Five Points

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February 17, 2010 in History, Writing New York by Bryan

The aim of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was to situate Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass within the nineteenth-century city’s worlds of print, from the highbrow publishing industry to cheap print, penny presses, flash weeklies, and urban pornography. Depending on which Whitman critics you read, he hews closer to high or low. I suggested he wanted to have it both ways: ever a joiner, he wanted to bring together the best of both worlds.

At one point, while talking about the so-called “Flash press,” I did geek out considerably, telling the story of how a bundle of these rare “sporting” men’s periodicals, mildly pornographic and thoroughly anti-authoritarian, made their way from an early-20c sportswriter’s private collection into the American Antiquarian Society. For the last dozen years or so, cultural historians have been poring over them aiming to understand more about 19c New York subcultures of style, sexuality, and reading. Other rare examples of these magazines have turned up in the city’s municipal archives, where they were long ago submitted as evidence in a rash of obscene libel trials in the 1840s, right about the time Whitman was editing his nativist newspaper, The Aurora. I mentioned Donna Dennis’s account of this legal history last week; you can also read key samples of this material in an anthology published a few years ago by some urban historian whose work I admire quite a bit.

If you want to understand why I would geek out about the preservation of this sort of ephemera, let me just offer one example of the fascinating work these materials have allowed cultural historians to undertake. In the on-line quarterly Common-place a few years back, James Cook — a cultural biographer of P. T. Barnum and editor of a thoroughly engrossing Barnum reader — drew on some material from flash weeklies to tease out some new understanding of the mixed-race origins of American popular culture. He starts his piece by recalling Charles Dickens’ famous account of the a dance hall in the Five Points, which featured a black performer who later became famous as “Master Juba.” Later in his essay Cook points out that most people have assumed Dickens catapulted Juba to stardom, but some new evidence from flash weeklies helps us flesh out the story: “We now know a good deal more” about Juba than ever before, Cook writes. We know

that his real name was William Henry Lane, although he generally performed as Juba or Master Juba; that he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, during the late 1820s, part of the first generation of African Americans to come of age following emancipation; that soon after Dickens’s visit he became the first black man to break the color line in the minstrel industry; that he participated in a series of “match dances” against Master John Diamond, the leading Irish American minstrel dancer of the day; and that he used his growing fame to forge a more lasting and successful career in Britain, where he eventually performed for Queen Victoria.Most scholars have assumed that American Notes represented the starting point for Lane’s public career. But an anonymous letter to one of the flash papers offers a more complex history. An up-and-coming showman by the name of P.T. Barnum, it turns out, had recently managed a young black dancer known as Juba at New York’s Vauxhall Gardens. The letter also suggests that Barnum deceived the sporting fraternity in two ways. In 1840, he presented Lane as part of a conventional minstrel show, without informing his patrons that the man behind the burnt cork was black. In 1841, he took the deceit a step further, promoting the young African American virtuoso as John Diamond. Barnum even staged bogus “trials of skill” as part of the act, with wagers on Lane-as-Diamond to win!

For evidence of the hopelessly mixed racial origins of U.S. popular culture, this is about as good as it gets.

For cultural historians of 19c NYC, that’s about as good as it gets too. I recommend the rest of Cook’s fascinating essay, which includes topics that have turned up elsewhere in our course, from Five Points and Bowery B’hoys, to city mystery novels (including those by Ned Buntline, a guy I didn’t get a chance to mention, but who, in addition to writing racy novels was a ringleader in the Astor Place riots), to blackface and the Bowery Theatre. It’s a perfect slice of the Bowery world Whitman sometimes wandered into, eager to take his readers with him.

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Playing Drunk / Virtual Barnum

February 10, 2009 in City on Stage, History, Writing New York by Bryan | 1 comment

barnumatdesk300.jpgWe’ve been thinking about entertainment cultures in the 19c city lately. I mentioned in lecture last week what a significant role P. T. Barnum played in popularizing the theater among middle-class families by staging “moral” plays such as dramatic adaptations of H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, even earlier, extraordinarily popular temperance (anti-alcohol) plays such as W. H. Smith’s The Drunkard — which often featured an actual reformed drunk in the lead role, adding to the realism of the famous delirium tremens scene (when the drunk falls into a delusional fit on stage).

The Drunkard was, like Royall Tyler’s The Contrast before it, a Boston
play with a New York
setting. The New York
scenes contrast rural simplicity and come only when the protagonist, Edward Middleton, is at the
lowest point of his alcoholism. The city is a symbol of vice, a lack of
self-control. The municipal government’s inability to govern its inhabitants
(particularly in the notorious Five Points slum) mirrored the individual lack
of self-control that could lead to alcoholism, or “dipsomania,” at it was termed
then. The play was orignally staged in a museum in Boston; museums in the
nineteenth-century were a mixture of pop science and sheer sensationalism. They
might offer natural history specimens, but they could just as easily offer
freakish “curiosities” with spurious claims to authenticity. They also offered
popular readings, or “lectures”–sometimes even scenes from Shakespeare’s
plays–to audiences that perhaps would not attend the theater.

