More on Albertina Rasch

Happy Women’s History Month! We’re almost to the end of it, but I wanted to be sure and sneak in one new post because I’ve been reading and thinking so much about the most important choreographer to come out of the New York Hippodrome, Albertina Rasch (1896-1967). There are three beats in her story that I want to make sure I cover in the bigger picture of the book.

1) When she’s the prima ballerina of the Hippodrome ballet corps from 1909-1911

2) When she comes back to the Hippodrome in the mid-1920s as the Hippodrome house choreographer

3) After she goes to Hollywood and does dance direction for the first wave of movie musicals, when she comes back and does some really influential Broadway choreography that is (I think) inspired by her work at the Hippodrome

Albertina Rasch in her second season at the Hippodrome playing Ioneta, daughter of Chief Keneu “The War Eagle” in The Ballet of Niagara. Image from https://dimitritiomkin.com/biography/albertina-rasch/

Rasch emigrated from Vienna to New York City for the Hippodrome’s 1909 season, where she danced in the Ballet of the Jewels. In the following season, she played the chief’s daughter in the Ballet of Niagara. Rasch was Austrian and Jewish, obviously not native American. But this was an era when women dancing on the American popular stage often explored “exotic” roles — Ruth St. Denis doing Indian and Southeast Asian dances, the “Salome” craze in vaudeville — so her role falls right in line with the popular movements.

The 1911 season was a house-cleaning one at the Hippodrome: R.H. Burnside had quit, and Arthur Voegtlin could now direct the shows instead of just coming up with the special effects. Rasch moved on to dance in vaudeville and classical concerts. She married and divorced after two years. She declared bankruptcy. She went to Paris. Eventually, she returned to New York and opened a dance studio.

women dancers in white dresses and blonde wigs pose on stage, arranged on a set of steps and gesturing toward one dance at the top of the riser

Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. "A moment from the Rhapsody in Blue ballet, created and staged by Madame Rasch for a company of her girls, who performed it in the Keith theaters" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1929-02. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b39b9ea7-6924-3293-e040-e00a18064a68

Rasch was following an established business model in Broadway of the 1920s: found a school training people to dance in Broadway choruses, then send them out under your name. Gertrude Hoffmann, the subject of my last book, did the same thing. So did Ned Rayburn, Chester Hale, later June Taylor. I’m not sure if Rasch worked directly with the Hippodrome during the time when it was under Keith-Albee ownership or if they just danced there as one stop on the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit. The performance they did during this time that most intrigues me was a ballet interpretation of Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin wrote that piece in 1924; by 1926, Rasch choreographed a dance interpretation of the composition which premiered at the Hippodrome in 1926. The piano parts were performed by her second husband, Russian pianist Dmitri Tiomkin. They toured vaudeville and then moved to L.A. so they could both work in movies.

Their timing wasn’t the greatest: Rasch and Timkin arrived in Hollywood in early August 1929. The Broadway Melody had opened in February, and everyone was sure that musical films were going to be a huge trend. Rasch worked on scenes for a couple of dances, with the assumption that they could be interpolated into different films. Then the stock market crashed. By June of 1930, she took a buyout on her contract with MGM and went back to New York City.

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Albertina Rasch Dancers featured in The Band Wagon" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1931. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dc-3883-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

This move was a good choice. She worked on The Band Wagon, a musical revue that seems to have completely re-imagined what a musical show should do. Instead of retreading old territory in the comic scenes, they did modern and even boundary-pushing gags like a woman in a showroom full of — gasp — bathroom fixtures. There was some light and youthful dancing and singing by Fred Astaire and his sister Adele, which must have felt light-years away from the try-hard mugging of someone like Al Jolson (who had been on Broadway earlier that year in The Wonder Bar). But most relevant to my concerns, the dancing was spectacular. The picture above is from a number called “Dancing in the Dark.” There’s a description in “Albertina Rasch: The Broadway Career,” a Dance Chronicle article by Frank W. D. Ries that is so evocative that it’s worth quoting in full:

“The song began as a solo by tenor John Barker, his face caught by a bright pin spot. As the light expanded, the revolving stage turned slowly under a play of colored lights. Barker finished his solo as he revolved offstage, and the melody was picked up by an offstage chorus. Meanwhile, the stage setting was transformed into a slanted mirror surface with Albertina Rasch’s dancers posed on it in long black and silver dresses of bias-cut lame designed by Constance Ripley and Kivette. The dance had an almost hypnotic effect as the chorus swayed and glided in the long dresses, forming themselves into sculptured poses that they extended into arching backbends. Tilly Losch then appeared on high, moving down from stage center on a series of slanted platforms until she reached stage level. She wore a draped gold dress of sparkling lame and a spiked headdress of modernistic design, all of which was reflected a series of mirror panels. Although she was in a floor-length gown, she danced on pointe so that she could create the illusion of gliding as she traveled across the stage. The dress, which included a train, limited her movements but created some striking effects that were further enhanced by thrusting-upward arm movements in a very restricted use of space.”
— Frank W. D. Ries “Albertina Rasch: The Broadway Career.” Dance Chronicle, vol. 6, no. 2, 1983, pp. 95–137. 115-116.

Doesn’t that sound amazing?! It’s so rare that I see a still photo from a dance performance and read a description of it that really helps me to mentally animate that frozen frame. Gosh I love it. So the reason I want to go beyond Rasch’s work at the Hippodrome is because I think the Band Wagon was a show that brought the Hippodrome’s aesthetic to Broadway. Rasch’s “American ballet” is absolutely the same kind of hybrid aesthetic practice that brought together whatever worked from a bunch of different dance traditions in order to make the most striking stage picture. She was willing to spend money, to go abstract, to ask a classically trained ballerina to wear pointe shoes under a floor length gown and move across the stage like a beautiful stilt-walker in order to do something new and blow the audience’s mind.

Murdock Pemberton's Poems

One of the main characters involved with the New York Hippodrome’s history is Murdock Pemberton. He came to New York City from Kansas, worked as the Hippodrome’s press agent, and joined the New Yorker magazine as its first art critic.

A black and white photograph of a white man with glasses in a suit, holding a glass of port in one hand and a cat in the other arm, in front of a wall with paintings.

Image from Llyn Towner. The New Yorker’s First Art Critic: A Portrait of Murdock Pemberton. 17 July 2013, https://waamblog.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/the-new-yorkers-first-art-critic-a-portrait-of-murdock-pemberton/.. The New Yorker’s First Art Critic: A Portrait of Murdock Pemberton. 17 July 2013.

Pemberton ends up getting overshadowed in histories of the period because his older brother Brock also moved to New York City and became a fairly successful playwright. They were both part of the Algonquin Round Table group; the Alongonquin, notably, was just across 44th street from the Hippodrome. The Round Table’s first lunch, held for Alexander Woollcott after he returned from WWI, even included a prop fabricated by the Hippodrome costume department, a felt pennant that comically misspelled his name as “A.W.O.L cot." This information comes from an amazing book by Pemberton’s granddaughter Sally Pemberton, which is called Portrait of Murdock Pemberton: The New Yorker’s First Art Critic.

Picture of the Algonquin hotel in September 2021 by epicgenius via Wikimedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_Hotel#/media/File:W_44_St_Sep_2021_01.jpg

Pemberton kept working for the Hippodrome through the 1920s. While still penning the usual press releases, he also championed the Hippodrome to more highbrow readers by writing poetry about the Hippodrome. His “Hippodrome Anthology” poems appeared on the front page of the New York Times Culture section, along with theater reviews by Woollcott. One poem is on my mind today. It was on the front page of the Drama section of the Times for October 29, 1922. The poem shares space with current reviews and theatrical gossip, an illustration of actor Robert Warwick in profile, and a notice that Six Characters in Search of an Author would premier the following day at the Princess Theater. The translation of the Pirandello play was “imported from Italy by Brock Pemberton.” Brock’s brother, though, had his own byline: a free-verse poem called “Play for Puritans (From the Hippodrome Anthology.)” The poem reflects on the current Hippodrome show Better Times and its friendly, ambitious international cast. This cosmopolitan stood in even sharper contrast to the boring, mainstream culture of visiting businessmen who see shows at the Hippodrome and then ask “Now what’s the next best thing?” The one thing I always try to get across about 1920s America in my classes is that the era of jazz and flappers also saw a resurgence of white supremacy and immigration restriction. “Play for Puritans” shows how the Hippodrome fought back against that norm in its own way.

