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.

Venice in New York: Arthur Voegtlin's Immersive Environments

I’m writing an article for an upcoming issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film on the topic of the New York Hippodrome’s first season. I am way more comfortable in the twentieth century than the nineteenth, but the NY Hippodrome definitely put on shows that drew from Victorian era performance. For my piece, I look at the nineteenth-century traditions of scene painting drawn on by Arthur Voegtlin, along with the ways he reflects on those experiences and how the size and scale of the Hippodrome pushes him in new directions.

Final of The Black Crook via Library of Congress Prints and Photos Division. http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/var.1527/

Arthur Voegtlin’s father William was a scene painter, best known for painting the backgrounds for the 1870 revival of The Black Crook. Arthur worked with his father for a bit, then struck out on his own, painting backdrops for the comedies of Charles H. Hoyt. The biggest comission Arthur Voegtlin received before he was hired at the Hip came from bandmaster John Duss, then the leader of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

John Duss in his bandleader’s uniform via https://sites.google.com/site/pittsburghmusichistory/pittsburgh-music-story/classic/john-duss

Duss was apparently a bit of a huckster, more interested in showmanship and making money than he was in music. Harper’s Weekly calls him the “P.T. Barnum of the Musical World.” Duss took over the main space in Madison Square Garden (the Stanford White-designed one) for a series of summer concerts in 1903. He wanted to create a beautiful, classy, immersive space for these events. Inspired by an island setting at another show in the same space, Duss decided he wanted to approximate the experience of Venice for his audience. He writes of the plan in his autobiography The Harmonists:

With an island “stage” for the orchestra, and a huge Venetian backdrop, I proposed to encircle the island with a canal, span it with bridges and float a number of gondolas manned by real Venetian boatmen.

So he called on Arthur Voegtlin.

Postcard of the exterior of Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden

Voegtlin designed a model of the interior decorations, which was presented at his studio to publicize the upcoming event. Along with the canals and island imagined by Duss, Voegtlin added rose-lined entranceways, a drop curtain painted with St. Mark’s Campanile and the Doge’s Palace framed by the Adriatic, several replicas of buildings both real and imagined — the house of Desdemona, Othello’s wife in the Shakespeare play being among the latter.

The design for Venice as it appeared in Harper’s Weekly April 11, 1903 via hathitrust.org

Tiffany Studios reportedly loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Venetian marble objects to complete the scene, including statues and fountains. The audience paid up to three dollars apiece (the equivalent of around $100 today) to sit at cafe tables next to the fake river. Guests didn’t know what to make of the event, which mixed the informality of roof garden shows where you could eat and drink at your table with the formality of listening to diva Lillian Nordica and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra playing selections from Wagner. The performance mixed signifiers of high class performance with low-key summer entertainment.

Canals of Venice, Dreamland, Coney Island, public domain via https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/file_sets/zg64tp22d

That same summer, visitors to Coney Island could take a tour through the new exhibit called The Canals of Venice, a ride that offered similarly “authentic” views of the city without the added attraction of classical music and Tiffany marble surroundings. Regardless of the price range for their ticket, everyone wanted to take a virtual trip to Venice that summer.

In a few years, once he’d befriended Frederic Thompson and Skip Dundy, Arthur Voegtlin would start making these kind of immersive environments at Thompson and Dundy’s Coney Island venue Luna Park. In addition to his work building and painting sets for the Hippodrome, Voegtlin designed and wrote scenarios for the historical pageants put on at Luna Park throughout the summer. Voegtlin designed an Old West environment for his “Great Train Robbery,” along with a mining camp for the later “Days of ‘49.” Much much later, after the Hippodrome had gone through many owners and renovations and formats, long after he was unceremoniously fired by the Shubert Brothers in 1915, Voegtlin returned for one last production in 1925 called “Verdun,” recreating a battle from the Great War. Even after that, in 1929, Voegtlin served as a consultant for Morris Gest’s Passion Play, where the Hippodrome’s opulent lobbies were redone to suggest the periods depicted in the production, including the Roman Empire and Middle Ages.Voegtlin wanted the audience immersed in the reality of a production’s time and place, no matter when or where it was.

Where to Begin? Frederick Thompson at the Columbian Exposition

It’s winter break here in Auburn, Alabama. We’re not likely to have snow for Christmas, but we are due for some below-freezing temperatures and windchills in the teens. I’m thankful to be from the Midwest and so still in possession of a few good winter coats.Winter break is a weird time, full of a lot of conflicting impulses: resting, holiday prep, course prep, hanging our with family, and, of course, trying to get some writing done.

I have two writing projects for the spring:
1) Co-editing and writing an article for a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Film, which will be about the first season at the New York Hippodrome.