Barnum_American_Museum.jpg The Drunkard aimed both for those morally high-minded
audiences and for folks who were attracted to freakish displays. The
combination must have worked: It played for an unprecedented 101 nights in Boston in 1844.
Following its extraordinary success in Boston, Barnum, the owner of New
York‘s famous American
Museum, decided to expand
his own “lecture room” not once, but twice, eventually accommodating 3,000
people. These renovations were undertaken largely to accommodate The Drunkard‘s
extraordinary success. He hadn’t taken such steps before because his museum
neighbored the Park Theatre (on Park Row, just across the street from the southern tip of City Hall Park). But once the Park burned down (again) in 1849 and wasn’t rebuilt,
Barnum decided to venture into the theatrical business.

Barnum wasn’t
the inventor of the museum by any means, but he transformed the institution in significant
ways and became one of the most successful and famous showmen in America as a
result. In the early 1840s he bought an already existing museum and the stock
of another and launched his own enterprise. Older museums had attempted to
combine education, moral uplift, and amusement in order to refine their
audiences and, of course, to make money. Barnum understood better than earlier
museum owners that above all the public wanted novelty. He brought in trained
dogs, performing fleas, jugglers, ventriloquists, fat people, giants, dwarfs,
wax figures, scale models of the wonders of the world, Indians, and even the
“Feejee Mermaid.” Barnum also understood the
power of print: his advertisements literally papered the town; his illustrated museum guide a bestseller; and he
pioneered the celebrity autobiography.
Barnum also opened special hours for black patrons, which means two
things: his audiences were still carefully managed in important ways (in this case, segregated by race), but he also recognized blacks as a potential paying audience.

Alcool-CPA-_11-39KB.jpg Reform melodramas were the primary theatrical genre
on stage at museums like Barnum’s. This made their spaces safe for some
Protestants who would not attend the more established theaters. These plays
drew on sentimental and gothic elements in a way that bridged the gap between
traditional theater and the freak shows on display in museums. In this way you
can think of the delirium tremens scene in The Drunkard–reportedly one of its biggest draws–as something like a freak show. People
would pay good money to see someone insane with liquor, just like they would
pay to see the Quaker Giantess. One of the motivations would have been to make
themselves feel normal.

Reform
plays had been popular at least since the 18th century, but became much more
common with the explosion of reform movements and the rise of melodrama in the nineteenth century.
William Dunlap, the original manager at the Park, had a play called Thirty Years, or The Gambler’s Fate.
Another such play had the enticing title, Wine, Women, Gambling, Theft,
Murder, and the Scaffold. Just in case you got hooked by the first part of
the title, it wanted to let you know where that would lead you. A number of
other temperance plays were produced in The Drunkard‘s wake. These include The
Bottle, Another Glass, Life, or Scenes of Early Vice, The Curate’s Daughter,
Aunt Dinah’s Pledge, The Drunkard’s Warning, The fruits of the wine cup, and
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, an adaptation of the era’s most famous
temperance novel.

Barnum-conflagration.jpg Following a fire in the mid-1860s, Barnum gave up his
famous museum enterprise and turned his energies to the traveling circus–a form
that still bears his name. But he’s important to us not only because he stands,
in New York and American history, at the crossroads between popular
entertainment and dramatic literature, but because he illustrates a conception
of celebrity he shared with the stars of the stage: As one theater critic of
the day put it, “Barnum himself is one of the curiosities [on display in his
museum] and we scarcely know which people would go further to see–Barnum, the
sea serpent, or a real mermaid.”

For more on Barnum: The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in collaboration with The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, maintains the excellent Website “The Lost Museum,” which offers, among other things, a virtual tour of Barnum’s Museum and a “temperance archive.”

My favorite recent book on Barnum is Benjamin Reiss’s The Showman and the Slave, which examines in detail Barnum’s early career, in particular his claim to have on display a 161-year-old slave woman who had been George Washington’s nursemaid. The standard biography remains Neil Harris’s Humbug. The best book on temperance is John W. Frick’s Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America.

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World through a Monacle

February 4, 2009 in Odds and Ends, Writing New York by Bryan

FivePoints1827,jpg.jpg

This morning in lecture I mentioned — while showing this familiar image of the Five Points — that the little fellow up front to the left, the one with the top hat, always reminds me of Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker‘s monacled mascot.

Turns out this week’s magazine includes the results of the 2008 Eustace Tilley contest, in which readers were invited to redesign Tilley for the contemporary city. Lots of people submitted Obamafied versions; lots of representations of a homeless Tilley too (which, along with Tilley the suicidal investment banker, seemed to speak to our current economic crisis).

Here are a couple of my favorites; the rest of the entries can be found here.

watchmen tilley.jpgbanksy tilley.jpg

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