The cover for 1922-1923 Hippodrome show Better Times, from https://www.tumblr.com/newyorkthegoldenage

“Play for Puritans
(From the Hippodrome Anthology.)

The press agent threads his way
Through the maze of peachtrees,
Neighing horses, baying hounds
In the cavernous Hippodrome basement
Seeking stuffs that might weave into a pattern.
There are young girls from Honolulu,
Paris, Moscow, Madrid, Rome,
One who danced in a bull ring in Juarez,
Two who went on foot from Petersburg to Tokio,
And God knows how many from Newark and Manhattan.
One of these may turn up something
That will round itself out neatly
To fit a Sunday page —
But the only meter is the hurdling horses’ hoofs,
And shaped for Pegasus, a donkey,
A stag’s horn on his head,
Doubling n the brass.
So the stag hunt is gone
And Merrie England turns to Shadwoland.
There’s Long Tack Sam,
He comes of a race that plays the Lute of Jade —
Perhaps he has some verse in him;
But Sam is chuckling at a letter
From his wife in Austria
And has no mood for poetry —
”Looks,” says Sam, “my wife, She’s Viennese;
”She writers: ‘The Emperor’s bedroom suite
”‘You bought for eight hundred dollar
”‘Is now worth half a million.;”
Well, muses the press agent,
There must be an epic here somewhere:
Olga, who broke the prison pen in Tomsk;
Winifred, who danced around the world
In the shadow of Pavlowa’s toes;
Perhaps there’s a thousand epics,
One in every dressing room,
A whirling stream of life
Longer than Spoon River,
Seeking this hospitable stage
From far countries.
But the verse will stay there
For all this Homer.
And the press agent walks back,
Sits in his office, disconsolate
* * *
What is this thing, this lodestone?
As it drew Olga from Russia,
And Long Tack from the Yang-tse-kiang,
It had drawn him from Spring Valley,
Now there was a verse — if you could name it.
Perhaps the burning of the opera house
And the decision of the deacons of the nineteen churches
And the three colleges
That the hand of God had struck the match
And that there should be no more devil’s hall in Spring Valley,
Anyway, here he was,
And here was his assistant
Lured from the same hamlet,
And upstairs the stone-mason’s son,
Serving soda so he could hear the Sunday concerts
And take lessons until Mr. Gazzazza calls him;
And on the desk a letter from home saying,
”Look up the banker’s son—
He went East to enter the ministry,
And his father hears he’s entered
A school for dramatics,”
And all the bankers, the merchants and lawyers,
Coming East each year,
Drop in and say:
”We’ve seen the Hippodrome —
Now what’s the next best thing?”
But none of them asks where the best church is,
Or the Second Baptist,
And the press agent wished
Some one would tell Spring Valley
That to keep its prided population
It would do well to scrap a few churches
And build of the stone a good theatre,
And that there’s been several ships docked since the Mayflower.

”
— Murdock Pemberton

I definitely feel like this poem speaks to the present moment, a week into the new administration. I need to think more about how to articulate my feelings about both. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Long Tack Sam’s family. Assuming that’s his Austrian wife in the middle.

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Long Tack Sam (magician)" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 - 2020. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-18ae-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

How do you find comp titles for something that's incomparable?

Happy new year! I have been spending my winter break between semesters hard at work on my Hippodrome book, sort of. I set myself the task of reading comps: books that are both recent and comparable to my book project. You can think about them as competitors or titles that will complement your project. I prefer the latter. But in any case, comps are supposed to help you (and eventually, your editor) locate your project on a pre-existing mental map.

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "New York City subway map with Everything cover" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1918 - 1919. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/822ed850-61fe-0132-7188-58d385a7b928

Sometimes people talk about their comps in a fun way, like they’re pitching a Hollywood producer: it’s Jaws, but in space; imagine if Seabiscuit met Finishing the Hat! I wanted to give myself an excuse to read recent nonfiction books and really pay attention to how they were put together. What I basically realized is that all of my academic press books were about popular performance in the early twentieth century — like the award-winning T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America by Michelle R. Scott. (And Sharkey: When Sea Lions Were Stars of Show Business [1907-1958] by Gary Bohan Jr.). They were really useful for seeing how authors introduced information about typically forgotten or misunderstood types of performance, how they integrated anecdotes and biographical background, how they cited archives.

Butterbeans and Susie, a comedy duo who made their name on the T.O.B.A. circuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterbeans_and_Susie#/media/File:Butterbeans_Susie.jpg

These comps were balanced out by trade press books that I can only call micro-histories of places within New York City. The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan made a big impression. I both highlighted and took a screenshot of the last two paragraphs. The book ends, “Every day, something slips into history that we will never recover: a memory, a document, the sound of a dead woman’s voice. //Save what you can.” Ryan and Prudence Peiffer, who wrote one of my favorite books from last year, both locate their stories with such vividness within a particular neighborhood and way of life. The same is true of Daniel Lavery’s Woman’s Hotel, a novel that has a quirky precision that I absolutely loved.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library. "Women's House of Detention" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1935 - 1943. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/77782ee0-d56d-0131-f1ac-58d385a7bbd0

These books all share a commitment to specificity and a skill at verbally sketching the contours of a space. What’s most striking, though, is that they all use history as a way of thinking through the lost possibilities for collective culture. Proximity makes things happen. And I want to use these books to think about what possibilities the Hippodrome made possible.

Passengers: getting to the Hippodrome and feeling transported in your seats

Wow, it’s been a minute. I just got back from the Modernist Studies Association conference, where I presented some ideas on the Hippodrome and its relation to modern leisure transportation. I’m including an edited version of my talk and slides below.

The Hippodrome interior spaces put the audience members in the mind of circus goers (with sculpted elephant head sconces and relief sculptures of horse drawn chariots) but took them even further afield with the first extravaganza called A Yankee Circus on Mars. Martian airships and “automobiles” for chorus girls drawn by elephants let the audience know that fantastic mobility was central to the Hippodrome’s aesthetic.

Detail from O’Sullivan, Burns. Untitled (A Yankee Circus on Mars) : Drawing, Undated. The New York Hippodrome : Drawings, 1905-1908. 1905. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:495365297$1i. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, MS Thr 1716 (Folder 1). Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.

Looking at Hippodrome programs from the early 1910s, we can see that the Hamburg American Line regularly advertised their cruises on the inside front covers. In one case, the headline for the advertisement echoes that of the show. Of course, both would have made audiences think of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Under the artistic direction of Arthur Voegtlin, Hippodrome shows in this period moved away from the imagined and historical landscapes that had previously been staged. They became more like travelogues, with a perfunctory plot (stolen diamonds, stolen maps) inciting the travel and offering the ostensible reason for changing scenes. In fact, we might consider the plots of shows like these to offer a kind of imaginary passengering, one that compensates for the slowness of travel and the encumbrance of geography. The show Around the World, for example, shows characters departing from New York City, arriving in England, then going to Switzerland, Egypt, Constantinople, India, Italy, Spain, Hawaii, and then to Ireland where a diamond that grants bad luck to whoever owns in is thrown down a well at “Blarney Castle.”

