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‘There is no gallery’: race and the politics of space at the Capitol Theatre, New York

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17460654.2023.2209940

1746-0662

Pardis Dabashi,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

ABSTRACTThis essay brings developments in Black film historiography and architecture studies to bear on the study of Northern picture palaces as the period of their prominence coincided with the Jim Crow era. Taking as my focus New York City’s Capitol Theatre – which opened in the immediate wake of the US race riots of 1919 and was the largest movie theater to date – I show how Northern middle-class film culture enforced racial segregation in the absence of legal protection. Southern movie theaters were able either to outlaw Black attendance or relegate their Black patronage to the gallery, a seating section closest to the roof of the auditorium and farthest removed from the screen. Northern movie theaters, on the other hand, had to find extralegal ways to ensure a predominantly white clientele – while also maintaining the image of the Northern picture palace as a shrine to New World inclusivity. They accomplished this, I demonstrate, through a combination of film-programming, strategically equivocal promotional language, and, most strikingly, architectural design.KEYWORDS: African AmericanUnited Statesracesegregationmovie picture palacespectatorship AcknowledgementsMany thanks to Agata Frymus and Rebecca Harrison for your editorial guidance on this piece. Many thanks, also, to Alix Beeston and Sarah Gleeson-White, whose conversations with me were very helpful as I was developing this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. Photoplay got the opening date wrong, in fact. The Capitol opened on October 24 1919, while Photoplay reported it as having been opened ‘in November’.2. For more on the significance of African American migration to and throughout New York City as it related to Black film culture, see Frymus (Citation2023).Additional informationNotes on contributorsPardis DabashiPardis Dabashi is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. Her work has appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Arizona Quarterly, Film Quarterly, Public Books, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge University Press 2022) and the Visualities forum on Modernism/modernity Print +. Her first book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel, studies plot and ambivalence in the classical Hollywood cinema and literary modernism (University of Chicago Press, Fall 2023).