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