Inside front cover of Around the World program, Arthur Voegtlin Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Moving in to a new phase of Hippodrome spectacles, under the management of Charles Dillingham, we can see in this promotional subway map for the 1918 show Everything an appeal to a new kind of tourist – a local passenger from the outer boroughs. We can see maps that show the appropriate stations for reaching the Hippodrome on the Interborough Rapid Transit subway system, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit subway system, and the Interborough elevated train lines. The slogan on the front cover – “If You Haven’t Seen the Hippodrome, You Haven’t Seen New York” – seems designed to counteract the local resident’s pride in avoiding tourist sites.

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "New York City subway map with Everything cover" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1918 - 1919. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/822ed850-61fe-0132-7188-58d385a7b928

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "New York City subway map with Everything cover" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1918 - 1919. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/822ed850-61fe-0132-7188-58d385a7b928

And the page where the Hippodrome theater is highlighted on its Manhattan map shows just how excessive the spectacle is meant to be. The theater is bright red on a black and white map, more obtrusive that the station markings on the other pages, and it’s so large and displaced from its actual geography that it’s parallel to Central Park and halfway into the Hudson River. All of these traces of the Hippodrome’s passengering practices that remain on paper suggest a kind of dislocating, escapist spectacle, one that ties in to existing networks of travel communication and that redefines even locals of the unified city as potential tourists.

The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past

I love the Memory Palace podcast. I loved it when I first heard it more than a decade ago (!?). “Giants in Those Days” was the first episode I heard, on a road trip, heavily pregnant and driving to New Orleans for one last vacation together before the kiddo came. It was an apt introduction, since Nate DiMeo’s brief, lyrically written and beautifully scored stories that have the vivid specificity of roadside attractions. So I was excited to hear that DiMeo had a book coming out based on the podcast. It’s releasing in November, but I just finished reading a digital advanced review copy through NetGalley. I thought I’d briefly interrupt my Hippodrome stories to share my thoughts about it.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "View in Cardiff Glen, near Fort Dodge, Iowa." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1873. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-6206-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

To be honest, it’s still relevant to the blog as a whole since the Hippodrome also belongs within the purview of “Old Timey Americana Studies.” This a field that DiMeo explores with great empathy and an eye for the telling detail, telling brief and evocative stories that bounce across times and places but mostly do focus on the United States. The scope can sometimes be dizzying: one sample from the middle of the book goes from California in 1966 to Massachusetts in 1774 to natural history museums in the Midwest studying air pollution from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s. They are all brought together, though through a repeated set of images and interests — animals, inventions, places that have played an outsized role in the American imagination like circuses, sideshows, and Coney Island. But he does not romanticize these stories. He is clear-eyed about the racism that often animates these places, their American exceptionalism, the willingness of the public to be duped. The sympathy comes for people who are outsiders, debutantes leaving their comfortable lives behind to pursue knowledge or immigrant sandhogs who worked underwater to help construct the Brooklyn Bridge. (The sandhogs below are from the later construction of the Hudson & Manhattan Tunnels dug in 1908.)

Seymour B. Durst The Hudson & Manhattan Tunnels: Uniting New York and New Jersey in Picture and Story. American Photograph Co., 1908. HathiTrust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100854803.

DiMeo plays around with form in some of the stories, writing them in six scenes, a timeline, 50 words. They all share a conversational tone, with rhetorical questions, sentence fragments, and direct address to his readers. I was most interested in the stories where he did things that podcasts can’t, like showing the pictures he’s describing or speaking negatively about the Sacklers who sponsored the Temple of Dendur at the Met. Most of all, I loved the section at the end of the book where DiMeo told stories about his life and his family. I absolutely loved getting a sense of how he arrived at the format his stories take. If there’s one thing I share with DiMeo, it’s the intense desire to imagine oneself inside the past, one fragment at a time. If you like the kinds of things I write about on here, I think you’ll like his work too.

Come Along to Toytown

From its opening, the New York Hippodrome evoked the pleasures of childhood. Fred Thompson’s biographer William Register based his whole biography around the idea that Thompson wanted to create childlike entertainment for grownups. The emphasis on toys as theatrical props and sets really went into overdrive when Charles Dillingham took over the management and R.H. Burnside designed the spectacles. Their first show together ripped off the work that Thompson did for the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world’s fair exhibit that he called Toyland.

Fred Thompson with sketches for Toyland, George Grantham Bain collection, Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.21555/

The Burnside show that re-opened the Hippodrome in the fall of 1915, called Hip! Hip! Hooray! opened act II with the setting listed as “At the Panama Exposition” and a scene called “Toyland in the Zone.” Burnside always said he was inspired by Thompson, and in this case the inspiration is pretty shameless.

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Hippodrome souvenir booklet for Hip! Hip! Hooray!" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1915. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/440c9950-2bf0-0132-63be-58d385a7bbd0

Irving Berlin, then a sergeant in the U.S. Army, wrote a song called “Come Along to Toy Town” for the 1918 season Hippodrome show called Everything. The lyrics were addressed to adults who might come to the theater to escape the stress of the Great War by reverting to childhood: “the land of harmless toys/Makes old folks girls and boys.” The next season, Happy Days had a whole kid-centric first act. It started in “The Kiddies’ Dormitory,” went to Fairyland, then has a nostalgic chorus of “Don’t You Remember Those School Days?”, a circus scene, and a book store scene with a pageant of characters from children’s story books. The Hippodrome had a fairly large proportion of children in its audience by this time, especially at matinees. But the embrace of childhood had a popular appeal with adults too. (Side note: I’m actually really fascinated with the different kinds of nostalgia at work in American popular culture of the 1910s and 1920s. People loved thinking about the “Gay 90s” then too, which may have also been their kiddie days.)

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Kiddies' scene" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1919. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/86107850-5633-0132-725e-58d385a7bbd0

So in 1924, Dillingham gave up his lease on the Hippodrome. The Keith-Albee organization took it over, but they didn’t want to keep putting on these extravagant, house-produced spectacles with casts of hundreds. They converted the theater into a vaudeville house — a fairly oversized one, with 6000 seats, but one that no longer had a stage apron with a water tank underneath. Now the bills would be organized around touring acts, filled out with some dance numbers and pyrotechnics from employees of the Hippodrome proper. They didn’t need to keep a full circus of animals fed and stabled in the theater’s basement, so they converted it to a venue that was half zoo, half exhibit that carried on the kid-focused magic of the previous years. It was called Toytown.

J. W. Henley, “Saved for the Children.” Light: The Magazine of the National Lamp Works of General Electric Company, July 1924, pp. 8–9, 32.

Toytown was open before Hippodrome shows and at intermission. Children and their parents could visit the miniature town, lit with fixtures that looked like airships and hot air balloons. And yes, because the Hippodrome comes out of the circus and fairground tradition, there were little people selling concessions and acting as traffic cop, farmer, barber, and even car salesman Toytown. Some of them were employed by Singer’s Midgets. I’m going to wait until I have enough information — such as actual names — to write about these performers.

Baby Peggy holding a Baby Peggy doll, via wikimedia Exhibitors Herald (Apr. - Jun. 1922) on the Internet Archive

One star of stage and screen who seemed to visit Toytown quite a bit in this era is Baby Peggy, aka Diana Serra Cary. She starred in films as a small child and then transitioned to vaudeville. Baby Peggy hosted receptions in Toytown. (I’ve got a picture from the Harry Ransom Center, but wow is it a bad one. I didn’t know what the deal was with Toytown when I took it.) One more visiting exhibit to Toytown that I want to shout out for local reasons: “Kiddies Karnival,” advertised as “a miniature Coney Island operated by electricity” and “A Wonderful Walk-Thru Mechanical Show of exceptional durability and simplicity of mechanism” that traveled to the Hippodrome from Eufaula, Alabama.

“Kiddies Karnival” exhibit in Toytown from Keith Hippodrome souvenir program 1925 season

The Hippodrome: Perpetually Part of Lost New York

So the New-York Historical Society has an exhibit running through the end of September called Lost New York. It covers some of the classic lost buildings, like the much-mourned first Pennsylvania Station, and lost city practices, like the now-icky idea of swimming in the East River.