2) Writing a sample chapter to complete my trade proposal for the group biography of the New York Hippodrome

So I’m thinking about the Hip from academic and popular points of few. In both cases, though, I’m starting at the same place, what I’m starting to think of as the genesis of the New York Hippodrome. And I think the place where the New York Hippodrome was born is the Chicago World’s Fair.

Rand Mcnally And Company. Bird's eye view of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago. [S.l, 1893] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/98687181/.

There were thousands of people who helped create the New York Hippodrome’s schedule, but it was arguably the brainchild of Fred Thompson, the architect and mind behind the first spectacles produced there.) Here’s Thompson at a more established point in his career:

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

When I went to the Ransom Center last spring, I found a lot of cool things about the Hippodrome. But maybe the most important thing I found was a letter that Fred Thompson wrote to his parents when he was a twenty year-old working at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Thompson worked at a bunch of world’s fairs around the turn of the twentieth century. He met his partner Elmer Dundy at the Omaha world’s fair and collaborated with him in Buffalo before they went in on Luna Park, the Coney Island venue that made their names as purveyors of amusements. This is before all of that.

My photo of the letterhead for Fred Thompson’s letter home to his folks from the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893, which is part of the Theater Arts Mss. Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

The World’s Columbian Exposition was a big deal to Chicago (see Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City) and it’s been a big deal to scholars of twentieth-century culture (see every American studies book in the past 30 or 40 years). And from what I can tell, it was a similarly big deal to the twenty year-old Thompson. His biographer Woody Register says Thompson “worked as a janitor and later a ‘demonstrator’ at one of the industrial exhibits and supplemented his income by stringing articles and sketches for a Chicago newspaper.” In the letter held by the Ransom Center, Thompson takes a day off from his demonstrator role and takes in the sights of the White City’s central area, the Court of Honor. He loves the contrast between the natural light of the sunset and the electric lights picking out the facades of the buildings surrounding the lagoon. He stays in one spot as the dark comes on and the electric light intensifies. I love this postcard image of the Court of Honor by moonlight:

Davis, George R. (George Royal). Picturesque World’s Fair : An Elaborate Collection of Colored Views : Comprising Illustrations of the Greatest Features of the Word’s Columbian Exposition and Midway Plaisance : Architectural, Artistic, Historical, Scenic and Ethnological. Chicago : W.B. Conkey, 1894. http://archive.org/details/picturesqueworl00davi.

He sees a statue at one end of the lagoon and imagines it as an allegory for classical culture being faced with modern life:

The search light on the Manufacturers Bldg turned its silvery rays upon the fountain directly in front of me, and revealed, standing out in bold relief, the figure of Father Time at the helm of the ship Columbia. In the striking contrasts of light and shadows he appeared in a much surprised attitude, surprise was even pictured upon his countenance. Can you wonder at it? as he sees himself guiding a ship, which in itself is a perfect gem, manned by a crew of nymphs, perfect in form and features, and whose grace is incontestable. The ship heads down a lake whose beauty he himself would never have dreamt possible. Mermaids sporting in the water about him, while the fountain is spurting up jets of silver from numberless mouths. Farther down the lagoon he sees gondolas, fantom like, quietly gliding over the placid waters, while in strange contrast to the slow, laborious but picturesque craft of Venice, there swiftly glides by a boat of graceful lines, propelled by no visible power.

‘’Photographs of the World’s Fair: An elaborate Collection of Photographs of the Buildings, Grounds and the Exhibits of the World’s Columbian Exposition with a special description of The Famous Midway Exposition’’, The Werner Company, Chicago, 1894 via wikimedia.

Thompson’s letter identifies so many things about the spectacle surrounding him that get picked up in the Hippodrome’s design, from colored lights and fountains to mermaids and Neptune. I really think the Hippodrome’s 14-foot deep water tank was included in the design of the stage from the beginning because of Thompson’s love for water features in world’s fairs, a love that began in Chicago. There’s lots more that I want to do with the letter, thinking about how these technological sights make him super nostalgic for home, but only for a home where he can imagine a similarly overwhelming and modern spectacle on the river next to a Nashville farm. He imagines a boat too, one that is human-powered like the fountain’s barge but silent and modern like the motor-powered gondolas. I feel like this is the starting point, but I can’t quite articulate why yet. For now, enjoy the pictures and the dreams of a kid still in awe of other peoples’ spectacles but on his way to creating his own.



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

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.

Female Maori performers sit in a line facing right, with a line of male Maori performers behind them who hold poles horizontally over their heads. The setting visible behind them includes stage versions of two thatched roofs and a painted backdrop

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.

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.