Popular Culture

Not surprisingly, sites of commercial entertainment feature prominently in Hine’s survey of Broadway. Chief among them is the succession of majestic theaters that had defined the street in the national imaginary since the mid-nineteenth century.

But Hine also turned his camera toward the auxiliary enterprises that sustained this theatrical world: trade magazines, booking agencies, Tin Pan Alley music publishers, hotels and boardinghouses where stars and would-be stars resided, and the venues where casting agreements were struck. Also included are “illegitimate” theaters offering cheaper variety entertainment — vaudeville, burlesque, and the new medium of moving pictures — and the even more “disreputable” penny arcades, dance halls, and saloons.

Gathering these together, the album offers a spatial and architectural history of the diverse strains of popular and mass culture that Broadway generated. It brings the mythical dreamworld of “Broadway theater” — like “Hollywood,” an abstracted place — back down to earth, resituating it within a complex urban geography of entertainment.

Through Hine’s lens, we may trace not only Broadway’s intimate ties to neighboring institutions of amusement and consumption, but also its links to institutions of finance capitalism headquartered on lower Broadway.  One such link is monopolism; like the industrial trusts downtown, these theatrical agencies, sheet-music publishers, and other entertainment enterprises adopted corporate or cartel-like practices during this period.