While it's well known as the center of New York’s commercial theater district, it’s probably lesser known today that for over 30 years, Times Square was also the headquarters for a type of theatre as exciting and bewilderingly diverse as “The Deuce” itself: vaudeville.

No one, across the face of the entire globe, is so jaded that they could ever be bored in Times Square. A perpetual explosion of color and motion, an astounding confluence of people and industries, it’s the home of New York’s busiest and largest subway stop, the world’s densest and most dazzling profusion of advertising signage, and major headquarters for most of the major media and entertainment empires.

While it's 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 bewilderingly 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 burgeoning 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.

If all the Olympia had to offer was cheese like the Cherry Sisters, Hammerstein would have been rapidly laughed out of town, or at least down to the Bowery. But, as an opera impresario, he had the rare know-how to offset his tastelessness with doses of taste. Among the class acts he imported for the Olympia Music Hall in the late 90s were French chanteuse Yvette Guilbert, England’s greatest music hall comedian Dan Leno (no relation to Jay), Italian quick-change artist Leopoldo Fregoli.

Despite these world class attractions, the gargantuan Olympia collapsed under its own weight (not literally but financially) and folded after just three years of operation, its various theatres cut up and distributed amongst various other producers.

Hammerstein was down but not out. Without a penny to his name, he began to work his way back, managing to patch together the funds to build a grand new Longacre Square theatre on the other side of Broadway. Opened in 1898, he called this new theatre “the Victoria” in commemoration of his victory over adverse circumstances. (The fact that it also happened to be the name of the century’s most popular human being couldn’t have hurt). For the first 3 seasons the Victoria showcased mostly legit plays and musicals. In 1902, under the management of Oscar’s son Willie, the format switched to vaudeville, and the Victoria began to truly make its mark.

“If E.F. Albee owned the body of vaudeville, “said Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Jr. in their book Show Business, “Willie Hammerstein owned its heart and soul”. Will Rogers concurred, “We have never produced another showman like Willie Hammerstein.” Not for Willie this opera nonsense of his father’s. Willie’s philosophy was “the best seats in a theatre for a producer are seats with asses in them.” Distinct among other Big Time vaudeville theatres of the day, a side show atmosphere prevailed at Hammerstein’s Victoria.

From 1902 until shortly before its closing in 1915, the Victoria was the prime showplace of Big Time vaudeville. Will Rogers called it “the greatest vaudeville theatre of that and all time.” Buster Keaton praised the Victoria as “vaudeville at its all time best.”

Willie Hammerstein harnessed public attention through the more sensational papers of his day, notably Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and W.R. Hearst’s Morning Journal. Willie invented the freak act, which comprised not only obvious side-show fare like Rahja the snake charmer from Coney Island, but a whole succession of tabloid headline acts as well, such as Nan Patterson “the Singing Murderess”, and “Shooting Stars” Ethel Conrad and Lillian Graham, so called because they’d shot up a dude named Web Stokes. (Such stories later provided the inspiration for the musical Chicago.) In 1913 he booked Evelyn Nesbitt Thaw, one of the original Floradora girls, whose jealous husband Harry K. Thaw had shot famous architect Stanford White, throwing both press and public into an uproar. Fortuitously, during the run, Thaw escaped from prison, pushing box office through the roof.

In 1907, Hammerstein had Gertrude Hoffman, one of his own acts, arrested for indecency, just for the publicity. In 1908, he picked up a stone-faced woman named Sober Sue in Philadelphia, and offered a cash prize to any comedian who could make her laugh. It remained a mysterious and impossible task for many years, though it later emerged that the intractable woman’s facial muscles were paralyzed, making laughter out of the question.

He loved to book famous people on the strength of their fame alone, for he knew that, though their acts could be incredibly lame, their drawing power wasn’t. As such, athletes like Babe Ruth, John L. Sullivan and Jack Johnson; cartoonists like Windsor Mackay, Bud Fisher, and Rube Goldberg; explorers like Captain Cook; and Lady Hope and the Hope Diamond graced his stage. He presented Helen Keller as an act. He also presented Sadakichi Hartmann, who gave a “perfume concert” using a special machine that produced the scents of lilacs, and other artificial aromas. He was cancelled after one performance, which is a pity, for I feel certain it would have been the one act Ms. Keller could have appreciated.

