In the fall of 1858, New Yorkers eager to participate in the city’s
burgeoning social scene welcomed a new popular entertainment venue. The
new “resort” was a pleasure garden, the Palace Garden,
which occupied a sizable plot of land at the current junction of
Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street and which offered “standard” pleasure
garden fare ranging from band concerts to fireworks and balloon ascensions
(Plate 5). In retrospect, the garden on Fourteenth Street appeals
to contemporary historians almost as much as it did to Antebellum
New Yorkers. Viewed from our current perspective, the Palace
Garden and the other late nineteenth century pleasure gardens, caught
as they were in a “cusp” between pre-modern and modern
entertainments, exhibited characteristics of both. While retaining
the Victorian quaintness, relative privacy, and simplicity of pre-electric,
pre-modern amusements, mid-century gardens simultaneously served
as harbingers of more public venues like central Park and Madison
Square Gardens, of mass entertainments like vaudeville and movies,
and of what cultural historical David Nashaw has identified as the “wide
open,” common commercial culture an entertainment scene of
the twentieth century.
During
the middle years of the nineteenth century (roughly from 1840-1875),
the American urban landscape underwent a series of radical changes,
both culturally and geographically, as the country made the inexorable
transition from a rural, agrarian, pre-modern society to an urban,
industrial, modern one. In an atmosphere charged by “an
air and movement of hysteria,” Americans, still accustomed to
the relative simplicity, isolation and local autonomy of small-town
life which typified the colonial era and the first years of the Early
Republic, literally reeled from the myriad social changes which confronted
them in the middle years of the nineteenth century. In their
lifetimes, they witnessed the opening of the American frontier; the
emergence of a coast-to-coast rail system which created national markets;
a shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one; urban
living, with its attendant dangers and difficulties; an ever-accelerating
pace of life; and the creation of a common commercial culture,
to name some of the more dramatic developments. During this period,
the country’s population increased from 17,068,953 in 1840 to
38,558,371 just thirty years later; while the population of America’s
major urban centers swelled correspondingly.
In
New York City alone, the population increased by over 250% during the
same time period and the city’s center of activity shifted continually,
as the populace moved ever northward and new neighborhoods were born
almost daily.
In such a turbulent era, popular entertainments were hardly immune from the changes
occurring throughout American society. Just as American culture was increasingly
lived outside of the home among strangers and in crowds, during the middle years
of the nineteenth century, leisure activities, once confined to parlor games
like Charades, Dumb Crambo, Hunt the Slipper or Blind Man’s Bluff, family
sing-alongs, and participatory sports like bowling and skittles, were supplanted
by more passive recreative endeavors like attending the theatre and lectures.
Correspondingly, the venue for entertainment shifted from the privacy of the
home, church or club to more public, commercial sites designed specifically
to attract large, culturally diverse audiences, as American popular entertainments
became increasingly more class and gender inclusive and the select circle of
acquaintances with whom one had traditionally sough and found amusement gave
way to the audience composed of strangers. As
summarized by Richard Butsch, “local entrepreneurs who [once] had catered
to class-specific markets were displaced by national oligopolies that market[ed]
their wares to the ‘masses’.”
At roughly
the same time that the entertainment industry was becoming a mass-market, commercial
enterprise, the American city was becoming a significantly more complex entity,
composed not only of residential neighborhoods surrounding seats of local government,
but small clusters of service industries organized into discrete districts. As
Gunther Barth has noted, the ordering of urban space into distinct districts
identified by specific function and connected by mass transit was a logical
development in cities that historically had struggled with the management of
their real estate. In its earliest
days, urban expansion was uncontrolled and the cities spread in all directions
from a limited number of governmental and commercial centers as topography
allowed; but, by mid-nineteenth century, local officials, aware that failure
to control the forces of urbanization would inevitably result in chaos, were
forced to adopt measures of city planning, and specialization of function,
a central characteristic of industrialization, became the model for entrepreneurs
interested in founding service businesses.
According
to the New York Sun, by 1867 New York, the country’s most distinctly
modern and American city, was already divided into discrete districts: Wall
Street was associated with finance; stock trading had settled between Hanover
and William Streets; wholesale grocers occupied Front Street; leather goods
had settled on Ferry Street; tailors and small clothing shops lined Cherry
and Catherine Streets; fur dealers claimed Water Street; and fashionable women’s
shops were situated on a stretch of Broadway dubbed “Ladies’ Mile,” which
began at A.T. Stewart’s mammoth emporium between 9th and 10th Streets
and ended at Madison Square. Even
the infant entertainment industry boasted its own district, Union Square, known
as The Rialto and composed of some of New York’s most prominent theatre
and concert halls surrounded by the businesses (costume houses, props shops,
scenery studios, theatrical printers, stage photographers, script sellers,
agents, and theatrical hotels and restaurants) which existed to serve the theatre.