George Bellows, Forty-Two Kids (1907), National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund)

Of course the Hippodrome joins the roll call of lost places and practices. It was in such a central location in Midtown Manhattan, and its shows were seen by so many people. The website mentions a “Broadway carpenter” who reminisces about his father going to the Hippodrome. If anyone gets a chance to see the exhibit, please share pictures and responses! I know that newspaper reporters and writers got super nostalgic about the Hippodrome being demolished once its fate was decided in the summer of 1939. I’ll be writing a bit more about that for the upcoming anniversary of its final shows in August. You can see a clipping from a typical story below.

New York Times, July 1, 1939, page 19.

What I want to talk about a bit more today, though, is the weird way that people kept imagining the loss of the Hippodrome well before it was actually torn down. One of the first columns that I found that dealt with this topic was a New Yorker column by “T.H.B.” a pseudonym for Tyler Howe Bliss, known as “Tip,” who was managing editor for the magazine in its early days. Filling in the space between a goofy parody of college athletics and a shockingly good listing of theatrical offerings, Bliss writes “A Brief History of the Hippodrome”:

“April 12, 1905 — Grand opening of the New York Hippodrome.

April 13, 1905 — First rumors that the New York Hippodrome is to be torn down to make room for an office building.

April 14, 1905 — Positive confirmation of rumors that the New York Hippodrome is to be torn down to make room for an office building.

April 15, 1905 — Editorial denunciation in all the newspapers of the fact that the New York Hippodrome, one of the historic old landmarks of the city, is to be torn down to make room for an office building.

April 16-22, inclusive, 1905 — Bitter, tearful, cunical and semi-humorous comment by newspaper columnists over the fact that the New York Hippodrome, one of the historic old landmarks of the city, is to be torn down to make room for an office building.

April 23, 1905 — Official announcement that the New York Hippodrome is *not* to be torn down to make room for an office building.

April 12-22, inclusive, 1906-1925, also inclusive — Follow formula.

April 23, 1925 — Official announcement that the New York Hippodrome is *not* to be torn down to make room for an office building, but has been purchased by E.F. Albee, and the present policy is to be pursued in perpetuity.

April 24, 1925 — Editorial writers and columnists mark their denunciatory, bitter, tearful, cynical and semi-humorous articles “stet” in preparation for 1926.”
— T.H.B., "A Brief History of the Hippodrome," The New Yorker, May 9, 1925, p.79

Obviously the fears about the Hippodrome being torn down didn’t really go back to the day after it opened, but they were recurrent. Whenever the management changed hands — from Fred Thompson and Skip Dundy to the Shuberts and Max C. Anderson, from the Shuberts to Charles Dillingham, and from Dillingham to Albee — there came a moment before the deal was done when people joked that the Hippodrome was a white elephant in its current state and speculated about the site’s potential. The Hip producers typically produced a one-off special show every spring on the anniversary of its opening; the one they put on April 12, 1923 was called the 18th and Final Anniversary. They paid tribute to founder Fred Thompson, who died 4 years earlier, with his widow in attendance. In a sense it was the final anniversary of the Hippodrome as it was. When Albee bought the theater, he had architect Thomas W. Lamb “renovate” it into a far more standard vaudeville house. Lamb eliminated 400 seats and (gasp) removed the water tank beneath the stage apron so the proscenium stage extended closer to the audience. That’s when my Hippodrome was lost.

Women's History Month: Shirtwaist Strikers and Suffragists at the Hippodrome

Due to blue laws that banned theatrical activity on the Sabbath, the Hippodrome did not present its usual shows on Sundays. (I talk about that at the NY1920s website, here.) Organizations often rented the theater for mass meetings and fundraisers instead. One rally on December 5, 1909 was hosted by Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a Mobile, Alabama native who used her great fortune and her platform in New York City society to support women’s suffrage and women’s rights in general.

Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, possibly on an ocean liner?, via the Library of Congress

The rally supported striking shirtwaist blouse makers. The 1909 Shirt Waist Strike, dubbed the “Uprising of the 20,000,” was an influential action in U.S. Labor History undertaken chiefly by young, Jewish women.

Jewish Women's Archive. "Women on Strike, 1909." (Viewed on March 22, 2024) <http://jwa.org/media/women-strike-1909>.

The strikers experienced a lot of harassment and full-on abuse from policemen. Some newspaper coverage was dismissive, suggesting that these young women just wanted a pay raise so they could buy frivolous things like fancy hats. Dress was a big part of the discourse about the strike, both in the press of the day and in current academic work inspired by Nan Enstad’s super-influential Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure.Check out the ladies below, who look super feminine in textured velvet and giant picture hats.

“Strike Pickets.” Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, https://www.loc.gov/item/2014684499/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2024.

The rally held at the Hippodrome supported their labor action, but it also put their work into dialogue with the women’s suffrage movement. Anna Howard Shaw, who worked with Susan B. Anthony in the nineteenth century, spoke at this event. The New-York Tribune noted that Rev. Shaw was speaking unofficially, though, because the National Woman Suffrage Association (of which she was the president) did not take a position on questions of labor. A snarky, sexist columnist said he “fail[ed] to trace the exact connection between the shirtwaist makers’ strike and woman’s suffrage. The prevalent idea that the feminine intellect is rarely logical seemed to be sustained.” But these were women who shared political ambitions that crossed class lines.

Girl Strikers, At Hippodrome, Cheered by 8,000 Sympathizers. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library., Anna Marble Pollock scrapbook 1909-1910 season.

The Hippodrome rally attendance was 6,000 people at a minimum, and perhaps as many as 8,000 as the newspaper clipping reports. Even the low end was a higher number than the listed capacity of the Hippodrome, since many participants were seated onstage. The New York Times gave the most attention to the decoration of the venue’s interior:

"The stage settings were for a woman suffrage meeting. Flags of blue on both side walls carried the words in white, “Votes for Women.” Three small drops hung down from the curtain machinery, all carrying arguments in big letters which the girls in the rearmost seats could read. “We demand equal pay for equal work,” the audience read; and “Give women the protection of the vote.”

Theresa Malkiel Portrait. https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/m/pics/malkiel-theresa.jpg. Accessed 22 Mar. 2024.

One of the women who attended on the labor side was Theresa Malkiel, socialist activist whose portrait is seen above. In her fictionalized account called The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, she talks about how the girls in her factory were excited to see Mrs. Belmont at the strike while she (the diarist) has some doubts about her sincerity. “I wonder what made her do it?” she writes, and then acknowledges “She must surely be better than the rest of her kind if she is willing to spend her money to help us girls rather than give a monkey dinner or buy a couple new pet dogs.” (The “monkey dinner,” given by socialite Mamie Fish, is described here.

Some of you might be wondering if this strike was at all related to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The Shirtwaist Strike took place in late 1909 and early 1910. They had protested for higher wages and safer working conditions. But on March 25, 1911 a fire broke out on the top floors of the building, beyond where the firetruck ladders could reach. 146 women and girls died, some of whom surely took part in the strike the years before.

The Hippodrome continued to be a gathering point for women involved with suffrage and labor. Mrs. Belmont and Inez Mullholland, another wealthy women’s suffrage supporter, sponsored another Garment Worker’s Union meeting at the Hippodrome in January 1913.

“Women Rush Theatre, Despite Police Clubs.” New-York Tribune, 6 Jan. 1913, p. 14.

Labor rallies and benefits took place at the Hippodrome well into the 1930s. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union sponsored opera performances, raised funds for the Spanish Civil War, and celebrated May Day at the venue. The poster below is from a rally that took place on April 30, 1938. I love that the union continued to think of the Hippodrome as a place to champion their “efforts on behalf of working class freedom” and that those efforts developed to include fighting “against fascism, Nazism, reaction and war.”

