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.