Before the Tiller Girls, there was the Pony Ballet

So if you read anything about precision dance and chorus lines in the 1920s, you’ll come across the Tiller Girls. They were a British troupe of performers, trained by John Tiller to dance in unison. You can see one of their routines on Youtube here:

The Tiller Girls made a big splash in the U.S. when they appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1924. But in his book Tiller’s Girls (London: Robson, 1988), Doremy Vernon notes that “although reporters gave the impression that the troupes were new to the American stage, they had in fact made their debut as far back as 1900 when George Lederer booked them to perform their original Pony Trot.” The “Pony Trot” number was part of Lederer’s 1899 spectacle The Man in the Moon. Actress Zella Frank performed “The Jockey Chorus” supported by “The Pony Ballet.” The group of sixteen petite dancers moved across the stage in pairs, as if they were horses pulling a carriage.

A few summers later, another group of English performers came to the U.S. under the same name, this time without Tiller at the helm. This group earned a feature spread in an April 1902 Sunday edition of the San Francisco Call, including ample illustrations of their acrobatic skill.

Headline “Training the Pony Ballet” appears above arrangements of young women in a “human arch,” one standing on the shoulders of another and holding up her leg, and other acrobatic poses.

The Pony Ballet set off a trend among Broadway dance directors. Ned Wayburn and Gertrude Hoffmann were especially known for their choreography using Pony Ballet-style choreography. And according to a column in Variety called “‘Corks’ on Girl Acts,” by December of 1905 some people were sick of it. There’s a funny account of a burlesque producer who wants to go back to the good old days when a beautiful pair of dancers did a “sister act.” Instead he sees all kinds of “girl acts”:

“I don’t know where Ned got his ideas in the first place, but they are all about the same, and the rest follow along until you get the idea that some one hired a whole orphan asylum and taught all the girls at once. There’s the same stamping, the same hand-clapping and all that, and except for the name and the costumes, one act is the same as the other whether Weytburn or Gertie Hoffmann or someone else put ‘em on. They can’t pay the girls a fair salary and make a profit out of ‘em, because a manager won’t pay enough, and so they do the best thy can, and they best they can is rotten.”

One of the reasons I started my Hippodrome project was to figure out what life was like for the chorus members. I keep finding all sorts of choruses in this era, and I want to know more about all of them!

Backstage at the Hippodrome Cast of Characters

So I finished my book proposal. Hooray! It feels really nice to end the summer by completing something major. One of the last things I did, based on the feedback from my Group Biography writing group, was add pictures to my chapter outline. It really brings the story to life. So I want to share the pictures of some of my “main characters.”

New York Star (October 3, 1908) Vol.1 No.1 via Wikipedia

Fred Thompson (1873-1919), co-founder of Luna Park on Coney Island, architect of the New York Hippodrome, and the only person in my book who was famous enough to have a full biography already written

New York Tribune (July 19, 1914) via Chronicling America

Frances Ziebarth (1879-1949), wardrobe mistress for the New York Hippodrome from 1905-1920.

Photo from Around the World souvenir program, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Arthur Voegtlin (1858-1919), set designer and conceptualizer of attractions, basically the artistic director from 1911-1915, came back to the Hip in 1920s to stage a pageant based on the Battle of Verdun and help design settings for Morris Gest’s Passion Play.

Photo from Around the World souvenir program, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Carroll Fleming (1861-1930), writer of several Hippodrome shows and stage manager at the Hippodrome

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

R.H. Burnside (1870-1952), stage manager for the Hippodrome and general director 1915-1923.

Murdock Pemberton: History’s Forgotten Tastemaker | Kansas Public Radio. https://kansaspublicradio.org/kpr-news/murdock-pemberton-historys-forgotten-tastemaker. Accessed 16 Aug. 2022.