ILGWU Web Site - Archives Broadsides. https://ilgwu.ilr.cornell.edu/archives/broadsides/index.html?image_id=133. Accessed 22 Mar. 2024.

The Fastest Game in the World

I have a new thread in my Hippodrome book's argument: the evolution of sports as spectacle.

The first sports chapter is about a baseball game played onstage the same year that “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was published. That took place during the fall playoff season when one of the New York baseball Giants committed what became known as Merkle's Boner: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Boner

The next sports as spectacle chapter is either going to be about ice skating and ice ballet or about swimming. Either way, it'll be about the 1915/1916 season and how people wanted to see female athleticism at the Hippodrome more than they wanted to see the feminine beauty of Anna Pavlova.

The last sports chapter will be about jai alai. There was a last-ditch effort to popularize “the fastest game in the world” in NYC in 1938. This is right before the venue closes for good. Seems like it has something to do with sports betting and the good neighbor policy and the increasing power of Latino populations. Not sure yet, but it seems cool enough to try and figure out.

Finding my way into opera at the New York Hippodrome and re-discovering Caterina Jarboro

So I’m trying to imagine my Hippodrome book structure as something that will introduce readers to the key images, acts, and spectacles that you might see there. Women marching into the water tank and disappearing, battlefields of the Civil War and the Great War, clowns — and Marceline in particular — as the human element in the oversized spectacle. These are components of Hippodrome shows that keep coming back to the stage over the decades.

Marceline in "The Baltimore Sun" on November 20, 1927, via Newspapers.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Marceline_Orbes

Hippodrome images build up over time: elephants in the walls, elephants in goggles driving automobiles with chorus girl passengers, Power’s elephants performing tricks in just about every show from 1905-1923, Houdini making an elephant disappear …One of the elements that I know is really important but have not yet been able to wrap my brain around is opera. I know there was typically a prima donna who sang some of the musical numbers. In a venue not known for its acoustics, singers with opera training could reliably make themselves heard. Belle Storey and Nannette Flack both served as the soprano stars at different times; they co-starred in the 1920 show Good Times, where they sang an allegorical duet with Belle Storey as Truth and Nanette Flack as Youth. There’s a great blog post about the costuming for that show here

Belle Storey as Truth, pictured in the Dry Goods Economist, via “Costumes for ‘Good Times’ at the Hippodrome.” Deep in the Heart of Textiles, 11 Oct. 2017, https://textileranger.com/2017/10/11/costumes-for-good-times-at-the-hippodrome/.

Apparently Belle Storey did not come from a grand opera background but sang in the long-running, Aladdin-inspired musical Chin Chin. Yesterday I was reminded of another Hippodrome diva whose first performances took place in more popular musicals: Caterina Jarboro. The Wilmington, NC native moved to New York as a teen and performed in two shows penned by African American musical comedy legends F.E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles: Shuffle Along and Runnin’ Wild. (Side note: Caseen Gaines’s book When Broadway Was Black, about the making of Shuffle Along, is absolutely fantastic.)

Jarboro in what I think is her costume from Aida, on a flyer for a fundraiser in Wilmington NC. Contributed to Staton, John. “7 Diva-Worthy Moments from the Life of a Wilmington Opera Legend.” Wilmington Star-News, https://www.starnewsonline.com/story/entertainment/music/2023/03/27/the-diva-worthy-life-of-wilmington-opera-legend-caterina-jarboro/69987163007/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2024.

Just like fellow chorine Josephine Baker, Jarboro moved to France — in her case, to perform in churches, not in Paris cabarets. Jarboro debuted in Milan in 1929 or 1930, playing a role in Verdi’s Aïda. She returned to the U.S. in 1932. In 1933, she performed Aïda at the New York Hippodrome, this time as the lead with the otherwise all-white Chicago Opera Company. This trajectory for Black artists — being hailed in Europe as a necessary precondition to performance in their home country — is one that happened to earlier singers as well. Sissieretta Jones, a soprano singer in the late nineteenth century, has a biography and some really smart academic work published about her. I’m excited to dig into it and to think about how Caterina Jarboro builds on or turns away from the models of celebrity Jones established.

“The Black Patti, Mme. M. Sissieretta Jones the Greatest Singer of Her Race.” Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, https://www.loc.gov/resource/var.1857/. Accessed 3 Feb. 2024.

I always get really excited when I figure out how the research I’ve run across in the past might help me to write about someone or something new that I happen upon. This is definitely one of those serendipitous finds. And then I found out the Jarboro was a friend and correspondent of Arturo Schomburg, the researcher, collector, historian of Black literature and culture. His collection formed the basis for the Schomburg Research Center, which seems to be where the Schomburg/Jarboro correspondence is held. Some of it is online in the NYPL digital collections too. And she has an oral history recording, and she performed with Jules Bledsoe, who played the lead in the Emperor Jones opera that also played at the Hippodrome in 1933! So many exciting connections, ones that will help me write a chapter that fills out the story of the Hippodrome in an era that had previously been a blank spot on my timeline.

MLA paper for biography roundtable

On Putting Yourself in the Narrative

Some of the most lauded biographies of the past few years have brought the subject’s life story into conversation with that of the author. Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine, Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet, and Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers all insert authorial voice and experience into the narrative to different degrees. Similarly, I assume that we are all familiar with academic approaches that understand knowledge that arises from personal experience as foundational to meaning making, such as black feminist thought or auto-ethnography. Participant-observer ethnography serves as a starting point for a recent essay by Australian academic Kate Rossmanith, which appeared in Public Books under the title “On Not Asking ‘Should I Insert Myself in the Text?,’” the text which brought these thoughts to fruition.

I did this briefly in the conclusion to Imitation Artist, my biography of vaudeville performer, dancer, and producer Gertrude Hoffmann. Hoffmann was a mimic, one who made her name first performing celebrity impersonations and then, more controversially, by traveling to Europe, observing the popular and avant-garde performance there, and recreating it in her vaudeville act before the originals could make the transatlantic voyage to the US. I ended with a brief reflection that disavowed my impostor syndrome by claiming it as an identification with my subject:

“Biographers are mimics too, taking gestures and traces of another person and trying to bring them convincingly to life. So, I will end with my visit to her grave, imitating Alice Walker in search of Zora Neale Hurston perhaps, or Hermione Lee bringing a silk flower for Edith Wharton. I arrived at the cemetery and asked the attendant where to go. [He dubiously asked if I was family; no, a writer, I said. Her remains were inaccessible, kept below the mausoleum level in an area where visitors were prohibited. I circled the small memorial park twice: even though I did not have the exact coordinates, I knew I had passed somewhere near her.”

Returning to the archive that lives in my Dropbox, I note a document from June 2019 where the copy editor flagged this paragraph and added the following comment: "This is the only use of first person in the book, but it seems fine here. Just noting." Despite its understatement, I remember how this comment excited me. I made a rhetorical choice outside of my academic comfort zone, and the reader found it effective even if they suspected I may not have done it on purpose. I see myself in the position often taken by my students, asking "Can I say 'I'?": feeling the pull of the first-person pronoun, knowing it has been proscribed in the past, hardly realizing that I was already asserting my consciousness even in the process of asking permission.

The thrill of attraction and the pang of embarrassment that come with wanting to say I were both sentiments I felt very strongly at the prospect of writing a biography in the first place. Even after I found out about Hoffmann and found that she had an archive in driving distance, I planned to write about her in an academic monograph making an argument about the relationship between popular theater and modernist studies. But for a number of reasons, which I can discuss in conversation, I felt Hoffmann’s life and archive were better served by a biography. Reasons: diary and correspondence where she engaged in self-fashioning, appearance in scholarship as a practitioner of Salome and Ballets Russes imitations but considering these as isolated incidents, archive at a private institution with research funding and workstudy students to copy materials, imaginative relationship that I could forge between the two of us.

