Brooklyn Historical Soc. - Dec 3: First American Musical

Happy 200th Birthday, Mr. Wheatley!
Sat, Dec 3, 7 pm – 8:30 pm
$35/$30 for BHS & G-W Members
Reserve your spot

Love musicals? Then you won’t want to miss this musical tribute to the guy who got it all started. William Wheatley (1816 – 1876), Green-Wood permanent resident and stage star, produced The Black Crook, the first American musical. The show was five hours long and ran for a record-breaking 474 performances at the famed Niblo’s Garden. Enjoy songs written, performed, and produced by Wheatley and other Green-Wood residents at this 200th birthday bash!

NEW YORK CITY: 1804-1808

1804

July

Aaron Burr departs from Manhattan, travels to Albany. He will soon move on to Amboy, New Jersey, and then further south.

Jul 12

Alexander Hamilton, mortally wounded yesterday in his duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey, is brought to Manhattan where he dies at the home of his banker friend Robert Bayard near today's Greenwich Village.

Oct 18

Future lawyer Eugene Kateltas is born to a wealthy and respected family in Manhattan.

New York City

Wealthy merchant Jonas Wood builds a house at 314 Washington Street.    **    John Jacob Astor purchases a plot of land at 133 LaGrange Terrace (Colonade Row).    **    Young ship's mate Dennison Wood, working on a vessel bringing sugar to the city, marries 17-year-old Lydia McKildo.    **    The approximate date Connecticut shoemaker Benjamin de Forest comes to Manhattan and opens a shop - Benjamin de Forest and Company - in the harbor area at 31 Peck Slip.

1805

New York City
Construction begins on the Commandant's House at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the East River, in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood. It will be completed next year.

1806

New York City

Population: 60,000.

1807

Apr 3

A New York City act is issued under the title Remarks of the Commissioners for Laying Out Street and Roads in the City of New York.

New York City

The Orphan Asylum Society of New-York is founded by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (wife of Alexander), the city's first private orphanage, at West End Avenue and 73rd and 74th streets.    

1808

Apr 25

Brooklyn municipal official and U.S. Representative James Samuel Thomas (S.T.) Stranahan is born in Peterboro, New York, to Samuel Stranahan and his wife Lynda Josselyn Stranahan.    

May 28

Minstrel show producer Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice is born in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Aug 8

Merchant and real estate operator Henry Evelyn "E." Pierrepont is born in Brooklyn to Hezekiah B. Pierrepont and his wife Anna M. Constable Pierrepont.

New York City

Grace Church is organized at Broadway and Rector Street.    **    Visiting free Ethiopian seamen and African-American parishioners, protesting racially restricted seating, leave the First Baptist Church at Broadway and West 79th Street. Next year they will found the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the third oldest Baptist Church in America.

©  2015 David Minor Eagles Byte

TENEMENT MUSEUM TALKS

After They Closed the Gates

Monday, April 216:30 PM

 Despite quotas set in the 1920s meant to sharply reduce the influx of immigrants into the country, immigrants continued to come. Historian Libby Garland tells the untold stories of the Jewish migrants and smugglers involved in that underworld. Garland also helps us understand how Jews were linked to, and then unlinked from, the specter of illegal immigration. Tenement actors will dramatize some of the cases highlighted in the book.

This event is free and seats are first-come, first-serve; however, you can reserve two seats by purchasing a copy of After They Closed the Gates. Contact Laura Lee at llee@tenement.org or 212.431.0233, ext. 259 to purchase the book.

Events take place at 103 Orchard Street at Delancey Street in Manhattan.

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1798

1798

January

The New Theatre - designed by French architect Marc Isambard Brunel and brothers Joseph-François and Charles Mangin and later known as the Park Theatre - opens at 23 Park Row.

Jan 13

Lower Manhattan's 1767 John Street Theatre closes. Part-owner Lewis Hallam, Jr.  Hallam sells it for £115 to neighboring grain and hay store. The acting company moves to the New Theatre.

February

Isaac Mann, Jr., Stillwater, New York, supplier of logs to New York City for its water system pipes during the Colles project, petitions the city for payment of the balance due. Records cannot be found for the contract and the council suggests Mann sue for his money.

