Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure

By David Freeland

      From the lights that never go out on Broadway to its 24-hour subway system, New York City isn’t called “the city that never sleeps” for nothing. Both native New Yorkers and tourists have played hard in Gotham for centuries, Lindy-hopping in 1930s Harlem, voguing in 1980s Chelsea, and refueling at all-night diners and bars. New York City is riddled with places of leisure and entertainment, but the city’s infamously fast pace of change means that many of the beautifully constructed and incredibly ornate buildings where New Yorkers partied have disappeared—and with them a rich and ribald history.
       David Freeland, a New York writer of music history and popular culture, acts as a guide in Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville, uncovering skeletons of New York’s lost monuments to its nightlife. He reveals several of the remaining hidden gems of Manhattan’s 19th- and 20th-century entertainment industry—from the Atlantic Garden German beer hall in present-day Chinatown to the city’s first motion picture studio, Union Square’s American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, to the Lincoln Theater in Harlem.
       Freeland reminds us that the buildings that serve as architectural guideposts to yesteryear’s recreations cannot be re-created, once they are destroyed and replaced with condos and big box stores.


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