As a part of my favorite summer writing time, #1000 Words of Summer, I have been working on a new chapter for my Hippodrome book. I didn’t want to start at the beginning (too much pressure) and my brain has been in the 1930s for a chapter I’ll be working on sometime down the road about Billy Rose’s Small Time Cavalcade. It was a live stage show featuring a bunch of old-fashioned vaudeville performers, with some acts going two or three at a time. These would have made an apt introduction for the movie on the same bill, Diamond Jim, because they all hit their prime in the 1890s and 1900s and were than decidedly retro.
Newspaper ad for Diamond Jim and the “Small-Time Cavalcade” show at the Chicago vaudeville/movie theater called the Palace. c. late 1935-early 1936. Via https://rss.listal.com/movie/diamond-jim/concept-art
Since my brain was residing in that decade, I decided to work on the last chapter before the Hippodrome gets demolished. In my book proposal chapter outline, I call it “Boxing, Wrestling, and Jai Alai,” but right now my mental version of the title is “Mike Jacob’s Offices, or Boxing and Anti-Fascism.”
Jacobs, circa 1942 ringside at the Henry Armstrong/Barney Ross bout at the Madison Square Garden Bowl, Long Island City, Queens, New York on May 31, 1938. Los Angeles Daily News via Wikimedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Jacobs_(boxing)#/media/File:Mike_Jacobs_1942.jpg
Doesn’t that picture look like a mug shot? It’s a ringside picture of Mike Jacobs, who leased the Hippodrome from May 1936 until the bank told everyone to move out in the summer of 1939. Jacobs was a boxing promoter, most famous for championing Joe Louis in his series of fights against German heavyweight (and stand-in for the ascendant Nazi party) Max Schmeling.
Frame advertisement for the rematch between Louis and Schmeling in June 1938.Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. https://collections.si.edu/search/record/ark:/65665/fd5af0e213de1e34db0b3cb952722679cde
The eagle-eyed among you may notice that these tickets were on sale at the N.Y. Hippodrome. That’s where Jacobs kept an office. The 5200-seat venue was an ideal spot for scheduling fighters on their way up through the ranks. That way, he could build interest in a boxer before he was booked in Madison Square Garden (capacity around 20k) or Yankee Stadium (maybe 70k at the time).
Chapman, John. “Sidewalk Specs.” New York Daily News, 30 Apr. 1933, p. 24.Via newspapers.com
Jacobs grew up on the Lower East Side, only attending school through the sixth grade. Then started as a newsboy around Union Square, where he was given two free tickets to a boxing match one night. Instead of going to watch the fight, he sold the tickets for twice their face value. The picture shared above shows him in the early days of this line of work. Pal Damon Runyon (then a sportswriter and co-investor in Jacobs’s Twentieth Century Sporting Club) ended a story on Jacobs’s plans for the Hippodrome by noting his friend’s “great affection for the Hipp, which you can understand when he explains, ‘I made $50,000 in one year on tickets to the show there in the old, old days.’”
By the 1920s, his ticket reselling business had grown to the point where he rented an office on 49th street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. This area was jokingly called “Jacobs’ Beach,” reports Jimmy Breslin, “because the fight managers used to lean against the wall of the ticket agency and lift their faces to the sun.” Breslin, Jimmy. Damon Runyon. New York : Ticknor & Fields, 1991. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/damonrunyon0000bres.247-248.
Other places around that area took on the name too, including the sidewalk in front of Lindy’s all-night diner and in front of the Garden. Jacobs started working with fight promoter Tex Rickard to publicize bouts at at the third iteration of Madison Square Garden, which opened in 1925 on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets. (Extreme side note: the version of MSG shown in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is this one, or something very much like it.)
Max Schmeling beat Joe Louis the first time they fought, on June 18, 1936. Then he wanted a chance at the heavyweight championship. James Braddock held the title, and Schmeling had beaten a serious contender. Schmeling was ready to fight Braddock at the Garden. Enter the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, Inc.
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“Oppose Maxie’s Fight Here.” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 19 Nov. 1937, p. 36.
The group protested the Nazi government’s persecution of Jewish people. They “nearly pulled off an official boycott of the Berlin Olympic Games,” according to Lewis Erenberg. And they called for a boycott of Schmeling fights because they would help fund the Third Reich. The picture above comes from a protest outside the Hippodrome that took place in late fall. Even though the fight was scheduled for Madison Square Garden, these protestors took their message to Jacobs. They may have thought the message would resonate with him in particular because he was Jewish. (Schmeling, too, had a Jewish manager.) But Jacobs was not persuaded. He had rented the Hippodrome to the German-American Bund at the end of October. A brief story carried on sports pages around the country read
“Mike Jacobs kidding the anti-Nazi picket in front of the Hippodrome who carries sign reading: ‘Mike Jacobs rents the Hipp to the nazis’…’So what?’ asks Mike…’I rent it to the Jews too, don’t I?’””
Not really sure what to do with that, but history is complicated. Jacobs did rent the theater to a number of Popular Front, Anti-Nazi, and Spanish Republican groups as well. And the good news, which you may already know, is that Joe Louis soundly and rapidly beat Max Schmeling in their 1938 rematch. The fight was over in two minutes and four seconds, “the shortest heavyweight title in history” according to Erenberg (Greatest Fight of Our Generation 145).
Back to the Hippodrome office, or rather offices. One was a busy crossroads of sportswriters, boxing managers, ticket speculators, and hangers-on. The other one, where he went to get work done in peace and quiet, was in a a repurposed women’s bathroom. I guess there weren’t as many ladies using the washroom when the Hipp mostly hosted boxing, wrestling, basketball, and jai alai matches! According to a New Yorker profile from 1946, a representative from NBC named John F. Royal visited Jacobs in his second hideaway in spring of 1939. So we’ll leave him there in peace and quiet for now.