Murdock Pemberton (1888-1982), press agent for the Hippodrome and founder of the Algonquin Round Table

Albertina Rasch (1891-1967), prima ballerina at the Hippodrome and later choreographer of the Albertina Rasch dancers who performed between vaudeville acts in the mid-1920s

USA Limited -- thinking about collective movement on stage and on the street

In 1913, the New York Hippodrome show was called America. Recent seasons had more of a global travelogue theme — Around the World, Under Many Flags — but this one stayed within the hemisphere. Act II opens with an expansionist jaunt down South American way to the Panama Canal Zone. The prologue, like the cover of the souvenir program, showed the Landing of Columbus. Pretty sure the native guy in the bottom right looks way more like someone from Great Plains tribe and not a Taino/Arawak indigenous person who’d actually be present.

Cover of America Hippodrome Souvenir Program, 1913-1914 season, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Library for the Performing Arts

The play proper began in a train station ”In Which is Depicted with Musical Accompaniment the Daily Occurrences in a Great Starting Point of Country-Wide Travel.” After a professor and chaperone sing about their obligations while taking “college boys” and “co-eds” on an excursion and the men sing about their wives going on vacation, everyone in the station forms themselves into the header image. I think the effect would have been pretty impressive: groups of people in different colored outfits rushing around the station and finally resolving into a red U, a white A, and a blue S. The Hippodrome was known for patriotic spectacles like this one. R.H. Burnside had a group of girls with streamers who took up the full stage to make a city-block-long representation of Old Glory.

“Suffrage Parade Photo,” Box 46, America folder. Production Photographs Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin..

Bur it’s not all rah-rah patriotic abstraction on the Hippodrome stage. America also featured a street on New York where a women’s suffrage parade was staged. This was described in the program as a “Replica of the Parade Held Recently in New York.” I think it’s a riff on the May 6, 1912 suffrage parade illustrated below, only because of how prominent the American flags are in both.

Originally copyright by American Press Association, published 1912, courtesy of Library of Congress via Wikimedia

The suffragist strategy of wearing all white during their protest marches was borrowed to striking effect by the NAACP for the July 28, 1917 Silent Protest Parade seen below. Ten thousand Black marchers moved silently through midtown Manhattan.

Photo of the Silent Protest Parade where Black women dressed all in white are lead by a Black man carrying a sign that reads “The First Blood For American Independence Was Shed By a Negro, Crispus Attucks.” Photographs by Underwood and Underwood, digitized by the Beinecke Library and held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library collection Photographs of Prominent African Americans.

All of this is to say I’ve been thinking about the way Hippodrome shows contributed to nationalism and nativism. I’m really interested in thinking about the ways collective movement can work in other ways too. And I wanted to end my Independence Day writing by thinking about other ways that people can move as a collective body and demand that their inherent freedom be recognized.

Māori performance in and around the Hippodrome: haka, tourism, and suffrage rallies

In September 1909, a triple bill opened: A Trip to Japan, Ballet of the Jewels, and Inside the Earth. It was the Shubert brothers’ third show, and stage manager R.H. Burnside’s second. When I started reading about the New York Hippodrome, I ran into two scholarly articles that talked about this season, the Hippodrome’s sixth. In “‘The Greatest Show on Earth’: Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific,” performance studies scholar Margaret Werry talks about the first and last shows on the bill as they bring to life an ideal of the American dominance in the Pacific. She sees the shows doing the same kind of cultural work as Theodore Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet,” [eyeroll] of sixteen new battleships that started their journey in the Atlantic, rounded the tip of South America, made a bunch of stops in the Pacific, and then completed their journey around the globe. A Trip to Japan and Inside the Earth both featured American guys going to Pacific Rim countries to do assertive things (keep submarine blueprints from being stolen, mine for gold) and bring white American women home. Werry talks a bit about the Māori performers who participate in Inside the Earth, mostly considering how their tours of New York City venues like Coney Island create another kind of spectacular performance of indigenous identity. The second article, “A ‘Harmony of Frenzy’: Māori in Manhattan, 1909–10” by Marianne Schultz, focuses on those performers, their travel and reception in New York City, and the participation in the Hippodrome shows. Mostly what interests me are the ways the stories of these performers challenge expectations and offer an appealing alternative to U.S. norms.

Performers in the souvenir program for 1909-1910 Hippodrome season, my collection.

I wish I knew more about indigenous art styles at the time so I could tell if the background has any relation to the performer’s culture. Weirded out by the phrase “specially imported” in their caption, but I guess it does make the performers’ role as exotic commodities clear, doesn’t it?

