Taxi Dancer

The sad world of “taxi dancers” was explored by Maxwell Bodenheim in the June 12, 1926 edition of The New Yorker.

Bodenheim visited a “cheap Broadway dance hall” populated by taxi-dancers and their patrons. It worked something like this: A male patron would buy dance tickets for ten cents apiece, and for each ticket a chosen “hostess-partner” would dance with him for the length of a single song.

He also described the pathetic strutting and preening rituals of both dancers and patrons:

A couple of other bits from the issue: An interesting headline for the profile of NYC Fire Chief John Kenlon…

…and this advertisement for apartments at 1035 Fifth Avenue. I thought the ad was interesting because children are rarely featured in The New Yorker. In case you are wondering about their social class, these are children living on posh Fifth Avenue, and that’s a nurse-maid, not mother, chasing behind them in nearby Central Park.

On to the June 19th issue, and a couple more items of interest…

As I’ve noted before, a common theme of the early New Yorker’s cartoons was the comic imbalance of rich old men and their young mistresses. This time Rea Irvin explores the subject with this terrific illustration:

My last post (“After a Fashion”), featured the June 5, 1926 issue and Lois Long’s account of her visit to Coney Island. I also noted that she would soon become the wife of cartoonist Peter Arno. Perhaps they visited the park together, because this is the cartoon Arno submitted for the June 19 issue:

Next Time: The Annual Scandals…