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An Urban Lament
| Article
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11427 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
2,757 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
GOING OUT
The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements
David Nasaw
New York: Basic Books, 1993
312 pp., $25.00
It is not surprising that a history of modern American amusement written by a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York should be infused with nostalgia for a presuburban world in which cities were the centers of American civilization. David Nasaw, the author of Going Out, is a quintessential urbanite. Despite the fact that suburbia is the fastest growing sector of America and probably contains a majority of Americans, he would like to return to a time when cities dominated the American landscape and Americans enjoyed the delights of urban amusements. "No society can prosper without centers of civility and public sociability," he argues. This is the role that the cities and their amusement centers have always played.
The turn-of-the-century theaters, parks, and palaces assembled the city's white people into a republic of pleasure seekers. What we require today is a new generation of spectacular and accessible public amusements to do the same for all the city's people, to bring us together once again.
The fact is, however, that the urban "us" that Nasaw refers to contains an ever-shrinking percentage of Americans. For good or ill, Americans have fled the cities. The era when millions flocked for amusement to Coney Island in Brooklyn, the Roxy Theater in Manhattan, and urban movie palaces throughout the country has ended, and laments by urban intellectuals are not likely to reverse the situation. The Roxy closed its doors in 1960, the Midlands Theater in Kansas City became a bowling alley in 1961, Detroit's Michigan Theater was transformed into a parking garage, and the Brooklyn Paramount was turned into a cafeteria and gymnasium at Long Island University.
Some movie-theater owners responded by opening outdoor, drive-in theaters in rural and suburban areas. Nearly five thousand of these were established. They were cheaper to construct and had sufficient space to park the cars of the world's most automobile-intoxicated nation. This development both reflected and furthered the decline of urban amusement. Until recently, Newark, New Jersey's largest city, with a population of over 300,000, did not have a single theater featuring anything other than X-rated films.
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