The Old Bowery: Stage to the Past

Harshil Patel 2004 The Old Bowery: Stage to a City’s Past By the time of the Civil War, a radical change was upon the United States. While bastions of plantation life fell, the realm of industry expanded, thus beginning the road to industrialization. This transformation, in addition to changing the nation’s economy, led to the growth of cities, and these cities created an entirely different social life for many Americans. The urbanization of the United States led to a conversion in thoughts and tastes of American, especially hose who lived within the cities. These people were usually the working class, who could not afford anywhere else and the effects of industrialization were greatest on them, as indicated by certain areas of daily life. One of these indicators is how city-dwellers spent their little leisure time. Thus, entertainment reflected the transformation of Americans. In particular, theaters, such as the Old Bowery in New York City, altered their shows and plays to accommodate this new life. In fact, the change of the Bowey occurs synchronously with the changes in urban population and immigration, a major factor of urbanization. However, it is important to note that the middle and wealthy classes did not change as much, since their lives allowed them to reside in the comfortable outskirts of the city. Thus, neither their lives nor theaters were altered. This difference in palates for entertainment hinted at a much deeper schism between the working and upper classes. Theaters may seem only an innocuous place of enjoyment, but in the era of so much change, nothing is left unaltered.

Many held the Old Bowery Theater, in the early 1860s, in quite high regard, even though its patrons were not as wealthy as those who frequented the shows on Broadway. As seen in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, a novel written in that time, the poorer classes of people most often used it. The protagonist of the novel, Dick, was a shoeshine on the streets of New York, yet he was able to afford seeing a play at the Bowery from time to time 1. When even bootblacks and other very low-wage workers are able to afford going to the theater, it is not likely that anyone but the working class of New York would come to see plays there. Furthermore, the Bowery was not far from the notorious Five Points, an intersection between five lanes, and the meeting point of the surrounding poor areas. Despite the unsavory location and rather downtrodden populace that became its audience, the Bowery Theater, in that age, still held a very high reputation. In fact, the New York Times, whose ideas often reflected those of the people of New York, gave much attention to the Bowery Theater. On August 31, 1860, an article was printed about the Bowery, which had recently come under new management 2. This article compared the Bowery to the theaters of Broadway, in decoration and performance. The show discussed was also regarded as one of the best plays in the city. Of course, this incident was not the only of its kind. For the next several years, the Bowery held plays of such praise. For example, later that year, on September 11, 1860, the New York Times’ praise continued, congratulating the excellent performance of Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale.” 3 Performance of Shakespeare was quite an oddity for even Broadway theaters, according to the article, and that for the Bowery to do it so well was even more amazing. To hold such praise and respect from actual theatrical critics, as those who did the amusements section of the New York Times, while also being in one of the poorest areas of New York City, marked the Old Bowery Theater as a true gem in the soot and smog of the industrial city.

Harshil Patel 2004 For several years, the Bowery held its respected position, being regularly mentioned in the New York Times, and often lauded for its performances. However, by the mid-1870s, a change in the theater’s performances and material had arisen. Rather than the Shakespearean plays, it showed works of much lower literary talent, and much more sensationalism in the productions. Once more, the New York Times took note of the changes and the theatrical critics conveyed their disappointment. For example, on September 30, 1874, an articled printed about the play from the night before exclaims, unlike the plays in the past, last night’s play focused a great deal on special visuals and newly painted colors of the sets, rather than the actual play 3.

This focus on the effects of the play, rather than on the play, had become a recurring event at the Bowery. Four years after this article, the Bowery had gone through major renovation, as discussed in the Times on June 30, 1878, and the changes returned some of the beauty of the hall but did nothing to return quality to the plays4. In this article, the plays included a farce, which is a type of parody, but in earlier years, such shows would not have been seen at the theater.

By 1890, the end of the Gilded Age, the Bowery was no longer considered the same theater that once showed Shakespeare and came second only to Broadway. That earlier theater remained as a memory and a threshold to compare new “legitimate” theaters, such as the Fourteenth Street Theater5. Critics, through the New York Times, agreed that the heyday of the Old Bowery Theater had come and gone.