The performers belonged to the Te Arawa tribal confederation, and they traveled from the city of Rotorua in New Zealand. They sailed on the S.S. Mariposa, debarked in San Francisco, then split into three groups and traveled 7500 miles cross country to Grand Central station. After reuniting with other members of their party, they reportedly boarded two open cars and toured the city. (I probably would have wanted to go crash at the hotel first.) The sight-seeing party was meant to be a sight themselves: they followed another car where a brass band played. The coverage of this publicity stunt reveled in the contrast between “savage” and “civilized” that the sight-seers embodied:

At intervals, as they proceeded along Broadway, they shouted their war cries and shook war clubs and spears at the surprised inhabitants of Manhattan. Their amiable smiles took the edge off their warlike demonstrations, however.

So what did their onstage performance look like? The men in the group performed a haka, the fierce challenge dance that many people today know because of the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby team. (I was going to mention Dwayne Johnson here too, but the Samoan version called the Siva Tau is different.) New York audiences absolutely loved it. One critic compared it favorably to the cheers and chants at Yale. Another talked about how much the ladies would enjoy seeing these paragons of masculinity.

“Scrapbook -- Hippodrome Season 1909-1910,” n.d. Series VII, box 57. R.H. Burnside Collection, Library of the Performing Arts.

“Supes” are supernumerary actors, typically extras in a crowd scene. Their “vociferations” appear comparable to the contemporary haka performances I’ve scene in terms of crouching posture and arm position.

New Zealand Maori tribe performing in the stage production Inside the Earth at the Hippodrome. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ace95ec1-ea57-290a-e040-e00a180618fb

The female performers do a poi dance where balls are spun rhythmically on the end of long strings. According to the reviews, both the haka and poi dances were performed at the beginning of Inside the Earth, ostensibly as part of the Chief’s birthday celebration. They are then interrupted by white men from the nearby mine who ask for their help in finding a white woman who has disappeared, the wife of the mining company’s superintendent. The male Māori find a “hideously made-up dwarf,” the lookout for a the tribal people who live inside the earth and have kidnapped the superintendent’s wife Rose Allen. The Chief translates between the mine owner and the dwarf. Eventually the miners travel to the “Palace in the Centre of the Earth” and rescue Rose Allen.

“Scrapbook -- Hippodrome Season 1909-1910,” n.d. Series VII, box 57. R.H. Burnside Collection, Library of the Performing Arts.

Several of the Māori women attended a women’s suffrage rally where Emmeline Pankhurst, the militant British suffragette, was the keynote speaker. Hosted by the League for Self-Supporting Women, the event seated representative career women on the dais along with the speakers. Their names are given as Kiri Matao, Waapi, and Erana. New Zealand granted women the franchise in 1893, but the article above includes the subhed “One of Them Has Been an Elector in Her Own Land for Twenty Years.” Not sure about the discrepancy — maybe voting for tribal/local/regional matters before, parliamentary in 1893? In any case, I love the thought of these women sitting on a platform 8700 miles from home, representing American women’s political future.

"Paying Off the Line" -- Pay days at the New York Hippodrome

In my research about the backstage life of the Hippodrome, I’ve run into a couple of sources about how performers and staff got paid. Between the two Saturday shows, everyone who punched in and out lined up at the pay window. Electricians and ballet girls, ticket takers and elephant trainers were each assigned a number. When they got a new time card for the week — like the one above— they kept the top half, sort of like a dry cleaning ticket. The bottom half was the time card, used to punch in and out for Monday morning rehearsals, and matinees and evening shows Monday-Saturday. Sunday was a day of rest, and more importantly theatrical performances were generally prohibited by blue laws, which I talk a bit about on the New York 1920s website here. (Performers sometimes got roped into “volunteering” their time for Sunday benefit shows.)

“The Saturday Pay Line Behind the Scenes at the New York Hippodrome,” The Theatre, December 1908.

The overly intrusive photo edits on some of the faces remind me of that botched fresco restoration in Spain.

