The Bowery Theater

 

Walt Whitman recalled that "any good night at the old Bowery,pack'd from ceiling to pit with its audiencemainly of alert, well dress'd, full-blooded young and middle-aged men, the best average of American-born mechanics--the emotional nature of the whole mass arous'd by the power and magnetism of as mighty mimes as ever trod the stage--the whole crowded auditorium, and what seeth'd in it, and flush'd from its faces and eyes, to me as much a part of the show as any--bursting forth in one of those long-kept-up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the Bowery--no dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle of perhaps 2000 full-sinew'd men ..."
(Whitman, "The Old Bowery," 595)

 

The Audience

Writing in 1850, George C. Foster gives a similar, if snobbier, view:

"The Bowery is the representative of that immense and important class of our population, inhabiting the Sahara of the East, and living—somehow—from day to day and week to week—upon the labor of their hands. The butcher-boy, the mechanic with his boisterous family—the b’hoy in red flannel shirt-sleeves and cone-shaped trousers—the shop-woman, the sewing and press-room girl, the straw-braider, the type-rubber, the map-colorer, the paper-box and flower maker, the g’hal, in short, in all her various aspects and phases—with a liberal sprinkling of under-crust blacklegs and fancy men—these make up the great staple of Bowery audiences.

The style of acting that prevails here may be conceived from this catalogue of the audience—but it never can be described. The loud and threatening noises from the pit, which heaves continually in wild and sullen tumult, like a red-flannel sea agitated by some lurid storm—the shuffling and stamping of innumerable feet in the lobbies—the unrepressed exuberance of talking, the laughing, children-nursing, baby-quieting, orange-sucking, peanut-eating, lemonade-with-a-stick-in-it-drinking unconventionality of the “dress circle”—the roaring crush and clamor of the tobacco-chewing, great-coat-wearing second tier—the yells and screams, the shuddering oaths and obscene songs, tumbling down from the third tier—mingling with the convulsive howls and spasmodic bellowing of the actors on the stage—such are the elements from which … we might attempt to create a picture of the Bowery theater."
(Foster, 155-56)

Some Definitions
from the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang

• B’hoy: a rowdy, lower-class young man, especially of Irish descent and associated with the Bowery in New York. [from the Irish-English pronunciation of “boy.”]
• Blackleg: a professional gambler or swindler.
• Fancy-man: the lover of a woman, especially, a man who lives on the earnings of woman, usually a prostitute; (broadly), a pimp.
• G’hal: a yong working-class woman, the counter-part of a b’hoy.