Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan's Lost Places of Leisure

By David Freeland

Book Overview

Winner of the Publication Award for Popular Culture and Entertainment for 2009 from the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America
Named to Pop Matters list of the Best Books of 2009 (Non-fiction)
From the lights that never go out on Broadway to its 24-hour subway system, New York City isn't called "the city that never sleeps" for nothing. Both native New Yorkers and tourists have played hard in Gotham for centuries, lindy hopping in 1930s Harlem, voguing in 1980s Chelsea, and refueling at all-night diners and bars. The slim island at the mouth of the Hudson River is packed with places of leisure and entertainment, but Manhattan's infamously fast pace of change means that many of these beautifully constructed and incredibly ornate buildings have disappeared, and with them a rich and ribald history.
Yet with David Freeland as a guide, it's possible to uncover skeletons of New York's lost monuments to its nightlife. With a keen eye for architectural detail, Freeland opens doors, climbs onto rooftops, and gazes down alleyways to reveal several of the remaining hidden gems of Manhattan's nineteenth- and twentieth-century entertainment industry. From the Atlantic Garden German beer hall in present-day Chinatown to the city's first motion picture studio--Union Square's American Mutoscope and Biograph Company--to the Lincoln Theater in Harlem, Freeland situates each building within its historical and social context, bringing to life an old New York that took its diversions seriously. Freeland reminds us that the buildings that serve as architectural guideposts to yesteryear's recreations cannot be re-created--once destroyed they are gone forever. With condominiums and big box stores spreading over city blocks like wildfires, more and more of the Big Apple's legendary houses of mirth are being lost. By excavating the city's cultural history, this delightful book unearths some of the many mysteries that lurk around the corner and lets readers see the city in a whole new light.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814727638
• ISBN13: 9780814727638
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A treat for anyone who loves the city

What makes David Freeland's book special is the personal/human touch he adds to make these forgotten places truly live again. Anyone who loves the City has looked at a building or spot and wondered "What was that? Who was there? What's the link to the past?" Freeland's research and prose make you see these things, and creates a continuity of urban life, making you, the reader, a part of New York City's vibrant life and history. It's a great, fun read, and I hope there are many sequels.

Bringing vansihed social scenes back from the dead

I'm reading this book now and I'm finding it to be both interesting and an easy read. The author takes you on time machine-like tours of selected social/entertainment scenes in mostly, I seems, 19th Century Manhattan. The historical social scenes revolve around specific structures & sites where at least some physical remnants still exist today. In reading about the histories of specific buildings, the reader ends up learning so much more than the mere architectural "brick & mortar" aspects. We learn about different ethnic and immigrant cultures that thrived and declined at different times and in different neighborhoods. The chapters are organized by neighborhoods, and therefore also by the ethnicities of those neighborhoods. We start out with the German immigrant community in the Bowery area, then we go to Chinatown, then to Jewish immigrant life on Second Avenue and so forth. There's a refreshing amount of heart & soul for what is essentially a history book. What you're left with is the realizeation that if you observe & learn, you can still find traces of previous centuries in everyday places.

A Well-Researched Look Back into New Yory City History

If youre interested in the social history of NYC neighborhoods, and want a well-researched, and still very readable account, I recommend this book. It discusses neighborhood evolution in areas like Times Square, Chinatown and Harlem. (The book's title gives a hint of some of the stories it tells). Its also has a great bibliography for those who want to keep on reading - there's no one book about NYC that could possibly tell the whole story. The only negative I have is the poor quality of the photos -- there arent many of them, and in this paperback, theyre far from high quality (web sites like those of the NY Public Library, the Museum of the City of NY, and the NY Historical Society have some great on-line photo collections for those interested in better pictorial histories). All-in-all, a very enjoyable read by a guy who did his homework.