Here’s a halftone reproduction of a photo from pay day. I like the visual echo between the chorus girl who’s fifth in line and the native performer standing next to her, both of whom wear feathered headgear. The other feature on the 1906-07 bill with Neptune’s Daughter was a spectacle called Pioneer Days that cast 100 Lakota Sioux performers. As I think about the role of indigenous performers in Hippodrome shows, I’m so excited to check out Christine Bold’s "Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s. You can read a short, open-access article that addresses part of her book’s argument here.

“Lining Up a Thousand Funmakers for an $18,000 Pay Day,” The New York World, 2/4/1910.

Found in “Scrapbook -- Hippodrome Season 1909-1910,” Series VII, box 57. R.H. Burnside Collection, Library of the Performing Arts, New York Public Library.

This illustration from a few years later gives another take on the variety of Hippodrome employees waiting for their pay envelopes. The fellow at the front of the line is Eddie Clark, who plays the male lead in A Trip to Japan. Behind him waits a stage carpenter and overalls. Some performers are clearly still in their costumes — Albertina Rasch wears the leotard and tights from The Ballet of the Jewels, while Hippodrome prima donna Nanette Flack appears in her kimono and elaborate geisha-style wig. Other front- and back-of-house workers share the line. Behind “Miss [Mabel] Dwight,” Trip to Japan'‘s ingenue in her enormous hat, stands a man in a vest and shirt sleeves. I’d guess that he’s maybe a stage hand? The shorter figure behind him, with cap pulled low over his eyes, looks like one of the boy ushers. At the far right, an inset picture lets readers know that if a chorus girl’s pay envelope jingles, she’s been fined. The deduction would most likely be taken for tardiness or absenteeism. I’m surprised that this illustration doesn’t include any of the people from the most-discussed act of this season. Inside the Earth featured Māori performers who traveled from New Zealand to San Francisco by boat and then to New York by train. These performers are fascinating, and their story merits a full blog post of its own. For now, I’ll leave you with this account, written by a New Zealander who discovers that his grandmother was one of the performers.

Ballet Girls Now Birds

I’m always excited when I find a newspaper story about the Hippodrome and instantly know that I want to write about it in the book. That’s what happened with my Monday find, “Birds of Various Feathers” from the Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh Post from October 4, 1908. I found it on newspapers.com but tracked down the original source, the New York Sun. The story has a different name, “Ballet Girls Now Birds,” and can be seen without a subscription through Chronicling America.

The article tells me a lot that I didn’t know about the backstage world of the Hippodrome, particularly the interactions between the ballet girls in the chorus, the dressers who get them in and out of costumes, and the wardrobe mistress who oversees everything, Frances Ziebarth (who I wrote about last summer). They all worked together to put on the ballet in the middle spot during fifth spectacular show at the Hippodrome, called “The Land of Birds.”

Two rows of bird ballerinas pose, showing off their costumes. From Life magazine, via Hathitrust.

The opening show was Sporting Days, notable for its onstage baseball game. The closer, Battle in the Skies, was a science-fiction story with airships and radium guns. In between, more than 200 chorus girls in elegant costumes performed in a ballet with a fairytale concept. A lumberjack’s daughter releases some birds that another workman has caught and caged. The hunter is angry; the little girl runs away and falls asleep in the forest. She dreams that avian companions take her to their land and dance for her. (Definitely in the same realm as the Nutcracker.) Hippodrome shows often included ballets, though the earlier ones were less about showcasing the physical prowess and beauty of particular star dancers (until Pavlova came in 1916) and more about gracefully moving large groups of women in attractive costumes.

Land of the Birds ballet girls with their “cold bottles,” the men who will take them to dinner

The newspaper story begins with a joke, illustrated in the picture above:

“They have a new name for the Johnnies who flit about the stage door at the Hippodrome these nights. They call them the cold bottles.”

This formulation reverses the usual phrase for Broadway men about town, who want to spend the night with a “hot bird and a cold bottle.” The hot bird, as you might suspect, is a double entendre that encompasses both the food you eat and the companion with whom you dine. (Chorus girls were also called “chickens” and in one revue got roasted on a spit, ugh.) The cold bottle is typically champagne, though here the funders of restaurant dinners get turned into consumables as well. The author of the newspaper article notes that since the ballet girls rehearsed this scene during the height of the summer heat, “the appellation ‘hot birds’ doesn’t seem so tremendously inappropriate as it otherwise might.” Living in the South and forever grateful for its omnipresent air-conditioning,I’m especially sympathetic to the discomfort of these performers who have to stick around NYC and learn their moves in heavy feathered costumes.

