Peep Shows and Palaces
For all their immense impact on popular culture, movies began humbly, and for a while it looked like they might never be more than a minor amusement. The first movies shown to the American public, Edison’s Kinetographs, appeared in the early 1890s. Because neither Edison nor anyone else had yet invented viable projectors, the first short film loops weren’t shown on screens. One viewer at a time dropped a penny in the Kinetoscope peep show machine, turned the crank and watched the one-minute loop through the eyepiece. The peep show’s appeal was as limited as its technology, and it never caught on outside of penny arcades.
Projectors came along soon enough anyway. Interestingly, given film’s later impact on live performance, the first commercial screening of a projected movie in the U.S. was in a vaudeville theater: Koster and Bial’s Music Hall on Thirty-Fourth Street, where Macy’s is now, in 1896. Other vaudeville theaters followed suit. At first they screened films as what were called “chasers” – acts at the end of the bill that were so bad or boring they cleared the house, making way for the next paying customers and the next cycle of performers. Because the films often just showed vaudeville acts recreated in silent pantomime, audiences shrugged and walked out on them.
As soon as projectors were developed, small-time showmen were traveling the country with them. They’d come into a town, identify a willing merchant, and set up a “store show” after regular business hours, screening their short films to the accompaniment of a local pianist, with maybe some local live acts as well.
The sea change came when store shows evolved into the nickelodeon (nickel Odeon), a permanent venue for screening short films. When a smal nickelodeon opened in Pittsburgh in 1905, its debut offering was Edwin S. Porter’s twelve-minute Western (shot in Jersey and Delaware), The Great Train Robbery. Porter, the visionary head of Edison’s movie production studios, pioneered directorial techniques still used in movies today. Both Porter’s film and the nickelodeon concept were instant sensations and spread with amazing speed to other cities. In three years there were some ten thousand nickelodeons and small movie houses around the country.
There were around a hundred and twenty-five nickelodeons and movie houses in New York City by then, not counting the vaudeville theaters that also showed films. A third of them were on the Lower East Side. Many were in storefronts strung along the Bowery and other main avenues from Union Square down. Several were crowded around Union Square itself. The neighborhood’s new immigrants flocked to movies, which, being simple melodramas and comedies enacted in silent pantomime, presented no language barrier. Nickelodeons and movie houses spread quickly to other immigrant neighborhoods in Manhattan, like the German Yorkville, Jewish Harlem and the Italian East Harlem. As they’d done for decades at live theater, working-class audiences participated fully in the movie, yelling advice to the actors, screaming, crying, leaping into the aisles, throwing things at the screen. Into the twenty-first century movie theater managers would struggle to impose order and quiet.
Although many of the venues on the Lower East Side were the cramped, dingy little nickelodeons of movie lore, some were much grander. In 1908 Tammany Hall’s Big Tim Sullivan and his partner George Krause leased the Dewey Theater, their thousand-seat vaudeville house on Fourteenth Street (which they’d named for Admiral Dewey, hero of the Spanish-American War), to William Fox. Born Wilhelm Fried, Fox was a German Jewish immigrant from Hungary. He started a two-hour program combining short films and vaudeville acts, and charged a ten-cent admission. The Dewey was an early avatar of the plush movie palaces to come, with nice seats and uniformed ushers, and it was a huge success. The Dewey made movie-going safe and attractive for the middle class who had stayed away from the rowdy, smelly nickelodeons. Fox next rented the Academy of Music across the street, an 1854 opera house that had converted to vaudeville in the 1880s, and enjoyed similar success there. He went on to found the Fox Film Corporation, ancestor of Twentieth Century-Fox.
By 1915 studios in both New York and Hollywood were making feature-length films. The nickelodeon faded into history, more vaudeville houses were converted into cinemas, and soon the grand movie palaces, built solely and lavishly to screen films, began to appear. By the time sound was added in the late 1920s, movies were indisputably the dominant form of mass entertainment and starting to kill off vaudeville.
Marcus Loew rose up from the Lower East Side to help drive those developments. He was born in 1870 at Avenue B and East Fifth Street, in what was then known as Kleindeutschland, Little Germany or Dutchtown. His father, recently emigrated from Vienna, worked as a waiter. Marcus began hawking newspapers on the street at age six to help the family make ends meet; by nine he’d quit school to work six days a week at a printing plant. He earned thirty-five cents a ten-hour day, making his weekly paycheck about fifty dollars in today’s dollars. Soon he and a young partner were running their own small printing business and putting out a weekly shopper, the East Side Advertiser. By the mid-1890s he was a partner in a fur company, Baer & Loew, operating from a loft on Union Square.
In 1903 Adolph Zukor, who’d come up through the fur business in Chicago, opened a penny arcade, Automatic Vaudeville, around the corner from Baer & Loew on Fourteenth Street. Loew and Zukor became lifelong friends even after Loew decided to go into the arcade business for himself. He called his operation People’s Vaudeville and opened his first one in a storefront on East Twenty-Third Street in 1905. He was on his way to building a chain of arcades in New York and other cities when he visited a newfangled nickelodeon in the Midwest and saw the future. Returning to New York, he converted People’s Vaudeville to a nickelodeon. He also experimented with another type of amusement using film, called the scenic tour. A storefront was made up to look like the inside of a rail car. Films of passing scenery played outside the windows, while clackety-clack sounds and swaying seats added to the illusion. Amusement parks have rides today that are not significantly different in concept, just higher-tech.
Pretty soon Loew was building a chain of combination film-and-vaudeville houses, mostly on the East Coast. Loew’s State Theatre in Times Square, opened in 1921, was one of the most popular movie-and-vaudeville palaces in the city. New Yorkers decided that Loew’s should be pronounced low-eez, and you still meet some older ones who do. The State survived through various incarnations – films from Some Like It Hot and Ben-Hur to The Godfather had their world premieres there – until it was torn down for a Virgin Megastore in the 1990s.
Needing product to put in his theaters, Loew had bought William Morris’ booking agency for live acts in the 1910s. He then acquired the film production houses Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Mayer Pictures to create MGM. By the time of his death in 1927, Loew’s movie theaters, showing primarily or exclusively MGM films, had spread around the country and across the Atlantic to England. Meanwhile, what his friend Zukor started as an arcade with peep shows on Fourteenth Street grew up to be Paramount Pictures.
by John Strausbaugh