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Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors

1995; University of Texas Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1225743

1527-2087

Ben Singer,

Art History and Market Analysis

The nickelodeon boom in Manhattan was an extraordinary phenomenon. At the close of 1905 movies were still a relatively marginal amusement, filling brief slots at the end of vaudeville shows or running on Sundays in melodrama theaters that aimed to evade New York's blue laws against live performance. Two years later, nickelodeons had revolutionized urban recreation and altered the commercial landscape of Manhattan. Well over three hundred small storefront movie theaters, known as nickelodeons, and converted larger theaters screened movies full-time by 1908. Early exhibition in Manhattan holds special interest for film history, not because it was necessarily the most extensive or important (although it may well have been, since New York City was the nation's commercial and cultural capital, as well as the center of the pre-Hollywood film industry) or because it was particularly representative of the emergence of cinema elsewhere in the country (recent historians have stressed different patterns of development in different cities and towns),' but rather because Manhattan's nickelodeon boom so often has functioned as historical shorthand for the rise of the movies in general. For most people, even those of us who know better, the image of cramped, dingy nickelodeons in Manhattan's Lower East Side ghetto stands as a symbol for the cinema's emergence in America. This synecdoche stems largely the superficiality of traditional survey histories and perhaps, more generally, the ideological convenience of the notion that the birth of mass entertainment in America took place at the gateway of the promised land, welling up from below, the lives of new immigrants and working people. Because Manhattan's nickelodeon boom has played such a prominent role in shaping our conception of early film history, as well as American social history, it is crucial that we derive an accurate picture of that phenomenon. How big was the nickelodeon boom in Manhattan? What was the make-up of the nickelodeon's audience in terms of both class and ethnic composition? In what kinds of neighborhoods were nickelodeons located, and what explains their distribution? Who were the exhibitors? How stable was the nickelodeon business? These questions have remained unresolved for a surprisingly long time. The issue of early cinema's class composition and orientation has been especially pivotal in recent historical work. Whereas traditional film histories