The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Times Square Then and Now Pierre DeNio is an old friend of mine who lives in the country and knows all about farm prices and farm problems, which is what he...
...They can bear me out when I report that these shows were brutally sexual and homosexual...
...In the first place, I found one thing that I expected to find...
...The Broadway theater of fifty years ago was not more moral than that of our day...
...I sometimes went to see them??and not at all "surreptitiously...
...But Pierre, after all, is the sort of fellow who deserves an answer...
...So up I went to the periodical library on West Twenty-fifth Street...
...But now Pierre has adopted a new cause...
...And actors??what actors...
...Drawing my facts from the advertisements, I classified the plays which were on stage in 1900, 1905, 1910 and 1915...
...I am always suspicious of this sort of plaint...
...When first I came to Broadway, there were no movies...
...In the entertainment business, there seemed to be a great desire to promote plays that would appeal to mature and intelligent people...
...And the ladies...
...There are fewer theaters than there used to be...
...At present, they entertain many more customers on an average night than do the "legitimates...
...During the season of 1900, there were three places of entertainment advertised as "burlesque...
...Even later??in 1915 or 1920??the movie houses were so few and unattractive that they cut practically no figure...
...I thought it would be fun to remind myself of what went on in the old times by looking over the advertisements as they appeared on the yellow and crumpled theatrical pages...
...There must be a few respectable old ladies and gentlemen about town who can recall making such investigations in my company...
...And if Pierre thinks those exhibits were not sexy and revelatory, he is quite wrong...
...Whenever I catch myself saying: "The shows aren't as good as they used to be, the girls aren't as pretty, the food doesn't taste as good," I give myself a shake and say: "Look, you old dope, the trouble with you is that you are overdue in the graveyard...
...Perhaps the best point which my correspondent might have made??and didn't??is that in the old days there was more variety than there is now...
...If anyone is interested, I will return to this dreamland...
...That is something for old fellows to remember and talk about...
...In those days, I knew a lot of actors and used to see a good many shows...
...Anyone visiting these places generally did so surreptitiously...
...The old way had its charms...
...That means that the whole place has changed??the look and sound and smell of it...
...On one point, my friend is definitely wrong...
...Out of the forty showplaces, about ten were vaudeville houses...
...I became acquainted somewhat with the cultural life which prevailed at that time...
...There can't be anything worse...
...I walked from Forty-second Street to Fifty-ninth??and I was appalled...
...He came to town the other day, and, in a letter to me, he moans long and loud about what he saw: "As a young man, I lived for a time in New York...
...The basic transformation can be expressed in a single short sentence: Broadway used to belong to the upper classes...
...There were ladies in those days??and they were dressed like ladies...
...Thirty or forty years ago, the so-called leg shows were found only in burlesque houses...
...The fact that such exhibits can get sufficient support to stay in business is an enlightening commentary upon our civic life...
...Dance places with lurid appeal and such names as 'Strip-orama,' and pictures which leave little if anything to the imagination, cover the fronts of most of the show-places...
...Plays that possessed spiritual and mental value, enacted by talented and intelligent artists, were given extended support...
...His letter set me to thinking about old plays and old actors??and so, in the end it sent me on a research expedition...
...It was forty or fifty years ago that I had my most active theatrical period...
...Generally, there are now fewer than thirty...
...People like Drew, Barrymore, Caruso and Schumann-Heink were admired because of their ability and high standards...
...Today, that section of New York resembles nothing more than the midway of one of the cheapest and most disreputable carnivals...
...I mean real theaters, theaters for "live" plays...
...Recently, I had an opportunity to visit the theatrical district along Broadway and Seventh Avenue...
...it has now been taken over by the common people...
...I wonder if Pierre remembers the carriages, the horses, the coachmen...
...Except for certain biological disadvantages of transportation by animal-power, there was a glamour and elegance about the scene which is lacking now...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Times Square Then and Now Pierre DeNio is an old friend of mine who lives in the country and knows all about farm prices and farm problems, which is what he usually writes to me about...
...Compared with many of the shows now so blatantly conspicuous along the Great White Way, those burlesques were models of moral and civic rectitude...
...In the days of my youth, there were always more than forty...
...Is that what my friend wants to go back to...
...All that is needed to make it a glorified honky-tonk is a roof over the whole smelly mess...
...True, there were good plays in that old time...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 14