This loss of respect by critics did not correlate to a lower audience turnout. Rather, the turnout to the Bowery remained strong as ever, which leads to the question as to what caused this difference between the writers and critics, who disapproved of the material, and the audiences that still loved to watch the productions? This question is what relates the changes in the theater to the greater changes of the city, and its answer lies in one of the largest factor of urbanization in the United States: immigration. According to the third edition of The Unfinished Nation Volume 2, by Alan Brinkley, this era was a time of a great influx of immigrants from Europe to New York. In fact, the book states that by 1890, eighty percent of New York City’s population was from immigration6. The immigration population in 1860, though significant, was no way near this amount, and most cities consisted of mainly the “native stock,” or people who were not immigrants. In fact, in Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger does not mention any people who are from any other nation, even though the protagonist lives and works in the area in which most immigrants would come to live. The change in demographics of the city in this time period occurs simultaneously with the changes of the Bowery. The immigrant groups, once in New York, seem to congregate, and create neighborhoods based on ethnicity. The lane on which the Bowery Theater resided also having the name of Bowery, became a place where these groups would often mix, because the neighborhoods converge at Five Points, not far from the Bowery Theater. With the arrival of immigrants the Bowery’s changes were appropriate, since it had always provided for the working class, and in the later part of the era, the working class was not the same group of people as in the 1860s. According to an article in the Times, from March 28, 1880, the Bowery had become a German music hall, and no longer had the visits of the bootblacks or newsboys7. Thus, in order to cater for the needs and wants of the new working class, the Bowery changed from the respected theater of the 1860s to a German music hall, hardly ever mentioned in the pages of the New York Times, unless to mention the death of one of the Bowery’s past stars.

Harshil Patel 2004 The writers at the The New York Times, as well as the writers of letters to the editor, were assuredly not from the working, mostly unschooled class of the city. Instead, the New York Times’ opinion came closest to middle class opinion (for this discussion, middle class shall include the wealthy because their tastes were similar to the middle class’s tastes) . As seen through its articles, the New York Times’ attitude towards the Bowery steadily worsened, and it is likely that the wealthier classes followed suit. Once more, new immigration came into play, as the middle class began its escape into the suburbs, while the new arrivals took the city. In the 1860s, the middle class and working class, for the most part, lived within the city. The geographic proximity allowed the two classes to share a culture, and thus hold similar beliefs. In addition to the geographic aspect, most Americans shared a common past, having families rooted in this nation. However, the industrial revolution made many middle class citizens leave the worsening environment and increasing population of New York. This, in addition to the coming of immigrants with differing backgrounds broke both of the tenets that held the common culture together. The collapse of that close bond between working and middle classes led to two different arising. The middle class culture remained much like the earlier one, enjoying traditional types of theater, such as Shakespeare and other melodrama. However, this differed greatly from the ethnic theaters of the city, such as the Bowery. Thus, when newspapers, with middle class writers and editors, discussed what occurred at these theaters, they often considered it to be of lower caliber and quality than the theaters the middle class visited. The articles that put down the performances of the later years, in comparison to the earlier ones, were only part of a larger class tension that grew in this era. That is, as the cultural divide between middle and working classes expanded, the middle class often treated the working class as inferior, especially new immigrants. This was not so common in the mid-nineteenth century, as seen in Ragged Dick. In this book, Dick, an orphaned teenager who works as a bootblack, is invited into the homes and businesses of several wealthier people, and even manages to become friends with a middle class boy. Though this may be idealistic, it does hold a seed of truth. Fewer people considered the poor to be inferior to others in 1860. However, the change of opinion towards the Bowery Theater over the era, hints at rising differences between the classes and a degraded view of the working class.

The Old Bowery Theater, over thirty years, changed tremendously, from the peak of its popularity as a respected theater to a local, insular theater, providing mainly for the surrounding ethnic communities. Its transformation is due to larger changes of the era, especially mass immigration. In addition, the way that the middle class views the theater signals the growing differences between the culture of the poor city-dwellers to the wealthy suburbanites of the era.

Though it may be only a single theater in one of the largest cities in the world, at the time, the Bowery provided its patrons into lives and experiences they would never know, on its stage.

Even today, through its history and transformations, it provides a new audience into a glimpse of lives nearly forgotten, into the worries and woes of the late nineteenth century New York City.

Harshil Patel 2004 Works Cited 1. Alger, Horatio. Ragged Dick Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks.

New York, Signet Classic, 1990 2. ”Amusements.” Editorial. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times 31 Aug 1860: pg 4 <http://proquest.umi.com> 3. ”Amusements.” Editorial. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times 11 Sep 1860: pg 4 <http://proquest.umi.com> 4. ”Amusements.” Editorial. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times 30 Sep 1874: pg 5 <http://proquest.umi.com> 5. ”Amusements.” Editorial. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times 16 Sep 1890: pg 4 <http://proquest.umi.com> 6. Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation: The Concise History of the American People.

McGraw-Hill, 2000.

7. “A Glance at the Bowery.” ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times 28 Mar 1880: pg. 10 <http://proquest.umi.com>