During
the late 1840s, decades before Union Square became New York’s theatrical
center and when the area was still one of the city’s most exclusive residential
neighborhoods, popular entertainments were located primarily on Broadway and
the Bowery below 8th St. At Barnum’s Museum on the corner of Broadway
and Ann St., the curious could view a practically unlimited selection of oddities,
attend moral lectures or witness the skills of jugglers, sword swallowers,
trained animals, magicians, and ventriloquists, all of 25 cents. Those
New Yorkers who were eager to escape the chaos of city streets could find both
refuge and entertainment at either Vauxhall Pleasure Garden (on Broadway between
4th and 8th Streets) or at Niblo’s Garden (at Broadway and Prince St.),
where the entertainment ranged from drama to lectures to minstrel shows.
Circuses
also flourished in the 1840s, utilizing any space large enough to house their
operations. In one year alone, 1848, three major circuses were attracting
large audiences: the New Broadway Circus, starring English riding master
Harry Whitby and American clown Alexander Rockwell, occupied the Alhambra near
Spring St., the Sands, lent and Company Circus pitched a huge tent, holding
5,000 spectators, at 8th St. near Astor Place opera House; and Van Amburgh’s
Circus entertained at the Zoological Hall, 35-37 Bowery.
Those interested
in panoramas, which were becoming the rage in the 1840s, could view countless
yards of painted canvas. Brunetti’s Panorama of Jerusalem was on
view at 598 Broadway; Banvard’s giant panorama of the Mississippi, featuring
three miles of canvas, occupied the Panorama Building adjoining Niblo’s
Garden; Harrington’s Sacred Diorama of the Creation of the World and
the Deluge was at 396 Broadway above Stoppani’s baths; and Barnum’s
Museum housed several different panoramas during the decade. By the beginning
of the next decade, the panorama had moved to within a block of Union Square,
becoming the first popular entertainment form to invade the future Rialto. Satler’s
Panoramas (also advertised as Satler’s Cosmoramas and Satler’s
Dioramas) opened in 1851 at Broadway and 13th St. and continued operation until
1853.
In the
late 1850s, vacant lots near the square were occasionally converted into circus
grounds for the summer months. On June 1, 1859, Harry Whitby and Company’s
Circus pitched its tent in a lot at the southwest corner of 6th Ave. and 15th
St. Five days later, Joe Pentland’s Circus, started several years
earlier by Pentland, a well-known clown of the era, began a summer of performances
at Broadway and 13th St. In a building at 39 Union Square, a circus of
a different sort was presented – Signor Bertolotto’s exhibition
of educated fleas. Bertolotto’s flea circus featured diminutive “performers” dancing
a polka, drawing miniature carriages and street cars, and impersonating Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza. The following year, P.T. Barnum and James M.
Nixon, an established ringmaster and circus entrepreneur, created an exhibition
called The California Menagerie on the lot occupied the previous year by Pentland. The
exhibition featured a collection of wild beasts and trained animal acts, with
J.C. Adams, “the California Trapper of ’49,” putting the
animals through their routines. Each circus played for only one season
near Union Square and then moved to another location in the city.
Among the
attractions at its inception, New York’s first theatrical center included
a pleasure garden, the Palace Garden, at the northwest corn of 6th Avenue and
14th Street. This particular pleasure garden was one of the last examples
of an entertainment form that had maintained a presence in New York since the
beginning of the eighteenth century, but was near extinction by the end of
the Civil War. It was, like its
more famous predecessors in lower Manhattan, Vauxhall and Niblo’s, also
closely patterned upon British models, especially London’s Cremorne Gardens.
According
to Thomas Garrett, the concept of a pleasure garden was a British creation
which had its genesis in the Tudor era. Just as historians of theatre
architecture have considered the ‘bearehouses” of Southwark to
have antecedents of Shakespeare’s Globe and other public theatres of
the Elizabethan era, Garrett has identified traits in the bear gardens which
indicate that they might have been the prototypes for British pleasure gardens
as well. To support his claim, Garrett points to the bearehouse at Horseleydown
which featured “an enclosed ground with an arched entry, trees, walks,
and two buildings,” and a precinct in the Bankside, called the Paris
Garden, that closely resembled later pleasure gardens in its provision of refreshments
and entertainments in an outdoor, natural setting.
The early
pleasure garden matured and increased in popularity during the reigns of James
I and Charles I, offering more attractions and becoming popular sites for clandestine
sexual meetings, so popular, in fact, that during the Commonwealth period the
gardens were able to withstand repeated attacks by the Puritans. It wasn’t
until the restoration of the crown in 1660, however, that the pleasure garden
attained a popularity that ensured its continued existence. During that
ebullient period, “the beau monde … found it an ideal place for
meeting, gossiping, and strolling,” not to mention the occasional romantic
liaison.