When the reporter asks one chorus girl, dressed in turquoise chiffon and a silk hat with pink trimmings, is a bird, the woman responds incredulously in Brooklynese, “Of course I’m a boyd. What’d you think I was? Goils, she wants to know if I’m a boyd, she does!” Some of the costumes are a bit more directly imitative, like the stork seen below. Some of the performers have a narrative role to play, while others are more decorative.

Stork design by Alfredo Edel via the Shubert Archive

The profile gave me such a clear sense of the silliness and camaraderie among the cast and crew. The woman who plays the stork has lost her prop baby, which one of the dressers sat on. When the baby is returned, the stork melodramatically thanks her for “My chile, my long lost chile!” I should note that this may be a riff on African American Vernacular English: Uncle Tom’s Cabin was among the most popular stage shows, after all. Though the theater audience was not racially segregated, the chorus girls in Hippodrome shows were all white or white-passing.

The dressers seem to be older women, and at least one is given an Irish lilt to her speech. One dresser recounts the story of the ballet to the reporter and then notes that she too had danced in the ballet in the era of Marie Taglioni and Fanny Ellsler; she’d worn a tarlatan skirt, but never a bird costume. I was happy to read this, since I don’t always have a sense of what happens to the ballet girls who age out of their profession.

Another place where the line between performer and costume shop worker was blurred: this story and another one two years later both note that when the chorus girls have down time between their onstage appearances, they sometimes use the Hippodrome sewing machines to make their own clothes. Frances Ziebarth says,

“You can tell how much harder the Bird Ballet is on the girls, when I tell you that last year that little paroquet in the corner made herself a complete set of lingerie and the cardinal was the envy of every bird in her set with a handmade outfit of twelve shirtwaists, all done right here in the dressing room between times. With the present ballet all the girls have time to make is changes — some of them have six during a performance. There’s no new lingerie and shirtwaists made this year, I can tell you.”

Even though they don’t have time to do their sewing in this production, the idea that chorus girls could use work equipment for their own ends made me smile. They are the ancestors of women copying their zines on the office Xerox machine and writing screenplays on work computers.

What this newspaper story really crystallized for me, though, was the need to think about the connection between the backstage labor of making a show and the onstage labor of performing it. That’s the subject of the awesome theater history I’m reading now, Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theater Labor by Christin Essin. So much of the Hippodrome aesthetic comes from collective labor and collective performance, from the prop makers to the ushers to the two hundred-plus ballet girls dressed as birds. I’m still thinking through the best structure for representing that collective labor in a book.

Single most charming artifact so far? Hippodrome Usher's Gazette

I’m finishing up my second week at the New York Public Library archives. The first week, I looked at scrapbooks and scripts and sheet music at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center. That would be the research library in closest proximity to Lincoln Center. Probably my single favorite find in the time I’ve spent here is the Hippodrome Usher’s Gazette, a biweekly newsletter published by the uniformed boys who helped Hippodrome patrons to their seats.

There are rosters of former employees in the Hall of Fame, poems written extolling the Hippodrome shows and mocking some of their coworkers who’ve gotten in trouble, even serialized adventure stories. I’ve only run across two issues so far, but they’ve got such Progressive Era boyish charm. I want to figure out what running the Hippodrome felt like for people onstage, designers and musicians, and the front of house staff like the guys who put out this paper. Glad there’s something left of their daily experience, as aw-shucks and constructed as it might be. Even if I am kind of imagining them as newsies from the musical.