Mar 2

A correspondent for the New York Gazette & General Advertiser estimates that the average cost of Tea Water is $15 per family, suggests an annual tax to raise money for a public waterworks. Nothing will come of the suggestion.

May

John Beddoe, his wife Catherine, and his cousin David Morse arrive in New York City from England, set out for the Finger Lakes region.

May 13

Manhattan's  original Rutgers Presbyterian Church, built on ground donated by Colonel Henry Rutgers, at what would become Henry Street at the intersection of Rutgers Street, is dedicated.

July

Surveyor Melancton Smith dies of yellow fever in New York City, the first death in a summer-long epidemic in the city that will claim 2,086 lives. As the summer passes coffins will be sold on street corners.

Jul 2

Westchester County, New York, doctor Joseph Browne, Aaron Burr's brother-in-law, writes that the health of a city depends more on the quality of its water than any other comestibles. He proposes supplying New York City from the Bronx River.

August

Yellow fever has claimed close to 100 New York City lives by the early part of the month. A carpenter sends around a wagon loaded with coffins to be sold in the streets.    **    New York's City Council appoint a temporary health committee to aid the indigent though the epidemic. They will spend $5,000 over the next three months.

September

1,000 New Yorkers die of yellow fever, including the family of doctor Alexander Anderson. He will later turn to engraving.

Sep 1

U.S. Military Academy superintendent Richard Delafield is born in Manhattan.

Sep 2

New York doctor Elihu Smith writes that new cases of yellow fever are dwindling, due to the small number of people remaining in the city.

Sep 13

63 New Yorkers die of yellow fever, including the father of a future mayor, 17-year-old Philip Hone.

Sep 17

Doctor Elihu Smith contracts yellow fever.

Sep 18

Hone's mother dies of yellow fever.

Sep 19

Elihu Smith dies of the fever.

October

New York's yellow fever death toll tops 400.    **    New York City museum owner Gardiner Baker dies in Boston in his mid-thirties. His Tammany Museum collection is sold.

November

Over 2000 New Yorkers are now dead from yellow fever. Colder weather ends the epidemic.

Nov 15

John Jacob Astor advertises in the New York Gazette and General Advertiser that he has 24 cannons and other military supplies for sale.

December

Nicholas Roosevelt revives his proposals for supplying water to New York City. Judge William Cooper proposes a plan to lay water pipes there.

Dec 17

A New York City committee chosen to evaluate water supply proposals - John Bogert, John B. Coles, Jacob de la Montagnie, and Gabriel Furman - reports that the Bronx River is the best source, but that a few alterations need to made to Joseph Browne's plans.

City

Population: 4,000 households.    **    A residence is built at 207 Front Street.    **    John Stevens conducts steamboat experiments on Collect Pond for the third year in a row.    **    Three health commissioners requested by the city and appointed under the state "Act to provide against infectious and pestilential Diseases" are empowered to enforce the city's health regulations. Dr. Richard Bayley is named head of the Health Office.    **    Coles' bridge across the Harlem River is completed but his mill works at the site is still unfinished.   **    The Tammany Society moves from its usual Barden's Tavern meeting spot at Broadway near Bowling Green to new quarters at Brom Martling's Tavern at Nassau and Spruce. The new place is nicknamed the Wigwam.    **    The state legislature recognizes The Corporation for the Relief of Widows and Children of Clergymen of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New York as a separate entity from a three-state umbrella organization.   **    The United Insurance Company and the New-York Insurance Company for Maritime Insurance are chartered.    **    Upstate land speculator James Wadsworth arrives, back from a stay in England.    **    The city orders a survey of the area along the Bronx River, with an eye to eventually obtaining a drinking water supply from its waters.    **    The Bank of New York establishes a branch on eight lots in Greenwich Village. The street where the lots are located will become Bank Street.    **    The city begins grading and paving South Street. Structures along it are built back from the wharves to accommodate the bowsprits of ships moored along the docks.    **    This year - after the fort in lower Manhattan was torn down in 1790 - the need for new fortifications leads to guns being placed in temporary fortifications close to Government House. 

Brooklyn

Shipbuilder John Jackson and his yard on East River’s Wallabout Bay - the future U. S. Navy Yard - build the 28-gun frigate John Adams for the Navy.