By the
beginning of the eighteenth century, the British pleasure garden had acquired
the characteristics that were to define and identify it throughout its existence. The “mature” pleasure
garden was an outdoor, pastoral resort, situated in an urban landscape which
offered many of the natural features the city-dweller normally associated with
a rural existence: trees, lawn, shrubbery, ponds, running water, and
seclusion. It was a retreat where Britons of all classes could find space
and privacy in which to relax after the rigors of the work day or, if they
chose, socialize with their neighbors or co-workers.
In addition
to providing an environment for both relaxation and socializing, the pleasure
gardens offered an abundance of refreshments and a vast array of entertainments
for both the participant and the passive spectator. The latter included: concerts,
puppet shows, plays, variety shows, dancing, bowling, circuses, juggling, exhibitions
of horsemanship, balloon ascensions, burlettas, fireworks, masquerades, transparencies,
illuminations, rope dancing, and on occasion, gambling.
Ironically,
when citizens in the American colonies sought to establish pleasure gardens
in their new country, they seemingly ignored British precedents. As a
result, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the establishment
of American pleasure gardens followed a pattern from primitive to sophisticated
which mirrored the evolution of English gardens in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. As Garrett points out, it was almost as if Americans, albeit
furnished with the blueprint for a finished resort, wished to reinvent the
concept of the pleasure garden themselves.
The colonists
were quick to create decorative gardens throughout New York, but there is no
evidence of food, drink and entertainment being offered until 1672 when Richard
Sackett, a brewmaster and tavern owner, opened a resort named the Cherry Garden
near Pearl and Cherry streets which featured among its attractions, drink and
bowling. The Cherry Garden was joined in the first decades of the eighteenth
century by three additional gardens which added music, dance, eating, and sports
and games – all standard offerings of later pleasure gardens – to
their list of featured attractions. These first pleasure gardens were
relatively “simple” creations which were generally attached to
existing taverns and were viewed as adjuncts to these establishments.
It was
during the subsequent decades (the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s) that pleasure gardens
began to flourish in New York and to more closely resemble British models. Possibly
in response to a perception that the city was becoming overcrowded and open
land was disappearing with increasing rapidity, the “middling-classes,” who
were rapidly becoming a dominant element in New York social policy, tacitly
encouraged the establishment of pleasure gardens. Not coincidentally,
during this period, New York pleasure gardens added programs of entertainment
to their bill of offerings, the American concept of a pleasure garden reached
maturity, the number of gardens mushroomed, and some of the city’s more
famous resorts (namely Vauxhall Gardena and Ranelagh Garden) were opened. By
mid-century, pleasure gardens were regarded as routine features on the urban
landscape, and it was this natural and expected that a pleasure garden would
be one of the initial entertainment venues to be opened in New York’s
first theatre district.
The Palace
Garden [see photo] was the first “resort” near Union Square devoted
exclusively to popular entertainment to achieve any recognition or longevity. The
garden was opened in 1858 by Cornelius V. Deforest and a partner simply known
as Mr. Tisdale on a 200 by 300 ft. plot leased from the heirs of John Tonnele,
a prominent merchant during the 1820s and ‘30s. When Deforest and
Tisdale established their pleasure garden, the original Tonnele home near 6th
Ave. and 15th St. was converted into a restaurant called the Mansion House.
As depicted
in written descriptions and an 1856 lithograph by the firm of Sarony, Major
and Knapp, the Palace Garden included a two-level octagonal pagoda for orchestras,
a platform for staging fireworks displays, a large fountain that doubled as
a fish pond, and a 100 by 75 ft. tent used as a salon. Throughout the
garden, “serpentine gravel walks … passed under elaborate cast-iron
arches enriched with colored-globe gas lamps. Along the walks and throughout
the grounds [were] placed ‘statues of heroes or heroines of mythology
and modern time’ and transparent or illuminated ‘scenic pedestals’ done
in stained glass.”
When the
Palace Garden opened on July 1, 1858, Deforest and Tisdale hoped that it would
become the “resort of the refined, fashionable and the intellectual,” and
their evening promenade concerts d’été were made
up of musical selections designed to appeal to upper-class patrons. The
garden’s regular orchestra, conducted by Thomas Baker, was supplemented
by Harvey Dodworth’s Band, Wallace’s Brass Band, and Robertson’s
Military Band. The highlight of the first summer was the appearance of
Carl Formes, a favorite of New York opera fans.
