on a stage. But the Folies didn’t last out the year, for the whole power of cabaret lay in its intimacy. Keller’s innovation, if it was his, of stationing the performer among the diners was essential, because in erasing the footlights that had traditionally separated entertainer from audience it engaged the fantasy that the diner was part of the intoxicating and risqué world of the entertainers. The most desirable tables were right on the edge of the cabaret floor, where you could see and touch and talk to the performers. The cultural historian Lewis A. Erenberg has described the sense of liberation brought on by the “action environment” of the cabaret and the café: “Seated among the fast crowd, women of the town, ethnic entertainers, and guests from out of town, respectable urbanites were open to the flux of public life that the city offered. . . . Instead of letting gentility define the limits of their public lives, respectable urbanites were realizing they could enter a wider world of spontaneous cosmopolitan gaiety and experience ‘the whirl of life’ itself.”

  A passage in Rupert Hughes’s 1914 novel What Will People Say? summarizes the astounding velocity with which the habits and mores of Broadway changed in the years after 1909 or so. A party has gone to the upstairs room of the fictitious Café de Ninive, and a middle-aged woman reminisce about very recent history:

  A few winters ago we thought it was amusing to go to supper at a good restaurant after the theater, have something nice to eat and drink, talk a while, and go home to bed. We thought we were very devilish, and the preachers railed at the wickedness of late-supper orgies. . . . Then somebody started the cabarets. And we flocked to that. We ate the filthiest stuff and drank the rottenest wine and didn’t care so long as they had some sensational singer or dancer cavorting in the aisle. . . . But it has become so tame and stupid that it is quite respectable. At present we are dancing in the aisles ourselves, crowding the professional entertainers off their own floors. And now the preachers and editors are attacking this. Whatever we do is wrong so, as my youngest boy says, “What’s the use, and what’s the diff?”

  The really shocking thing about this passage is that a woman of mature years is adopting both the slang and the morals of her youngest son; it indicates how drastically the revolution in entertainment upended settled forms of behavior. It all began with cabaret, which mixed respectable urbanites with the fast crowd of Broadway, leaving respectability much the worse for wear. Cabaret was still a passive experience, like theatergoing. But almost immediately, restaurants and what were known as cafécabarets began encouraging diners to get up off their seats and get onto the floor. And this proved an even more dizzying sensation than the cabaret itself. Dancing in couples was still a new and quite daring phenomenon; nineteenth-century American dances such as the Virginia reel had been performed by groups, in a ballroom. Yet the dance craze spread so rapidly that early in 1911 Irving Berlin wrote “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” a celebration of dance fever. (“Everybody’s Overdoing It,” the columnist Franklin P. Adams groaned.)

  Berlin was a principal agent of this dismantling of Victorian mores along Broadway, and far beyond. Only a few years earlier he had been an urchin belting out tunes in Tony Pastor’s, but in that extraordinary year of 1911, when he was all of twenty-three, Berlin wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a song that, like “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” was both about a craze— for ragtime—and the most vivid popular expression yet of that craze. “Alexander” was the most popular song ever written to that time, selling a million copies of sheet music in a few months. The song had a thrilling urgency to which everyone seemed to respond. Berlin himself wrote, “Its opening words, emphasized by immediate repetition—‘Come on and hear! Come on and hear!’—were an invitation to ‘come,’ to join in, and ‘hear’ the singer and his song.” That invitation, Berlin said, became part of the song’s “happy ruction.” The wild public reaction to “Alexander” changed the musical world, for the tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley gave up their sentimental ballads and dialect songs for the more modern, urban, and black sound of ragtime. The music scholar Philip Furia goes so far as to say that “Alexander” “crystallized a crucial cultural moment as well, one when people fully realized that they were living in a truly modern age.”

