architecture & buildings – Page 13 – A New Yorker State of Mind

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

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 4.38.53 PM — June 12, 1926 cover by **S.W. Reynolds**.

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:

Screen Shot 2016-01-08 at 11.00.59 AM — “TAXI-DANCERS” waiting for customers at a Broadway dance hall in the early 1930s. The image was scanned from an article in *Weekly Illustrated* (Oct. 6, 1934) that described new regulations banning the vocation.

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…

Screen Shot 2016-01-08 at 10.22.38 AM — June 19, 1926 cover by **Carl Rose**.

As noted previously, 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:

And we close with Peter Arno, and his observations of Coney Island.

Next Time: The Annual Scandals…

The Ringling Brothers Circus was in town, and The New Yorker marked the occasion with a profile of the surviving Ringlings, John and Charles. Writer Helena Huntington Smith noted that the brothers used a lowbrow profession to become multimillionaires, real estate kings (“They own “most of the west coast of Florida”) and even occasional patrons of the arts.

Speaking of lowbrow, circus freaks remained a big attraction in 1920s New York. Here is an image of the Ringling Brothers “Congress of Freaks” lineup from two years earlier, in 1924:

Congress of Freaks 1924 — Photograph by **Edward Kelty**, who took photos of the “Congress of Freaks” every year from 1924 to the mid 1930s. (artblart.com)

The 1926 show at Madison Square Garden also featured elephants “dancing” the Charleston. One wonders how much these poor beasts were abused:

7341-1 Dansende olifant 1926 — (Vintage Everyday)

And from the “Remember it’s 1926 Department,” we have this New Yorker obituary for famed Ringling circus freak Zip the Pinhead. Note that Zip was “owned” by a Captain O.K. White:

Zip’s real name was William Henry Johnson. Thought to have been born with microcephaly (those with the condition were commonly called “pinheads), he might have merely possessed an oddly shaped head.

Audiences were often told that he was a wild man, or a missing link, and although it was assumed he was mentally deficient (the New Yorker article above suggested he had the mentality of a two-year-old child), Johnson’s sister said he could “converse like the average person, and with fair reasoning power.” She claimed his last words (he died at age 83) were, “Well, we fooled ’em for a long time, didn’t we?”

The New Yorker editors continued to marvel at the heights of new buildings, the latest being the Ritz Tower, which was to be the tallest residential building in the city:

Here’s a postcard image of the Ritz Tower from the late 1920s. Note the airplane at left, added to emphasize the building’s height:

new-york-ritz-tower-granger — (geographicguide.com)

At 41 stories and 541 feet, the Ritz was city’s tallest residential tower at the time. The tallest residential tower in NYC today is 432 Park Avenue. The 96-story tower is just shy of 1,400 feet:

432PA_NW-View_copyright-dbox-for-CIM-Group-Macklowe-Properties-1024x682 — (Forbes)

Even taller residential towers are in the works.

Now, to end on a lighter note, a Whoops Sisters cartoon by Peter Arno—this is the first in which their trademark “Whoops” is uttered.

and this “generation gap” observation by Helen Hokinson:

Next Time: Batter Up

Category: architecture & buildings

Taxi Dancer

The Circus Comes to Town