Page one of the Hippodrome Usher’s Gazette

She Designs and Helps Make Six Thousand Dresses Per Year

In the dream version of my Hippodrome project, I’d write about the shows from the point of view of the many women performers, artists, and behind the scenes workers who made them possible. As I’m discovering (and as people writing any kind of hidden history already know), it’s easier to find information about the owner of the building or producer of the show and more challenging to find archives for a high diving mermaid or a wardrobe mistress. One of the best pieces of advice I took away from the BIO conference (Biographers International Organization, one of the best professional organizations I’ve joined) came from Pamela Newkirk. She said to look for traces of these people’s lives in the papers of the powerful. I’ll get to do that in the spring when I finally (COVID willing and the creek don’t rise) will get to go to the archives in New York and Austin.

In the meantime, I’ve been following research trails through one of my very favorite digital archives, Chronicling America. When you’re looking through old newspapers, searching for Hippodrome staff can sometimes turn up fun and revelatory profile pieces like this one:

Top of the Women’s Page from the New-York tribune., 19 July 1914. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. “Designs and Helps Make 6,000 Dresses Yearly” is the headline crossing the top of the page. One demure, younger women’s portrait on the bottom left, a photo of a car in front of a large house in the middle, an older and more imperious looking women’s portrait on the top right

Frances Ziebarth started working at the New York Hippodrome in 1906, assisting with the costumes for A Society Circus. She moved up in the ranks and became head of the wardrobe department, where she oversaw costume design, construction, and maintenance. (When you have twenty-four “water guards” walking into the water tank twice a day, maintenance is a big part of the job!) I haven’t tracked her all the way through her career, but the last show she gets Costume Design credit for is Happy Days, which ran from August 1919 through May 1920. The next step is historical stalking. I’ll look for traces of her on Ancestry.com and see if there are any more threads to pull on for now.

The Great War, popular performance, and James Weldon Johnson on Harry Lauder

I’ve gotten really interested in the ways that popular performance in NYC responded to the Great War. (This is what I almost always try to call WWI because, as I point out to students, that’s what people who lived through it called it because they didn’t know there was going to be a second one.) One of the chapters in my Gertrude Hoffmann biography talks about the response in vaudeville. Historian David Monod has an awesome article about American neutrality before the nation joined the war, particularly as that attitude was embodied in songs like “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” I suspect that Gertrude Hoffmann pulled her son Max Jr. out of military school to go on tour with the family not only because her chorus boys kept joining the military but because she thought her kid would too.

The New York Hippodrome spectacles leading up to the war ended up being very influential in stirring up patriotism and getting men to enlist. I have an article under review about the ways that the drama critic at socialist periodical The Masses charts the show’s evolution from perfunctory to full-throated nationalism during the lead-up to US involvement. The Masses got in a lot of trouble because of its anti-war stance, something that this Brooklyn Rail article describes. This cartoon by Art Young, called “Having Their Fling,” is pretty intense:

An editor, capitalist, politician, and minister dance onstage, showered with money and pro-war slogans while Satan conducts the orchestra of war in a box above them.

The newest Great War/Hippodrome artifact I came across was an essay in the African American newspaper The New York Age. James Weldon Johnson, one of the most important American writers and civil rights activists of the time, had a fairly regular column that frequently touched on the theater. (Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond wrote a number of Broadway songs, as well as the iconic “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”) Johnson went to a fundraiser for the United War Work Campaign of the YMCA that took place in October 1917. Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder delivered the keynote speech. What motivated Johnson to write a full column about this speech titled “Harry Lauder as an Orator?” Lauder tried to assert a kind of international white brotherhood; surprisingly, the rhetorical tactic fell flat. Here’s the full column:

James Weldon Johnson, Harry Lauder as an Orator.” The New York Age, October 25, 1917, sec. Views and Reviews.

I want to transcribe the end of the column, both because it’s so striking and because I hope this makes it accessible to more people.

Then it was that Mr. Lauder said the thing which was the cause of this article being written. In driving home the sentiment that in spite of past misunderstandings and antagonisms, American and Britons can now stand together, he shouted:

“We are all white!” (Pause).

“We are all white!” (Pause).

Undoubtedly, the speaker expected applause during his first pause. It did not come. In place, a chill seemed to sweep over the immense crowd. The speaker then shouted the phrase with greater force, but the words found no echo, the great audience that had risen to every stirring sentiment remained silent and unresponsive. It was curious. After the first, cold blast of the words had struck and passed over me, I tried to analyze the psychology of the crowd and to understand why the audience had not showered down when Lauder had shouted “We are all white!”