Technology

John Stevens conducts steamboat experiments on New York City’s Collect Pond for the third year in a row.

Ireland 

Irish insurgents are defeated by the British at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, in County Wexford. Many of the former will emigrate to the U. S. , and settle in a Brooklyn neighborhood that will become known as Vinegar Hill.

© 2013    David Minor / Eagles Byte

SCRIPT No. 457, April 8, 2006

1830s, Here We Come

 

December of 1829 had been an unusually warm month; the following month remained so for a while. New York harbor remained free of ice. Visitor James Stuart was able to make quite a few visits to Manhattan from his boarding house in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he and his wife were staying.

Quite often his fellow passengers aboard the Stevens family steamboats were males; men did most of the marketing in the shops and stalls of Manhattan, returning later in the day with their produce and meats. Stuart had heard that even U. S. Chief Justice John Marshall, who occupied his residence on Staten Island when the Supreme Court was not in session, was often seen returning home with his dinner tucked under his arm, even the occasional turkey.

Most New Yorkers ate quite well. Stuart went to meet some friends for dinner once at a Manhattan boarding house. His shoes got dusty on the trip over; he stopped at a boot black’s house on Leonard Street for a polish, and found the man and his wife, “persons of colour”as he described them, “at dinner, consisting of one of the fattest roast geese I had ever seen, with potatoes, and apple-pie.”

In the several months they spent in Hoboken, many Sundays would find the Stuarts attending divine services in Manhattan. He mentions attending services at Episcopal, Presbyterian, Reformed Presbyterian, Baptist and Roman Catholic churches, as well as at several Methodist meetings. He found the various ministers to be equally impressive in their abilities. He was a little surprised when, turning up at the Oliver Street Baptist Church to hear the Reverend Spencer Wallace Cone, to find that he really had to hunt to find a vacant seat. “. . . the tide of Mr Cone's popularity was so great when I heard him, that the regular sitters were in some degree tenacious of their rights.”

It’s not too surprising that Cone was a popular preacher. The Princeton, New Jersey, native, had become an actor, much to the dismay of his devout mother, when he turned twenty. It may have been his presence during a fire that killed 72 people at the Richmond Theatre in the Virginia capital in 1811, including the state’s new governor, that made him decide to leave the stage. Afterwards, during a stint as a newspaper editor and writer, he was inspired by the biography of English divine John Newton to enter the Baptist church. Commanding a rifle company in the War of 1812, during which he witnessed the burning of Washington and the attack on Fort McHenry, he then moved to the nation’s capital. After preaching in the Washington and Philadelphia areas he moved to New York City in 1823 to take up the pastorate at the Baptist Church. Certainly Cone had a wealth of experiences to draw on, and by the time Stuart heard him, knew well how to work up a crowd.

The Stuarts must have done a bit of clothes shopping while they were in the area, probably in expectation of being on the road before long. He notes that most of the work in the fashion trade is done by women, apparently as opposed to the custom in Britain. The visiting couple may also have been refurbishing their outfits for the New Year’s celebrations to come at the end of the month. Well before Times Square was imagined.

                                                     

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1796

February        

English actor Joseph Jefferson makes his New York City debut in The Provoked Husband.    **    New York City's council solicits bids for a municipal water system, receives two. Nothing is done.

Mar 26                 

Matthew Clarkson, Thomas Eddy, John Murray, Jr., Isaac Sloatenburgh, and John Watts, are authorized by the state of New York to build a state prison on newly-acquired property on Greenwich Street in New York City, to be known as Newgate.

November

The New York City owner of a Barclay Street building destroyed by fire this month starts a public subscription drive for financial aid in recouping his losses.

December        

A warehouse fire in lower Manhattan spreads northward from Wall Street, destroying close to 70 buildings between there and Maiden Lane, and costing $1,000,000. Water from the Tea Pump is used in fighting the blaze.    **    New York City's council once again solicits bids for a municipal water system, receives two (one from Westchester doctor Joseph Browne), both of which die in committee.

Dec 6                 

Leather dresser William Thomson, son-in-law of the Hardenbrook family, who took over the Collect property in lower Manhattan a few days ago, advertises in the New York Minerva promoting his tea water pump business on the property and countering some bad publicity.