Understand that these acts were just the icing on the cake; they gave the place its special flavor. When combined with the requisite assortment of singers, comedians, acrobats, magicians and so forth, it was the best variety show in town. You got your money’s worth at Hammerstein’s. In fact, you got too much. The shows (two daily) were over fours hour long: a matinee from 1:45-6pm, and an evening one from 7:45-12am! Nobody with a life stayed for the whole show.

The other amenity offered by the Victoria was the roof garden, which permitted the management to continue presenting vaudeville shows throughout the summer in those hellacious days before air conditioning. The roof was advertised to be several degrees cooler than street level, though with the sun beating down up there; it was actually many degrees hotter. Willie corrected that effect by heating the elevator that brought the customers up, so that stepping out onto the roof actually felt like a relief.

To the distress of vaudevillians and their New York audiences, Hammerstein passed away in 1914. The Victoria lasted until 1915, when it was converted to a movie house called the Rialto. By that time, big time vaudeville had a new home anyway, the most famous theatre of all: The Palace.

Built in 1913 as the flagship for the big time vaudeville circuit run by E.F. Albee (grandfather of the playwright) and Martin Beck, manager of the Western Vaudeville Managers Association, the Palace was the perfect showplace for the biggest of big time vaudeville during the last two decades of its existence. The Palace became a show business Mecca. All the top acts would play there: Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, the Marx Brothers, Nora Bayes, Smith and Dale, Frank Fay, Jack Benny…the list goes on and on. The Palace was a cherished showcase gig because the audience was full of bookers, scouts, agents, and fellow performers. Comedian Ed Lowry said opening day at the Palace was as exciting as the Kentucky Derby. The sidewalk out front, called the Palace “beach” was a popular hangout for industry professionals looking to network. For a vaudevillian, to have “played the Palace” was to have died and gone to heaven. Which is why that expression lives on in popular idiom, long after anyone even remembers what it used to mean.

Only a vaudevillian who has trod its stage can really tell you about it. Audiences can tell you about who they saw there and how they enjoyed them, but only a performer can describe the anxieties, the joys, the anticipation, and the exultation of a week’s engagement at the Palace. The walk through the iron gate on 47th Street through the courtyard to the stage door, was the cum laude walk to a show business diploma. A feeling of ecstasy came with the knowledge that this was the Palace, the epitome of the more than 15,000 vaudeville theatres in America, and the realization that you have been selected to play it. Of all the thousands upon thousands of vaudeville performers in the business, you are there. This was a dream fulfilled; this was the pinnacle of variety success.
-- Jack Haley

The Palace became the focal point of a new twentieth-century aesthetic of snazz, of pizzaz, of (as Variety abbreviated it) “show biz”. The breezy new spirit was perhaps embodied most successfully in the personality of Bob Hope, wisecracking, confident, comfortable – here was the future.

At least, that’s the way it seemed at the time. As we know today, entertainment’s future, already a million dollar industry by the time of vaudeville’s founding, came on little strips of celluloid. By 1932, the Palace was only the last straight two-a-day Big time vaudeville house left in New York, and the flagship of the R.K.O. chain, which was not only a movie theatre chain, but a production company as well. That last Palace two-a-day (May, 1932) is considered by some to be the symbolic end of vaudeville. In July of that year, the Palace played its first feature film (Eddie Cantor’s The Kid from Spain) and from then on continued experimenting with various combinations of vaudeville and films until 1935, when they dropped the vaudeville format altogether (although it would be revived sporadically as late as the 1950s). Today, the Palace theatre is a top Broadway house, the present home of “All Shook Up”. The nearby Martin Beck theatre (at45th Street), named for the Palace’s founder, was renamed the Al Hirschfeld in 2003. The history is still there; you just have to look a little harder for it.

Trav S.D. is the author of the forthcoming NO APPLAUSE – JUST THROW MONEY: THE BOOK THAT MADE VAUDEVILLE FAMOUS, to be published in November 2005 by Faber and Faber, an imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2005 D. Travis Stewart. All rights reserved.

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