Was it because in the same instant there flashed across the minds of the men present a picture of black men from India, black men from North Africa, West Africa and South Africa, black men from the West Indies fighting and dying to save England and France?

Was it because in the same instant there rose in their minds the consciousness of the fact that in every war in which this country has fought it has had to depend in now small degree upon those who are now its black citizens?

Was it because there is at bottom a sense of fairness in the average white American which, in spite of the occasion and tense enthusiasm, made Mr. Lauder’s remarks sound small, mean and unfair?

Whatever the reason, there is satisfaction in the fact that this portion of the speech failed to arouse applause, and fell in silence.

I’m not yet sure how to process this moment, but I wanted to make sure it got recorded. I know that the drumbeat of war can rouse even latent white nationalism. It’s nice to hear about one moment where that attempt didn’t work. (Even if it was just because people in the audience hated the English.)

Making Plans and Finding Them

So here’s a story about research tenacity. On Friday I met (over Zoom) with a couple of fellow scholars who have researched parts of the New York Hippodrome’s history. It’s so lovely to chat with people who geek out at the same specific thing you know too much about. I hope we’ll be able to put a conference panel together soon. We talked about proposing a special issue for Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, which is just about the perfect venue for the hybrid circus/melodrama/extravaganza performances going on in the Hippodrome’s early years.

One of the folks in this research group had looked for the Hippodrome’s stage dimensions and list of equipment in Julius Cahn’s Official Theatrical Guide, which helped touring stage performers get from town to town and told them what to expect when they arrived. But the Hip doesn’t get listed in Cahn’s guide until 1910. I knew that Lost Broadway Theaters by Nicholas Van Hoogstraten ( Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) had good information, but where did they get their info? The appendix told me they were from The American Architect and Builder. I looked for the 1905 issues online, since that’s when the building opened. Google Books had the bound volumes with those issues, but they no longer had any illustrations. (This is one of the weird problems with studying older periodicals: the fashion plates get torn out of Godey’s Ladies Book, the Modernist Journals Project had to find original issues of the magazines they scanned in order to ensure they were archived cover-to-cover.) So I was not surprised. I popped over to my favorite place on the web, the Internet Archive, to see if they had the originals scanned. And of course they did: in fact, they have a collection of American Architect issues from 1876-1938. Illustrations are included. So, here’s the good stuff:

Plan for the first floor part 1, including proscenium, apron stage with 2 full-sized circus rings and a water tank underneath, and the floor seats.

Second part of the main floor (box office, lounges, etc.) and gallery seats.

The New York Hippodrome in cross-section

Hippodrome Mermaids

So the first part of my Hippodrome book that I’ve been able to fully research and draft an article about is the New York Hippodrome’s water tank and the mermaid performers who used it.

I’d love to be able to write about the experience of the performers using first-hand accounts. Unfortunately, women who wore spangled swimsuits and headdresses and worked in 1905 Times Square mega-theaters are not always the people whose papers get preserved in public archives. I’m really hoping there are some family members who kept their diaries and letters. According to the one Pinterest post I’ve found with names written on the pictures, these were the original Hippodrome mermaids: 1. Marion Pardue 2. Bernice Elser 3. Beryl Clifton 4. Hattie Dorsell 5. Kitty Watkinson 6. Angelina Pesslone 7. Margaret Townsend 8. Juanita Davis.

I’ve seen Margaret Townsend’s name other places too, as the “Queen of the Mermaids.”

If you recognize these names from family lore, please get in touch with me! I would love to write my book as a group biography of the women performers who made the New York Hippodrome so spectacular.

All Dressed Up with No Place to Go

I was pretty excited to start blogging about my research on the New York Hippodrome. Then COVID-19 hit. I now have two research fellowships (at the Harry Ransom Center and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) and no idea when I’ll be able to take them.

In the meantime, I’ve got a good chunk of digitized archival artifacts to review. Some of it’s cool visual materials like this still from Billy Rose’s Jumbo. Some of it’s written, like this script for “Cheer up: a colossal revusical comedy in three cheers.” But all of it is spectacular, understudied, and super exciting.