City

Some black members of the John Street Church ask Bishop Francis Asbury to conduct separate services for them. He creates the African Chapel  (later the Zion A. M. E. Church) under the jurisdiction of the Methodist Episcopal Church.    **    The council rejects a state offer to purchase the site of the former Colles Water Works for a prison, turns the land into a dump for street waste.    **    Yellow fever kills several dozen people.    **    John Fitch tests his screw-propeller steamboat on New York City's Collect

 Pond. Passengers include Robert Fulton, Chancellor R. Livingston, passenger and inventor Nicholas Roosevelt, and young John Hutchings, who acts as steersman. John Stevens also experiments with steam on the pond.    **    The city attempts to get property owners around The Collect to agree to a canal to drain the pond. Nothing happens.    **    A steeple is added to St. Paul's Chapel.    **    The approximate date Benjamin Davis erects the Broadway House tavern on Broadway at Grand Street.     **    James Blackwell erects a clapboard farmhouse on Blackwell’s Island (formerly Varckens Eylandt, or Hog Island; later Welfare, then Roosevelt Island).    **    John Rogers buys four acres of the former Warren estate in lower Manhattan. The property will become the site of the first house to be built on Washington Square North (No. 20) in 1828 and 1829.

©  2013         David Minor         Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1791

 1791

Jan 5

The 14th New York State Legislature, having assembled a quorum on its second day, begins sitting at the second City Hall at the north End of Broad Street.

Feb 7

The legislature re-apportions the state Senate and Assembly districts.

Feb 12

Inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper is born in New York to Newburgh, New York Methodist hat maker John Cooper and his wife.

Mar 24

The 14th New York State Legislature concludes its 14th session.

Jun 9                 

Playwright-composer John Howard Payne is born in New York City.

Oct 14

The Old American Company drama group out of Philadelphia performs the tragedy The Gamester and a farce called The Mock Doctor or, the Dumb Lady Cured in a John Street Theater.

Dec 17                 

Manhattan's first one-way street is created.

City

The city begins a ten-year project to fill in the Collect Pond, a source of drinking water, after pollution makes it unfit to drink. It purchases all land claims previously granted to the Rutgers family.    **    Trinity Church, rebuilt in 1788, is consecrated by Bishop Provost.    **    New Jersey express coaches travel to New York City and back at the rate of twenty a week, mostly on commercial travel.    **    The city suffers a relatively mild outbreak of yellow fever, although close to 100 died in the Peck Slip area.    **   A tontine organized by Lewis Morris to fund a toll drawbridge across the lower Harlem River fails to raise enough money.    **    The Tammany Society has over 300 members.    **    Andrew S. Norwood goes into business in Manhattan as a merchant.    **    Brig owner Joseph Rose and his family move from their Georgian-style homer at 273 Water Street to Pearl Street, leaving the former property to his son.    **    Merchant Benjamin Seixes builds a double house at 76 Broad Street.    **    The city establishes the Northern Dispensary for treatment of the poor, in Greenwich Village.    **    The Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures is founded. It will move to Albany in 1797.    **    Only 4% of the city’s households – mostly elite merchants -are owners of stock.    **    The 1784 Bank of New York receives a corporate charter. It currently has 190 shareholders    **    The city is divided into seven wards.    **    Free black future dry cleaner Thomas L. Jennings is born to Joseph Jennings and Marry Baker.

©  2013    David Minor / Eagles Byte

Ingress

(Continued from September 23, 2011)

Manhattan's Park Theatre was well-positioned in the autumn of 1829. One rival had been burnt out in April, another had closed recently due to poor box office receipts. But there was a young theatrical impresario in town, an Irish import, whose showplace would rival and, finally outshine and outlast the Park.

Very little seems to be known of William Niblo's background. His 1878 obituary in the New York Times just adds to the confusion: The subhead lists his age as 80; the text as 89. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle agrees with the later figure, so it seems Niblo was born in the late 1780s, probably arriving in New York sometime in the mid-to-late 90s. He apprenticed himself to David King, the keeper of a coffee house at 43 Pine Street (today's Trump Building) and settled in to learn the dinning trade. When King died Niblo, who had become his son-in-law by then, took over the business, changing the name to the Bank Coffee House, a name designed to appeal to the denizens of the surrounding financial district, including the two-year-old Merchants Exchange just down the street. The first Delmonico's would have come along at the same time, but there was enough feedbag trade to go around and Niblo prospered.