And yet I still felt embarrassed, or at least apologetic. I was trained by a theory-oriented dissertation director, and I didn’t have any immediate scholarly models for doing this work. When I discussed the plans with my chair he warily asked a question somewhat along the lines of “Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to be wrong?” referring, I think, to the facts and dates that make up a life and that resist the finessing of textual interpretation. I definitely added new, more historicist skills to my toolkit: analyzing birth certificates and censuses and ship manifests. Writing biography is a deeply interdisciplinary act, even when you’re writing about literary figures.  

I knew there was a residual sense of biography as not what English professors do. And for this roundtable, I tried to identify at least one place where that idea may have come from. I work in modernism, so I could blame Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians or T.S. Eliot’s assertion in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that poetry was “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” But in this case, I blame Stanley Fish. He published a 1999 op-ed in the New York Times titled “Just Published: Minutiae Without Meaning.” In his polemic, Fish says that biography makes him “queasy” because it tries to assert causality where he sees only contingency. He writes: “The falseness of it all is overwhelming, and you begin to be embarrassed at the spectacle of a biographer who knows so much and is trying so hard, but who can deliver only transitions that creak and analyses that you don't believe for a minute.” This was a revelatory claim: entering into dialogue with a historical subject and trying to narrate their life exposes the biographer’s knowledge and effort. We make spectacles of ourselves.

As it so happens, I’ve been thinking about spectacle quite a lot lately. My current research project is a cultural history of the New York Hippodrome, the 5200-seat playhouse where massive popular spectacles were performed from 1905-1939. These shows involved everything from circus to Russian ballet, history pageants to vaudeville. These shows were excessive, over the top, and hard to imagine. Each show involved hundreds of people. As I think about my narrative structure, I want to end by sharing the questions I’m considering. With whom do I identify among the backstage and front of the house workers I’ve located in the archive? Who do I need to account for beyond those figures that seem immediately compelling or recognizable? How can I disperse the biography of a cultural institution across several people’s lives? What are my ethical obligations toward this material, and how will they inform the shape of my text? How do the spectacles of the Hippodrome relate to the spectacle of my voice telling the story? I’ll conclude here, with the more general version of these questions on the slide to inform further discussion. I look forward to hearing about when you all say I and why.

Architectural elephants

To “see the elephant” is U.S. slang that means to see amazing sights or to gain knowledge beyond the everyday. The phrase originated in the early nineteenth century, after the first elephants toured the Eastern seaboard: the earliest visitor was simply called “The Elephant” in the press; the second was named “Old Bet,” short for Elizabeth. Encounters with these remarkable animals took on a metaphorical cast and often described grueling experience: overland travelers who were part of the California Gold Rush and soldiers who had engaged in battle in the Civil War commonly said they “saw the elephant.”

Patent for Zoomorphic Architecture received by James V. Lafferty, via Wikpedia

By the turn of the twentieth century, the phrase is roughly equivalent to enjoying the night life of a city: an O. Henry narrator says in a story titled “Man about Town” that the titular urban fellow “makes his rounds every evening, while you and I see the elephant once a week. This incarnation referred not to Old Bet or Jumbo but to the Elephantine Colossus on Coney Island.That structure, covered in tin skin studded with windows, housed an amusement bazaar, a hotel, and later a brothel. The building burned in 1896; Thompson and Dundy’s famed attraction “A Trip to the Moon” was built on its former site. It was a foundational ride for Luna Park, where the story of the Hippodrome elephants begins.

An illustration of Topsy, a female Asian elephant killed at a Coney Island, New York park by electrocution on January 4, 1903. Via Wikipedia

Along with the land that had formerly been Sea Lion Park, Thompson and Dundy purchased an Asian elephant named Topsy. Topsy had a violent history: she may have killed two elephant keepers in 1900, and she crushed one man who tormented her — throwing sand in her face and stabbing her trunk with a lit cigar — and threatened to do so to another. Topsy’s story is a tragic one, dealt with in tremendous detail in Michael Daly’s book. The relevant piece of information for this story: Topsy was electrocuted on camera for an Edison film called “Electrocuting an Elephant” (not linking to it, but easily findable) that doubled as an advertisement for Thompson and Dundy’s Luna Park opening that summer. It’s not a graphic film, but it is sad and shocking. One of the things I’m trying to work out in the chapter I’m writing is how T&D got into the elephant game at a transitional moment, moving from the panic about “bad elephants” around the turn of the twentieth century to the kind of infantilized and ridiculous elephants of the mid-twentieth century (think elephant ballerinas in Fantasia).

Fred Thompson was obsessed with elephant imagery. He kept a carved ebony elephant sculpture on his desk at Luna Park, and when Topsy was killed he reportedly had her hide tanned and used it to cover his office chair. So it’s not surprising to learn that elephants were built into the very architecture of the New York Hippodrome. An elephant’s-head keystone decorated the central arch of the main entrance. That head was larger than life size, sculpted from terracotta, and weighed two and a half tons.

Grandeur and gaudiness combined in this ornamentation, and architectural critics held mixed opinions on the effect. One journal found it original, appropriate to the site, and highly praiseworthy. Another praised the keystone as simple and aesthetically pleasing but criticized the interior heads. They all agreed that this vernacular embellishment came from the world of world’s fairs, circuses, and amusement parks.

“The New York Hippodrome. J.H. Morgan, Architect.” Architects’ and Builders’ Magazine, W.T. Comstock, 1905, pp. 490–99. Page 494.

Elephant’s head capitals topped supporting columns in the auditorium and decorative pilasters in the lobby. In photographs, the lobby ornaments look particularly outsized, with heads the size of ticket booth windows and trunks extended down the front of the columns. Their design mixed realistic elements — wrinkled skin, ears hanging in loose folds — with decorative ones.

Detail from New York Hippodrome Theatre, Internet Broadway Database, Bill Morrison Collection, Shubert Theatre Archive

In the interior hallways, each elephant fixture sprouted three incandescent lights from its headdress and two from the tips of its tusks. One source suggests that their eyes illuminated as well. Elephant heads lit by electricity seem especially evocative of Topsy’s execution. The technological violence required to tame these animals is built into the structure.

Overall, I think elephants are so important as a symbol of the New York Hippodrome because they’re architectural. They are massive, grander than human scale. And for Thompson and Dundy, they were easily abstracted into a symbol of circus power, tamed and stylized, covering every part of their new venue.

Caught in a trap of deciding

I’m once again struggling to imagine the form of my New York Hippodrome book. I have all kinds of ideas — one season! all the different types of spectacle presented there and what they mean! a group biography! a cultural history, cradle (construction) to grave (demolition)! — but I can’t settle on one for long enough to decide. I also have the wonderful trouble of multiple audiences who I want to reach: academic and popular, NYC lovers and theater people and modernists. I want to talk to everyone and share everything, and as a result I don’t know how to start.

These are the three post-it notes I keep on my monitor. The first one is a diagram of Jessica Abel’s model for the artistic process, which she calls The Creative Engine. It’s a framework for thinking about the steps of research and creation and reflection that work in a recursive feedback loop. One thing this model does is help people who are stuck identify where in the process they’ve hit a wall. And oh man am I stuck in Decide.

So what I think I’m going to do is try to unstick myself from this mental glue trap by moving on to the next stage in the engine. And the other two post-its are helping me do that. I wrote them after doing some academic coaching with Katherine Fusco. She’s a really smart and thoughtful listener, one who helped me focus on the things I wanted to assert and value as I moved on to a new stage in my career. The middle footnote, which reads “I am a skilled and practiced writer.” in my prettiest cursive, helps remind me that I’ve done this kind of work before. One of the toughest things to remember about writing a book is that even when you’ve done it before, each book has to be written in a new way: it’s a new topic, you’re a different person and might have different career and personal goals, the archive you’re drawing from lends itself to telling a different kind of story. So it’s really useful to remind myself that I’ve been at this “back to the drawing board” place before. I wrote my way out, to use a phrase from Hamilton that’s inspirational if not altogether applicable.