  The overnight success of “Alexander,” “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” and other ragtime tunes created an insatiable demand for danceable music; and the dance craze changed Times Square from one moment to the next. The essayist and flaneur Julian Street wrote Welcome to Our City, a gimlet-eyed delineation of Broadway, in 1912; the following year he was forced to add a preface to a new edition because he had failed to take account of dancing. Broadway, he wrote ruefully, “changes faster than the main street of a mining town.” By 1913, virtually every big restaurant in Times Square offered dance lessons, afternoon thés dansants, and revolving dance floors; or elaborate cabaret performances; or both. Indeed, Claridge’s, the fine restaurant of an elegant hotel, made a lonely plea for the remaining sedentary diners: “We prefer to believe that there are some people in this city who would rather dine in silence and dine well than dine to music and go hungry.” But probably there weren’t many. When Harvey Forbes, the southern military officer who is the hero of What Will People Say?, comes to New York and takes a room in a 42nd Street hotel— this is also in 1913—he falls in with a crowd of well-bred fun-lovers who invite him to go “turkey-trotting.” Forbes gasps with shock. “Do nice people—” The beautiful young socialite Persis Cabot cuts him off to say, “We’re not nice people, but we do.” And another friend adds, “That’s all we do.”

  Persis and her crowd were nice people, but nice people wanted to be naughty. The dance craze always involved a balance, which teetered first one way and then the other, between the idea of erotic abandon and the idea of aristocratic restraint. The first dance celebrities were Vernon and Irene Castle, who had made a career teaching social dancing to the children of Fifth Avenue until the all-important year of 1913, when they opened up Sans Souci at 42nd and Broadway. The Castles were impeccable in matters of dress and deportment, and their aristocratic style had the effect of shielding dance from its lower-class associations and its black and Latin origins. Indeed, Irene’s way of talking about freshly arrived dances gave the impression that she and her husband operated a laboratory for the neutralization of virulent dance germs. “We get our dances from the Barbary Coast,” Irene once explained, using a euphemism for the black world. “Of course, they reach New York in a very primitive condition, and have to be considerably toned down before they can be used in the drawing room.” A particularly low item called “Shaking the Shimmy” had “just arrived,” and Irene said that “the teachers may try and make something of it.”

  The social hierarchy remained perfectly undisturbed in the mansions and the clubrooms of Fifth Avenue, but the Corybantes scrambled whatever was left of the old order in Broadway. As Julian Street wrote, “Practically any well-dressed person who is reasonably sober and will purchase supper and champagne for two may enter” a restaurant that offered dancing. “This creates a social mixture such as was never dreamed-of in this country—a hodge-podge of people in which respectable young married and unmarried women, and even debutantes, dance, not only under the same roof, but in the same room with women of the town.” They might, in fact, dance with each other. Restaurants and cabarets provided men, typically of dubious background, as partners and dance instructors for the unescorted women who appeared at the afternoon thés dansants. This practice provoked scandalous rumors and much public debate; even Variety, the unofficial trade publication of Times Square, warned about the dangers of “tango pirates.”

  And no amount of Castling could disguise the erotic abandon e
ncouraged—almost compelled—by dance. Even the names of the dances implied a new openness toward the body and toward touch: the turkey trot, the black bottom, the bunny hug, the tango. These steps typically required the partners to lock in a tight embrace and to fling themselves around the floor in wild gyrations. In “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” a “ragtime couple” “throw their shoulders in the air,” “snap their fingers,” and shout, “It’s a bear, it’s a bear, it’s a bear.” Julian Street described a performance by Maurice (“the French pronunciation, please!”), the dance master at the rooftop cabaret of Louis Martin’s, a traditional lobster palace: “Suddenly, the man flings the girl away from him violently, as a boy throws a top. Holding to his hand, she spins until their arms are outstretched. Then with a jerk, he draws her back again, revolving, to his arms.” Faster and faster they go, until the climax: “With a leap, she alights astride her partner’s hips and, fastened to his waist with the hooks of her bent knees, swings outward and away from his whirling body like a floating sash.”

  One can judge the impact these dances had on received moral principles from the reaction of the courtly Lieutenant Forbes in What Will People Say? Early 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 young men and women who raced from restaurant to theater to cabaret to roof garden. “He has a golden cigarette case,” Street writes acidly, “she a gold-mesh bag; receptacles in which, it is believed, they carry their ideals.”

