Tag: Zeigfeld Follies

Defying gravity: New York’s most famous daredevils

Bird in the sky: The delicate Ms. Millman makes it look easy

Last night on my walk home, I observed something you just don’t always see everyday — a renegade acrobat dangling from the top of the Williamsburg Bridge! The perilous pair, Seanna Sharpe and Savage Skinner, performed this foolhardy trapeze as traffic whizzed by below them, and the two were later apprehended by police. Will this stunt place them in the annals of great stuntwork performed by others who have used New York landmarks as their own personal stages?

1 Jules Leotard
This young French performer, renown in his home country, performed at New York’s Academy of Music in 1868 where he essentially debuted the art of the flying trapeze to startled New Yorkers. While we would not consider his feats particularly compelling today, audiences went wild, with local papers calling him a ‘dazzling, plumed bird’ and the Tribute referred to him as ‘tremendous, as a son of thunder’. He would return to Europe, where his tight, one-piece uniform would be mass produced and eventually bear his name.

2 Hanlon Brothers
The lofty endeavors of tightrope walking and trapeze acrobatics were forever changed on November 1, 1869, when an acrobatic troupe brought an aerial show to New York so ambitious for its time that it required one of its members to invent the aerial safety net! (William Hanlon eventually held the patent for it.) But here’s the odd part. The venue for that performance? Tammany Hall, at the time at 141 East 14th Street — and nearby the Academy of Music — making the block a sort of revolutionary spot for 19th century stuntwork.  [source]

3 Steve Brodie
A teenage newsie looked over at the Brooklyn Bridge as it slowly rose over the East River during its construction in the 1870s. He looked and thought, “I’m going to jump off that one day!” And so he did, on July 23, 1886 — or so he claimed — and the single event transformed him into a minor celebrity. He toured in a stage show recounting the event and opened a popular saloon at 114 Bowery (at Grand Street) in honor of his claim to fame. Today most people attempting such a ridiculous stunt are hardly considered heroic.

4 Harry Houdini
The legendary magician moved to New York at an early age  in the 1880s, and as he honed his crafts of illusion, he frequently used the city as a backdrop to heighten the drama. He was thrown into the East River on July 7, 1912, locked in a crate and bound in handcuffs and leg-irons. (Time it took him to escape: 57 seconds.) And in another rather famous trick in 1916, the escape artist, bound in a strait-jacket, hung precipitously from a crane over an excavation for the New York subway in the middle of Times Square. (Escape time: 2 minutes, 37 seconds.)

Below: Houdini, coming up for air (Pic courtesy NYPL)

5 Bird Millman
The lovely queen of the tightrope (pictured at top) was a favorite of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, not to mention a featured performer for Florenz Ziegfeld. She performed hundreds of times within vaudeville theaters in New York well into the late 1920s, but occasionally she performed outside, dancing across tightropes stretched between buildings.

6 Evel Knievel
Garbed in his trademark patriotic colors, Knievel leapt over nine cars at Madison Square Garden during a series of shows in July of 1971 — his only major New York appearances. But the stuntman’s real dream never got off the ground:  the desire to jump his motorcycle from one great skyscraper to another. The city wouldn’t have approved of something so dangerous….

7 Philippe Petit

…which is why you don’t ask them. The eccentric French high-wire performer snuck into the World Trade Center several times to plan the specifics of an extraordinary display of daredevilry. And on August 13, 1974, this ‘Man on Wire’ walked a narrow cable from one tower to the other. A masterful display of personal courage, and a rather embarrassing on the Twin Towers’ lax security.

8 Alain Robert
This modern daredevil — the ‘modern Spider-man’ as the press has dubbed him — has scaled all sorts of tall surfaces throughout the world, including the Empire State Building in 1994. When the new New York Times headquarters was completed in 2008, it was like a red cape to a charging bull, and Robert took to the building on June 5, 2008, and unfurled a banner about global warming.

ALSO: Coney Island has been the site of a great many deathdefying performances over the decades. An August 14, 1904 issue of the New York Tribune marvels at the amazing stunts at the theme park Dreamland — “Men Must Do Much to Thrill The Public Now” — and notes one performer who fell off a rusty 725-foot sliding cable, tumbling into the ‘Shoot the Chutes’ ride!

Bowery Boys Bookshelf: ‘Butchery’ and beauties

On January 31 1857, the body of dentist Harvey Burdell was found mangled on the floor of his suite at 31 Bond Street. In Benjamin Feldman’s look at the murder and its famous trial, ‘Butchery on Bond Street‘ he uncovers so many potential suspects that entire episodes of ‘Murder She Wrote’ could be scripted from a single page.

Suspicion, of course, mostly rests on Burdell’s former lover Emma Cunningham, an attractive and elusive women suffers the abuses of a misogynistic press while remaining unsympathetic for much of the tale.

Feldman lays out the details of a love affair turned sour, intertwined with jealous family members, seedy bachelors and secret marraige vows. Notably, A. Oakley Hall makes an appearances, years before his scandals with Boss Tweed.

‘Butchery’ has the ingredients of a delicious gaslight thriller, far more successful a crime novel than period piece. The biographical details of Burdell and Cunningham are indeed rich but the tale’s gothic qualities would have benefited from more atmosphere.

My favorite portions were rather tangental to the actual storyline — solid depictions of Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, and upstate Saratoga Springs, that “watering hole for the wealth and the aspiring middle class.” It’s worth getting to the third act, when Cunningham concocts a botched fake baby scheme so outrageous it gets the attention of P.T. Barnum.