Writing your way out: good in some cases, bad in others.

And as for that last footnote: one of the reasons I work on modernism is because I have always loved collage. I love the open-endedness and the ragged edges, the resourcefulness of making things fit together even when it’s clear the pieces came from elsewhere. That’s a kind of talisman for the resourceful, creative fidelity to the past that I aspire to in my writing. This semester, I’m teaching a graduate class on modernism with a larger-than-typical number of collage texts: Spring and All, a goofy manifesto that also has at least one poem you know it it; Cane, a lyrical and ominous exploration of Black culture in the country and the city (and the country again); and Book of the Dead, an amazing political documentary lyric call to action. They all use different techniques and aspire to different things, but they all use choppiness and fragmentation to make something in the mind of the reader that they couldn’t achieve in more straightforward narrative ways.

Black and white photo of the New York Hippodrome's interior hallway. The hall is carpeted and ornately decorated, with chandeliers, potted palms, velvet chairs and gilt tables, and plaster elephant heads on the walls.

New York Hippodrome interior with elephant heads as part of the decor, Bill Morrison Collection, Courtesy of the Shubert Archive, https://www.ibdb.com/theatre/hippodrome-theatre-1305

So by the end of the months, I want to write some kind of collage essay about elephants at the Hippodrome over the course of its lifetime. The picture above is just the beginning: elephants were a Thompson and Dundy trademark, so they were built into the very structure of the theater as decoration. There’s also Powers Dancing Elephants, an act that appeared at the Hip in one form or another from its opening into the mid-1920s. Houdini made an elephant disappear. Frances Ziebarth costumed elephants in tuxedos and top hats. And Jimmy Durante befriended one in Jumbo and then denied its presence in Jumbo’s most famous gag. So I want to figure out something to say about elephants at the New York Hippodrome in order to see if I can write something approaching collage-chapters for other parts of the Hippodrome repertoire too. Deadline for posting: December 7, when my grad class turns in their final essays. Hold me to it, please, oh friends of the internet!

Tribute to Jenny Lind, this week at the Hippodrome

103 years ago today, the New York Hippodrome’s regular matinee and evening performance of Good Times included a bonus act: their prima donna Belle Story sang a tribute performance to mark the centennial of Jenny Lind’s birth. You can find a more detailed biography of Story at the University of Arizona American Vaudeville Museum site.

Belle Storey, October 1914, Theatre Magazine https://archive.org/details/theatremagazine20newyuoft/page/174

Those of you who’ve seen The Greatest Showman might know some version of Lind’s story. She was an nineteenth-century opera singer known as the “Swedish Nightingale.” Brought to the U.S. by P.T. Barnum, she gave 93 concerts and donated her earnings to charity. Lind was a huge celebrity in the nineteenth-century, with “Lind mania” seizing her fans. Lind sang at Castle Garden, now known as Castle Clinton, on the southern tip of Manhattan. By the time the Lind Centennial took place in NYC, the venue was an aquarium.

[Jenny Lind, three-quarter length portrait of a woman, three-quarters to the left, facing front, seated], Daguerreotype from Matthew Brady’s studio, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3c10191/

Belle Story dressed in a reproduction of the gown Lind wore, was introduced to the stage as a fellow Hippodrome performer dressed as Barnum. She sang two numbers, “The Echo Song” (aka “The Herdsman’s Song” by Jacob Ahlstrom) and “Comin’ through the Rye” (a Scottish ballad with lyrics from a Robert Burns poem). “Rye”, according to music professor Steve Waksman, was not originally on Lind’s program but had been requested by the public and added. It makes sense, then, that Story chose a song that was associated with NYC specifically and with the kind of populist crowd that still came to the New York Hippodrome in 1920.

Newspaper story about the Carneigie Hall celebration of Lind’s centennial, New York Herald, 10/7/1920, page 9 via Chronicling America

The Lind Centennial was celebrated in at least a few other US locales: based on a quick survey of newspaper coverage, it looks like they may have taken place in areas with a large Scandinavian immigrant population. But the major celebration in New York took place at Carnegie Hall with German soprano Frieda Hempel as Lind. Hempel also sang “Echo Song,” accompanying herself “on the genuine Lind piano played at the 1850 concert.” But she didn’t appear on the same bill with Powers’ Elephants or sing her final aria as twelve women dove into a tank of water and disappeared, so I give Story the W.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Lind#/media/File:Jenny_Lind_Advert_Sheffield.jpg

The Sordid Lives of the Voegtlin Men, Part 3

So what about Arthur Voegtlin, the younger brother in this theatrical family? He saw the messes that his father and brother got into and steered clear of trouble, right? Not so much.

Arthur Voegtlin photo via Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library of Performing Arts

When he was twenty, Arthur either played a prank on Emil or spread some of his brother’s gossip to an editor who put it in print. Either way, the New York Mirror announced in March 1882 that Emma Carson was engaged to Emil Voegtlin. The week following the announcement, the trade paper printed this retraction:

“Emma Carson, of Mitchell’s Pleasure Party, telegraphs from Portland asking us to deny the report published last week of her engagement to Emil Voegtlin. We acquiesce with pleasure, for Miss Carson is a charming little actress who should not think of leaving the boards and settling down to married life at the beginning of her career. The publication of the statement she denies was requested as a particular favor by Mr. Voegtlin’s brother.”

I’m so curious about the circumstances behind this: jealousy? good intentions when Emil had exaggerated their relationship? At least the writer made it clear that the information was passed on by Arthur and not Emil himself. Here’s Miss Carson a couple of years down the road, still treading the boards:

 Card 897, Emma Carson, from the Actors and Actresses series (N45, Type 2) for Virginia Brights Cigarettes via picryl.com

The following year, Arthur Voegtlin took his first (and perhaps only) trip out of the country, helping to construct and paint sets for a new theater in the Caribbean, in what is now Guyana. In May 1884, he married first wife Emily in Yonkers, NY. I still haven’t gotten ahold of their marriage certificate and don’t know her maiden name. Did you notice I wrote first wife?

While Arthur Voegtlin made his name as a scene painter working for playwright Charles Hoyt, he treated Emily cruelly. The couple separated in fall 1892, and Mrs. Voegtlin moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota in Fabruary 1893, where she lived under the assumed name of Mrs. Varian. Why Sioux Falls? Because, as I discovered when reading April White’s fascinating recent book The Divorce Colony, that was a place where wealthy white women from the east took up residence when they wanted to divorce their husbands. South Dakota let people establish residency in a briefer amount of time than other states, and its judges were more amenable to granting divorces in the case of violent treatment, neglect, or abandonment.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Sioux Falls showing American flag flying over street, building identified as Cataract House." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 - 1930. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-6f90-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Their divorce case brought some attention in the papers, mostly in the Upper Midwest. Emily testified that her husband threatened to kill her multiple times. Arthur responded that those claims were untrue and that she had an inappropriate friendship with Herbert Rosenfeld, a wealthy and married photographer who loaned Emily $400 when she moved to Sioux Falls. (This is not the same Herbert Rosenfeld as the British psychoanalyst.)

The case was decided in Emily’s favor. I need to find out her maiden name so I can figure out what became of her post-divorce. A few articles about the case note that she was a newspaper and magazine writer, and I really want to hear more from her point of view. Writing a story like this where many of the main characters lack extensive archives, I have to leave some loose threads hanging for now.

The Sordid Lives of the Voegtlin Men, Part 2

Wow, I did not intend to take a month off between sordid tales. The third part of the trilogy will come more quickly! So to recap, William Voegtlin avoided his bigamy charges and went on painting sets for another 7 years until his death. His oldest son Emil, however, was convicted of crimes severe enough to land him in NYC police inspector Thomas F. Byrnes’s guide titled Professional Criminals of America. As we can read in the picture below, Emil was a hotel and boarding house thief.