  If one looks back even further, to the Broadway of 1895, the difference is even more drastic. “Broadway” barely appears in the upper-crust literature of the 1890s; in novels like Brander Matthews’s His Father’s Son, mentioned earlier, the reader has, in fact, almost no sense of street life, of crowds, of a “public,” for the action is largely confined to parlors. But Broadway is a topic of never-ending fascination for the New York writers of twenty years later—for Julian Street, for Rupert Hughes, and for George Bronson-Howard, the author of Birds of Prey: Being Pages from the Book of Broadway. For these writers, Broadway is life itself—the speed, the lingo, the cynicism, the brittleness, the desperation. Bronson-Howard, for example, writes story after story about the relationship of mutual exploitation between chorus girls and the men who pursue them. The only moralists on Broadway—the only people who think like the characters in a Brander Matthews novel—are fools. It’s a cold, glittering, gorgeous world. “Remember,” Julian Street writes, “New York is the national parlour for the painless extraction of ideals; get a new set made of gold.”

  4.

  SKY SIGNS

  IN THE CLIMACTIC SCENE of Sister Carrie, Hurstwood, Carrie’s luckless consort, having spiraled downward into beggary and despair, trudges south on Broadway to 42nd Street and sees the “fire signs” blazing in the snow. This is Dreiser’s portentous term for the electric signs that announced restaurants and theaters up and down Broadway, a technology too new to have a proper name. Hurstwood pauses before a restaurant— Shanley’s, perhaps, or the Café de l’Opera—and there, too, a “fire sign” illuminates the giddy whirl of merrymakers. The snow in front of the Casino, where Carrie is starring, and which in fact had the biggest and shiniest electric sign of all the Broadway theaters, is also “bright with the radiated fire.” Here is something new in the world, a glowing, glittering kind of speech that attracts nighttime revelers with a promise of excitement and warmth (and repels the likes of Hurstwood, who proceeds to trek through the darkness to a flophouse, and to suicide). The lighted sign, which came into being just as Times Square did, was quickly established as its visual signature and the symbol to the entire world of its dazzling nightlife.

  At the time Dreiser was writing, in the last years of the nineteenth century, electric lighting was only twenty years old; Edison had perfected the incandescent lightbulb in 1879. The ability to turn night into day seemed miraculous. The world’s fairs that were in such vogue in the last decades of the century were essentially festivals of light, with an Electric Building, or Electric Tower, their featured attraction. At many of the fairs, an anthropological exhibit designed to feature the evolution of the arts and sciences ended with a dazzling display of light. Electric light was not the home convenience we think of it as today, but rather a spectacle, used to illuminate streets, restaurants, theaters, and fairgrounds, and to draw
country folk into the city.

  Electric streetlights began to line Broadway almost as soon as they became commercially available, in the early 1880s; they reached 42nd Street in 1895. Theaters had long used gas lamps to light their marquees; now they began to switch to electricity. Advertisers at first continued to favor billboards, which were plastered over every available space on major thoroughfares and often stacked one atop another. And so the first electric signs were essentially billboards made of light. In 1892, the president of the Long Island Rail Road hired the Edison General Electric Company to erect an electric sign at the wedge-shaped corner of 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue beguiling passersby to “BUY HOMES ON LONG ISLAND SWEPT BY OCEAN BREEZES.” The sign, located at what was then the absolute center of New York, was a sensation—a brilliant, almost three-dimensional ad leaping out from the drab two-dimensional signs around it. The food magnate H. J. Heinz often looked out over the sign from his Madison Square hotel; in 1898, Heinz took over the space and hired New York’s leading bill-poster, O. J. Gude, to make a new electric sign for Heinz. The sign featured a fifty-foot-long pickle in pickle-green lights against an orange and blue background, a giant white “57,” and the names of Heinz’s most popular products: Sweet Pickles, Tomato Ketchup, India Relish, Tomato Soup, and Peach Butter. Advertisers had learned how to incorporate flashers into signs, so the pickle, the numerals, and the product names flashed on and off in the night sky of Madison Square. A new medium, and a new maestro, were born.