Billy, as he has been referred to, enjoyed being the genial host. His obit described him as jovial and kind-hearted with native shrewdness and wit. Whenever he came up with an extra-special culinary treat he would hold a private reception just for his regulars, which added to the cachet of the establishment and draw in new clientele. Not content to rest on his laurels (or bay leaves, or what-have-you) he looked for opportunities to expand. A few years previous to 1829, he leased some land further up Broadway at Prince Street, the area that would someday become SoHo, and set out to convert the building on the site into a combination restaurant and public concert garden. In the years following the American Revolution it had been an indoor arena for circus-style entertainment called The Stadium. Later it was used for drilling militia officers during the War of 1812 and, most recently, was the pleasure grounds known as Columbian Garden. Niblo had built a stage into one end of the main room and replaced the corridor walls with glass doors. Eventually the site would also sport a theater - the Sans Souci - that could seat 3,000, a saloon and, eventually a hotel. Open spaces between buildings were covered with canvas tents, creating a circus atmosphere along Broadway, as gaily-colored flags at the peaks flapped in the breezes.

This year, 1829, Niblo unveiled his once-again renamed Niblo's Garden and Theatre to the public on May 18th for a preview look. A month-and-a-half later, on a rainy Independence Day, the official opening, Niblo pulled out all the stops, topping himself with an unprecedented display of gaslight, the first such inside a theater. One attendee reported, "a patriotic display of gas lights which flaunted the name of "Niblo" far and wide and immortalized it in stage as well as gas history. An admiring public gasped from a respectful distance, watching the red, white and blue shadows cast by the rows of gas jets spelling the proprietor's name." William Niblo would be a theatrical force to be reckoned with for many years to come. And who knows - perhaps he was an inspiration for a young man who was running a fruit and confectionery store for his grandfather Phineas Taylor in Bethel, Connecticut.

© 2005 David Minor / Eagles Byte

FRED AND BILLY

(Continued from August 20, 2011)

Fred Niblo, son of a Civil War veteran, put his horses up on the screen. On the eve of New Year’s Eve in 1925 the fifty-year-old director’s silent adaptation of a biblical novel by another Civil War veteran, Lew Wallace, premiered at New York’s George M. Cohan Theatre, on Broadway and 43rd Street. He may have gotten a good deal on the theater, by the way; he had been Cohan’s brother-in-law, until his wife died. The spectacular set piece of all versions of “Ben Hur” has been the chariot race. Audiences watched enraptured as Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman guided their plunging vehicles at breakneck speed around Rome’s Circus Maximus. The sound of thundering hoofbeats, of course were only in the viewer’s mind.

Which may have been the case ninety-five years previously with another Niblo. According to Charles H. Haswell, writing as The Octogenarian back in 1830, “In July a trotting course was opened on the ground in front of the "Kensington House" of William Niblo, on the east side of the Old Boston Road at Seventieth Street, which he had opened several years before.”

We met William “Billy” Niblo on our last visit to Manhattan, when the entrepreneur re-opened his renovated Niblo’s Garden at Broadway and Prince Street, in today’s SoHo neighborhood. If Haswell was correct Niblo’s flier on the ponies was a rip-roaring non-success. First; none of the readily-available sources make mention of the project, and there’s only a brief mention in one, of a Kensington House, described as being on the East River. No connection is made there with Niblo. Even the location is suspect. In 1830 Prince Street was considered as being practically in the country. Seventieth Street, had it existed, would have been way “out of town”. Even if the transcription misread Seventeenth Street, as I suspect, there’s no further mention of a trotting track, run by anyone, anywhere near the spot. Haswell never mentions it again in the thirty further years he kept an account of the city’s history. So we can probably score one equine success and one failure for the Niblos.

And, in case you’re wondering, no, they were not related. Fred Niblo’s real name was Frederick Liedtke. It’s most likely he took his stage name from the producer. History can be messy,

The 1830s’ sporting crowd would have to travel over to Long Island to watch racing steeds or the newly-popular trotters. But there was plenty else to do in Manhattan, especially if the theater was your pleasure. And here Haswell is a fine guide. Even though James Stuart returns from his travels at the beginning of June he mentions attending the theater only once. But diarist and former mayor Philip Hone can help us fill in some of the blanks.