During
the first season, however, it became apparent that the Palace Garden was not
destined to be a resort attended exclusively by the upper classes. The
garden became a favorite place during the day for housemaids and their infant
charges and attracted the working classes from other parts of the city in such
large numbers that “by the neighbors it was looked upon as the blemish
in [an] otherwise impeccable habitation.” Sensitive
to the wishes of their clientele, Deforest and Tisdale dutifully provided children’s
matinees which included ventriloquism, magic, and Indian dances. At the
same time, they publicly announced that the “masses” were welcome
and that the Palace Garden would provide “cheap entertainment” for
their enjoyment.
Deforest
and Tisdale increased their appeal to the working classes, not by replacing
the promenade concerts, but by augmenting them with proved variety acts many
regarded as traditional fare for pleasure gardens. Routinely, fireworks
displays, balloon ascensions, magicians, and “authentic” exhibitions
of Indian life were presented on the same program with waltzes, quadrilles,
and gallops. In their first season, the proprietors also offered free
gifts to the ladies who patronized the garden, a gimmick commonly attributed
to Tony Pastor. In a departure from its London counterparts and earlier
New York gardens, the management of the Palace Garden steadfastly refused to
serve liquor on the grounds, most likely a concession to temperance activists
who were influential at the time and perhaps an indication that a middle-class
(rather than a working-class) ideology predominated in the running of the garden.
At the
end of the first summer, Deforest and Tisdale, evidently encouraged by the
season’s profits, erected an amphitheatre with wooden sides and a canvas
top that covered the portion of the garden abutting 6th Ave. The new
amphitheatre accommodated 1,600 spectators, contained a center ring or “equestrian” roughly
30 ft. in diameter, was lit by “an enormous chandelier suspended over
the center of the ring, and … was heated by steam pipes run beneath
the seats.” With its “equestrian” and
steam heat, the building quickly became popular with local circus managers
looking for a winter home. In the first few months of its existence,
the amphitheatre housed Pentland’s, Whitby’s, J. Van Amburgh’s,
and Nixon and Kemp’s circuses, as well as Professor Starr’s Menagerie
and Side Show.
In the
winter of the following year, Deforest, then sole proprietor of the Palace
Garden, made additional improvements on the property. He razed the amphitheatre
and salon and erected a permanent structure which measure 50 by 200 ft. The
new hall, dubbed the Palace Garden Music Hall, was located on the western border
of the property and could comfortably seat 3,000. While the construction
of the new hall did little to elevate the class level of his patrons it did
allow Deforest to continue concerts during the winter. In 1860, the hall
was redecorated with a profusion of flowers, trees and shrubbery and at the
same time a new salon and an aviary were added.
In July
of 1861, James M. Nixon assumed management of the garden, with Colonel T. Allston
Brown servicing as his business manager. Baker’s orchestra was
retained and the garden continued to present concerts, but Nixon added pantomime
to his programs and permanently installed Nixon’s Royal Circus and Menagerie
of Living Animals in one of the pavilions. Since Nixon planned to pattern
his operation after London’s Cremorne Gardens, he changed the name of
his establishment to Nixon’s Cremorne Gardens.
During
his first winter as proprietor, Nixon undertook a massive renovation of the
grounds and buildings. The Music Hall was transformed into a 2,000-seat
theatre called the Palace of Music, complete with “a spacious and handsome
stage, new scenery, curtains, proscenium, chandeliers and a balcony at the
rear of the auditorium.” The
salon was converted into the Hall of Flora, which was attached to a new 2,000-seat
amphitheatre for equestrian exhibits. The renovations also included a
complete restructuring of the grounds and erection of a second pagoda for orchestras.
The level
of entertainment during Nixon’s first full season as managed (the summer
of 1862) matched the grand scale of the renovated garden. Pantomimes,
added the previous season, were increased in importance, and Commodore Foote
and Colonel Small appeared in the garden, riding in a beautiful chariot, drawn
by Lilliputian ponies. Susini, Carolotta Patti, and Isabella Cubas gave
concerts; and clowns Tony Pastor, William Lake, Signor Blitz, and W. Donaldson
(who billed himself as “the black clown” and who was a former member
of Charles White’s Serenaders) regaled the crowd with their antics. Especially
enticing to pleasure-seeking New Yorkers was a 25 cent admission ticket, which
entitled the patron to partake of all of the attractions and entertainments
the garden offered.
For reasons
never made public, Nixon did not open the gardens in 1863. While the
most plausible explanation for the closing was Nixon’s realization that
it was impossible to operate the garden at a profit on the scale he had envisioned
and that he was involved in a fiscally unsound venture, it is also conceivable
that he sensed that the pleasure garden was already an anachronism and envisioned
the day when the form would be supplanted by the public park, the vaudeville
hall and such entertainment venues as Luna Park and Coney Island.
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