Below: a Harpers Weekly of the 1857 Cunningham trial

You might say ‘Ziegfeld: the Man Who Invented Showbiz’ is a biography with more character than its subject. In fact, I would call this retelling of Florenz Ziegfeld’s life by author Ethan Mordden more a performance than a book. But wouldn’t Flo approve of that?

Mordden wryly recounts all of Ziegfeld’s sexy, zany productions as though he had been backstage and were describing things from a corner booth in a nightclub later that night. One takes away the feeling of crazy possibility in those days, when Ziegfeld could throw any combination of girls, music and dance on stage to see if it would stick. Like a pageant, he parades by the reader every Ziegfeld production — from Eugen Sandow to the final Follies — with both reverence and all-knowing.

The author’s vast knowledge of Broadway history is clearly displayed, but the writing is quirky, friendly, open but insider-y. He peers into Ziegfeld’s heart and even dares prioritize Flo’s true loves in life. (Ann Held, Lillian Lorraine, Billie Burke or Marilyn Miller: who wins?) After racing through the book in a couple days, I felt I had just drank an entire bottle of champagne.

We’ll be occasionally reviewing new New York history-related books on this site. If you’re a publisher and have any upcoming releases, please let us know by emailing boweryboysnyc@earthlink.net.

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PODCAST: Ziegfeld!

Cue the dancing girls, lower the props, raise the curtain — we’re taking on Broadway’s most famous producer, Florenz Ziegfeld! We give you a brief overview of the first days of Broadway, then sweep into Ziegfeld’s life — from his early successes (both professional and personal) to his famous Follies. And find out how the current Ziegfeld Theatre, a movie house, relates to the original Ziegfeld Theatre, home of Broadway’s first ‘real’ musical, Show Boat.

CORRECTION: I mention that the Lion King is playing at the new New Amsterdam Theater. It DID play the New Amsterdam, but another Disney musical, Mary Poppins, resides there today.

The original Ziegfeld Theatre, built by Thomas Lamb and Joseph Urban, one of the glitziest stages and the home of ‘Show Boat’ (built 1927, demolished 1966)

Three years after the original was torn down, a movie theater bearing the Ziegfeld name was constructed by Emery Roth and Sons. Don’t let its bland exterior fool you; this is one of the greatest movie screens in town.

Florenz Ziegfeld, for once not surrounded by actual girls

Anna Held, Ziegfeld’s ‘common law’ wife, became a star in America thanks to Flo’s often comically ridiculous press stunts

A New York Sun ad for the Jardin de Paris, the rooftop performance space at the New York Theater, touting the Follies of 1907

Some of the real mystique of the Ziegfeld girls comes from the provocative photography of Alfred Cheney Johnston, whose candid images were often the closest one got to these beautiful women. Below are a few examples of his work:

Marion Davies

Drucilla Strain

Billie Burke

Marilyn Miller

Just how big did all this make Ziegfeld? Cover-of-Time-Magazine big, that’s how big. (Courtesy Time)

Klaw and Erlinger’s crown jewel the New Amsterdam was the home for the Ziegfeld Follies for most of its years. The stage wouldn’t see another hit that size for another 75-80 years, when Disney would renovate and move in the Lion King (now at the Minskoff Theatre).

In 1948, some Ziegfeld girls who had married well (and most of them did) put together a reunion to raise money for their sister chorines who weren’t quite living it up so well.

For more information, I highly recommend you check out Musicals101’s great coverage of the Ziegfeld phenomenon. If that’s not enough, there’s a new biography on Flo Ziegfeld by Ethan Mordden that’s an absolute blast to read.

Ultimate Flair: T.G.I.Friday’s four Broadway goddesses


Imagine a Steve Madden shoe store in Times Square erecting a grand new palace to footwear, and atop its banner they decided to welcome its patrons and the throngs of Broadway theater goers passing by with sculptural likenesses of Angela Lansbury, Audra McDonald, Idina Menzel, and Julia Roberts.

That absurd theater dream actually happened — eighty-three years ago. Polish-born Israel Miller was a successful importer of women’s shoes from the 1920s well into the late 1960s, an early fashionista who learned his trade fitting ladies of Broadway during its formative years. It was an adroit way of self-promotion; the glamorous Ziegfeld girls wore his shoes home, and what lady doesn’t want to look like a glamorous Ziegfeld girl?

By 1911, Israel opened his first shoe store at 1552 Broadway, the heart of the new theater world. Business boomed — echoing the fortunes of Broadway itself — and by 1926 absorbed the storefront next door, 1554 Broadway, to create a midtown footwear oasis for trendy women.

Today, Israel’s former shrine to shoes is a TGI Friday’s. But the gaudy striped signs of this chain restaurant fail to mask a remarkable glimmer of the building’s glory days.

You can still see Miller’s slogan etched into the marble — The Show Folks Shoe Shop Dedicated to Beauty in Footwear. Sitting into the walls below are four statues of Broadway muses, four major stars of the stage when they were carved in 1929 — drama icon Ethyl Barrymore, musical muse Marilyn Miller, operetta diva Rosa Ponselle and film’s biggest female star Mary Pickford (yes, that’s really her, in drag as Little Lord Fauntleroy).

But the building is as much a monument to 20th Century art as it is to the early days of Broadway. The first remarkable fact comes with the man who sculpted these stone beauties: Alexander Sterling Calder, father of the iconic mobile designer.

The second involves Miller, who in the 1950s commissioned a young graphic artist to invent whimsical, fresh shoe designs, radically dusting off his store’s by-then dusty reputation. That illustrator, Andy Warhol, would later uses his assembly-line acumen and eye for product design to revolutionize the art world.

For more information about this remarkable landmarked building, check out this string of posted articles.