About the time Stuart was heading for South Carolina, lower Manhattan’s Chatham Garden Theatre, which had failed last year, then been briefly reborn as the American Opera House (for a limited run of three months), opened once again, this time as Blanchard's Amphitheatre. “Under this style very good equestrian performances, with rope-dancing and the like, were offered.” So, if you couldn’t bet on the horses in Manhattan you could at least watch them prance around a ring.

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte

INFERNAL DIN ?

Script No. 244

November 17, 2001

The pipa and the Han Dynasty of China grew up together. When a king calling himself Shi Huangdi or First Emperor came to power around 221 B. C. he feared barbarian hordes from the north and began a crash building program, erecting a series of protective walls that would soon merge to form the Great Wall. Needless to say, he did none of the labor himself, leaving the grunt work to the peasants. A later Chinese scholar would write, “When the people suffered from being forced to build the Great Wall, they played the instrument to express their resentment". Looking somewhat like the Western lute, the pipa has a shallow, pear-shaped body and a long neck supporting 3 or 4 strings. It’s played with a wooden plectrum, or pick, with the “pi” sound made on the downstroke and the “pa” on the return. Sort of like the “plink-plunk” sound we make vocally today to simulate a banjo. The instrument grew in popularity, with various rival schools established around China to further develop both instrument and repertoire. It’s outlasted all succeeding dynasties and in descendent forms remains probably the most popular instrument in the country today.

Speaking of succeeding dynasties, you know what they say about the best laid plans. While the emperor was guarding the front door against the barbarians, with his enormous public works project, younger rivals sneaked in the back door. A series of battles ensued, with a rebel named Liu Pang coming out on top around 202 B. C., and establishing the Han Dynasty.

Some of the earliest pieces written for the pipa have survived and are still being played. One of these, the martial “Ambushed on Ten Sides”, mimics the progress of one of the early battles. The names of the segment suggests the intensity of the piece - Setting up Camp, Beating Drums, Sounding Horns, Firing Cannon, Calling the Rosters, Manoeuvering Troops, Laying Ambush, The Skirmish, The Major Battle, Farewell to Concubine Yu, The Suicide, and The Rout. A critic from the Tang Dynasty describes it, "... as if thousands of warriors and horses are roaring on the battle field, as if the earth is torn and the sky is falling". A contemporary describes how, "... The thicker strings rattled like splatters of sudden rain, the thinner ones hummed like a hushed whisper. Together they shaped strands of melody, like larger and smaller pearls falling on a jade plate."

Listeners here in the West have often had trouble getting used to Chinese music, with its five-tone scale that makes the melodic line secondary to the quality of individual notes. When a San Francisco newspaper editor went to a Chinese concert in November of 1869, if he heard a band version of something like “Ambushed on Ten Sides” he would have agreed that the music was originally written to express resentment. He may never been in battle but he drew head pictures of his own. He wrote, “Imagine yourself in a boiler manufactory when four hundred men are putting in rivets, a mammoth tin–shop next door on one side, and a forty-stamp quartz mill upon the other, with a drunken charivari party with six hundred instruments in front, four thousand enraged cats on the roof, and a faint idea will be conveyed of the performance of a first-class Chinese band of music."

© 2001 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Today, eight-plus years after the above was written, I was reading Dee Brown's WONDROUS TIMES ON THE FRONTIER, when I came across the following in the chapter GREASEPAINT IN THE WILDERNESS. As reported by actress Miriam Follin Leslie - wife of the New York City newspaper editor Frank Leslie - during her 1877 railroad tour the western U. S.:

"Then these grotesque and phantom-like figures began a series of the strangest evolutions . . . to the accompaniment of that frightful discord of barbaric sound, until it all seemed more like a feverish dream, the fancy of a lunatic, or the vision of an opium eater than an actual stage peopled with human beings."

Speaking of that latter audience type: Around the same time Cincinnati Commercial reporter J. H. Beadle wrote: . . . the whole crowded with Celestial [Orientals] and noisome with the smokey fumes of some weed I can't recognize . . ."

Perhaps Miriam Leslie would enlighten Beadle at some future point.