| Vaudeville's Mark in Times Square |
| Written by Trav S.D. | ||||||||
Page 1 of 3  Theater entrepreneur Oscar Hammerstein I, grandfather of the lyricist  Union Square in its vaudeville heyday While its well known as the center of New York’s commercial theater district, it’s probably lesser known today that for over 30 years, it was also the headquarters for a type of theatre as exciting and bewildering diverse as “The Deuce” itself: vaudeville. If Times Square is the Crossroads of the World, vaudeville was its theatrical equivalent. Over the course of a couple of hours a vaudeville audience might encounter singers, comedians, musicians, dancers, trained animals, female impersonators, acrobats, magicians, hypnotists, jugglers, contortionists, mind-readers, and a wide variety of strange uncategorizable performers usually lumped into the category of “nuts”. In a vaudeville show you could have everything: from the puritanical to the licentious, from the patriotic to the anarchistic; from idolaters of wealth to egalitarians; and on and on. The ethnic variety of vaudeville made it the theatrical equivalent of the melting pot. Black, white, Jew, gentile, men, women, children, Irish, Italian, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, shoulder to shoulder, toe to toe, cue to cue. The hat rack in the dressing room had top hats, derby hats, fedoras, turbans, sombreros, bejeweled head-dresses and Apache war bonnets. All were equally important. It was a world where a nightclub dancer like Joe Frisco could meet an opera singer like Enrico Caruso backstage, and say, “Hey, Caruso, don’t do ‘Darktown Strutters Ball’. That’s my number and I follow you.” High art, low art, and no art stood cheek by jowl. Like George Jessel’s act of the same name, these disparate personalities were all sewn together like “patches from a crazy quilt.” As ideally suited as vaudeville and Times Square were to each other, the match didn’t take place until the eve of the 20th century. It is interesting to note that New York’s theatrical district has always been located at the geographical heart of the city. As the city expanded further and further uptown, that heart moved with it. The early nineteenth century theatres were located near what is now the financial district and city hall. Then, as thousands of immigrants moved to the city thanks to improved sea travel, the Bowery became a center for populist amusements, with dime museums, salons and theatres making the street something like Times Square, Coney Island, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditoriums, and Atlantic City rolled into one. In the 1880s, a more genteel “Rialto” was established around Union Square not far from the new department stores now enjoyed by the burgeoining middle class. In the next couple of decades, the focus shifted almost glancingly to what is now the Flatiron district around 23rd Street…to the area around Herald Square at 34th…inexorably to its final home at 42nd Street, the plot once known as Longacre Square. In 1895, opera impresario Oscar Hammerstein (grandfather of the famous Broadway lyricist) bought several lots on the east side of Broadway between 44 and 45th streets and erected the Olympia Theatre. This mammoth multiplex contained several separate theatres: the Music Hall (seating 4000), the Lyric theatre (seating 1800), a 600 seat concert hall, bowling alleys, a pool room, several lounges, smoking rooms, Turkish baths, plus a roof garden. His three sons (Willie, Arthur and Harry) helped him run the place. In the Olympia’s Music Hall, where vaudeville was presented, the Hammersteins demonstrated a flair for showmanship unmatched by any of their contemporaries. They managed to make a mint, for example, on the Cherry Sisters, an act that has become notorious in theatrical lore as the worst ever presented in vaudeville. This horrid quintet, sang off-key, told unfunny jokes, and stepped all over each other’s toes in the dance numbers. Audiences paid good money just to throw vegetables at them.
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