Emil Voegtlin mug shot from page 111 of Thomas F. Byrnes, Professional Criminals of America (New York, Cassell & Company, 1886), http://archive.org/details/cu31924096989177.

Like all the other rogues in this rogues’ gallery (a phrase Thomas F. Byrnes reportedly popularized), Emil has a biographical entry in this book. He is number 47 of the 204 listed criminals, each of whom has a photo, physical description, and criminal record listed therein. His first name spelled with a final e, Emil’s appearance is sketched with brief phrases:

“Twenty-six years old in 1886. Born in United States. Single. Scenic artist by trade. Medium build. Height, 5 feet 10-1/2 inches. Weight, 155 pounds. Brown hair, hazel eyes, dark complexion. Wears black mustache and side-whiskers. Has a very genteel appearance.”

That seeming gentility gets reinforced in the first line of his record, which calls him “the son of very respectable people.” Like his father who skipped town after his trial, leaving a bunch of bills behind, I get the sense that Emil had expensive taste that his scene painting salary could not quite support.

NYC detectives first arrested Emil in April of 1882. The Voegtlin family had been living in a boarding house on Fifth Avenue just north of Washington Square Park. Over a six-month period, residents reported thefts of jewelry and other valuables, including “a long gold watch chain, a ladies chain, a diamond and ruby pin, an onyx pin, a diamond ring” and more recently $1500 in government bonds. The landlady spotted Emil leaving another boarder’s room with that man’s coat over his arm. She summoned the detectives; Emil confessed, and they found a stolen scarf-pin in his trunk.

According to Byrnes, when Emil Voegtlin was arraigned he received a suspended sentence due to the respectability of his family, his admission of guilt, and his promise to reform. And the rest of the stolen goods? The first account, published in the New York Times on April 23, reads “Young Voegtlin said that he had squandered the proceeds of his theft in dissipation.” The second, published the following day, ends this way: “He declined to give the officers any information in regard to the manner in which he had disposed of the missing jewelry, and it is believed that he made presents of the articles to women with whom he was associated.” I had initially assumed these accounts conflicted, but I supposed that giving your stolen jewels to women with whom you are associated is one way of squandering them in dissipation.

This seems like Emil’s m.o. When he stole jewelry from another person’s room in another boarding house later that year, he gave a locket to his fiancee who was either named Hattie or Nellie Haight. Miss Haight, a sales clerk at Macy’s and the daughter of a primary school janitor, signed the deposition against her fiance. At the trial, he said goodbye to Miss Haight in a manner more befitting an actor than a scene painter: “he pressed her hand, struck his forehead, and waved a theatrical adieu which was so stagey that the spectators laughed and Miss Haight looked embarrassed.” Emil ended up serving his sentence at Sing Sing, and it doesn’t seem like the rest of his short life was a happy one. But I want to end on this moment of at minor comedy, thinking about the sad-eyed guy from the picture who maintained his genteel appearance to the end, even if it was gentility learned from plays.

The Sordid Lives of the Voegtlin Men, part 1

One of the weird things about writing biography is accounting for the unpleasant things your subject has done. Sometimes they’re funny: Gertrude Hoffmann knew she was ripping off the Ballets Russes when she went on tour with her Russian ballet, but they were booked in London and she was a mimic, so what did they expect her to do? Sometimes they’re sad: Hoffmann didn’t write a single thing about her son’s death in her journals at Wake Forest, which I eventually ascribed to her Christian Science beliefs. But I felt a real connection to Hoffmann and felt that I could understand her foibles.

 

This time around, it feels a bit different. Working on the first chapter for my Hippodrome book, I first focused on Arthur Voegtlin’s set designs for the opening season. Now that the academic version of the essay is drafted, I wanted to think about Voegtlin more as a person. I know that he was influenced by working with his dad, a noted scenic artist of the nineteenth century. So I looked for more information on him. WIlliam Voegtlin painted actual landscape paintings along with drop curtains and flats. Ok, that’s useful because Arthur wanted to be a fine artist too.

William Voegtlin landscape

He was a member of the Bohemian Club, an influential all-male organization for artists, writers, and politicians in San Francisco. That helps me gauge his fame in the era when they lived in California. (Plus, it affirms a surprising thing I found out in my last book, the way that San Francisco in the nineteenth century influenced NYC in the early twentieth.)

William Voegtlin c.1876 from the postcard below

Members of the Bohemian Club, 1876-1877, via San Francisco Public Library digital collection https://digitalsf.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A153552

So William Voegtlin was first married to Bertha Fleichman in Illinois in 1857. She was an immigrant from Baden, Germany (then a part of Prussia). William was Swiss. Once they were married, Bertha gave birth to nine children, only two of whom survived until adulthood: firstborn Arthur and younger brother Emil. Both sons worked with William in the scene painting trade, first in Chicago and then in New York. In 1883, Bertha ran off with a family friend, William asked his lawyer to start divorce proceedings, and then they both independently moved from New York City to the California — Bertha in Oakland with her (also married) paramour and William in Los Angeles working on the ornamentation for a newly-constructed opera house.

Image via Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive by Michael Goodman

https://shakespeareillustration.org/2016/08/01/oberon-titania-puck-and-bottom/

According to the Los Angeles Herald, William’s decorations included a painted asbestos drop curtain, ringed in ermine white and gold paint, with a medallion illustrating the scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Oberon wakes Titania both from her sleep and her enchantment. As a result, she sees that Bottom, who she had been snuggling in the forest, was in fact an ass. The “figures of the fairies and the angels [an addition to Shakespeare’s original cast] are exquisitely painted in Herr Voegtlin’s best style”. This scene was commonly illustrated in printed editions of the play from this period. It also allows William to paint a kind of wish fulfillment: the scene of a wife’s ridiculous dalliance and a validated husband taking her home.

While he worked in Los Angeles, William received word from Bertha that their divorce had gone through. He met a woman named Lizzie Richie, a dressmaker. Newpaper stories note that they met in a restaurant, which just makes me think of the rhyme from the Blondie song (“you could tell I was no debutante”). They married two months later. Three weeks after the happy day, Lizzie received a letter (or discovered one — stories vary): William Voegtlin was still married to Bertha, and if he didn’t pay, she’d reveal his bigamy to the press! Lizzie may have tried to get William to pay for her silence too. In any case, it didn’t last long.

Daily Alta California, Volume 38, Number 12855, 24 June 1885, via California Digital Newspaper Collection

I love the descriptions of the second Mrs. Voegtlin in trial coverage. Here, she’s “most becomingly dressed.” An earlier story goes into even more detail:

“The fair prosecutor was a beautiful demiblonde, tastefully dressed, with a rich sealskin, and handsome diamonds in her ears — the whole attire topped with a full-feathered hat that was very becoming to her countenance — a fact the lady was evidently well aware of.”

The half-modest blushes and the self-awareness about her attractive hat seems like such damning details. Women appearing in court have to look respectable and attractive, but they can’t look like they know that’s what they’re doing. It reminds me of the discourse around E. Jean Carroll’s wardrobe last week.

On June 24, 1885, William Voegtlin was acquitted. Lizzie instead moved for her marriage to be annulled. William moved away, leaving behind numerous unpaid bills along with his ex-wife. The Pacific Bee archly noted: “William Voegtlin, the scenic artist who figured so conspicuously in a bigamy case a few weeks ago, skipped town, presumably en route to New York. His departure will be mourned by many creditors. Voegtlin had a year’s engagement with the California Theater at a very lucrative salary, but his many debts pressed too hard on him, and he concluded to retire.”

William’s sons shared his expensive tastes. Emil got into particular trouble, which I’ll discuss in my next post.