46. Hammerstein's Opera House, Part One

COPYRIGHT 2023 Peter Schmitz - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[ AITH THEME MUSIC]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History! Welcome to all our listeners both old and new. Hello I’m Peter Schmitz. We’ve been so pleased with the listener response and support for this, our second season, with our ongoing theme Drama is Conflict. We’ve been covering a lot of fights, riots and protests in Philadelphia - more than you might think possible for a city, after all, whose moniker literally means ‘Brotherly Love.’ But, well, there it is. And guess what, there’s even more uproars to come. As we move into the early Twentieth Century in the overall narrative we’ve also just entered into the Era of Censorship in American entertainment - and of course many theater people would fight back against it. 

And we will get to how that fight over increasing censorship began to affect what appeared on Philadelphia’s stages in future episodes, but first we have to take the time today to introduce one of the largest, the most beautiful and the most impressive theater buildings ever constructed in Philadelphia, which would itself eventually play a part in those censorship and Public Decency disputes.

This building, fortunately, is one that - unlike almost every other theater from that era - still stands today. If you’re in Philadelphia in 2023, as I record this podcast, you will know this theater as the popular concert venue called “The Met” on N. Broad Street. After many years of neglect it’s been restored and run by the huge Live Nation corporation for a while now, and it typically hosts rock, rap and popular musical acts. (Which is great!) But if you were around Philly in the year 1908, the year it was constructed, you would have called it “Hammerstein’s Opera House.”

And you would likely also know, if you were a devotee of popular theater and classical music of the day, that the city of Philadelphia had suddenly become a new front in The Opera War.

[MUSIC - start “DRAMA IS CONFLICT” THEME - but after a few seconds, CROSSFADE AND CONTINUE MUSIC, UNDER]

But before the war, first, a little pleasant detour!

The years of the early 20th century were some of the most prosperous and dynamic for Philadelphia. For theater and for everything else.

We already talked about how the Theatrical Syndicate controlled most theaters in Philadelphia at the turn of the Century, I should mention that in response to that domination, during this period, there were five new major theaters built in Philadelphia, in what was then the central theater district, near the City Hall in the blocks along Broad Street 

First, the Garrick Theatre was built in 1901 by millionaire Willis G. Hale alongside his already extant 1887 seven-story Renaissance palazzo. The Hale Building in all its weird grandeur, is still there, but alas its younger companion the Garrick is not. But in its day the Garrick had a 230 foot-long lobby, leading from the grand Chestnut and Juniper Street entrance, going all the way back to the auditorium, which was really mostly on Sansom Street. This elegant Garrick Theatre was an effort by independent American producers and directors such as Richard Mansfield and David Belasco to establish an independent house in Philly where they could book prestigious legitimate shows - ones that were not financially beholden to the Syndicate. In time, it was to become one of hometown girl’s Ethel Barrymore’s favorite places to perform in Philadelphia.

Not to be outdone, the Keith-Albee organization which was attempting to make its own vaudeville version of The Syndicate, erected the simply enormous B.F. Keith Theatre with a huge arched entrance on Chestnut Street. No expense had been spared by its builders - it was the city's first "million dollar theater". It opened with a house policy of Continuous Vaudeville, and housed top of the line headliners and entertainers that kept Philadelpians happy with shows that might run all afternoon and evening.

Next, north of  City Hall were the twin theaters, called the Lyric and the Adelphi, built in 1905 and 1907, respectively. These two new houses, which were intended to house both vaudeville and light musical comedies, also had large halls which were formed by digging out space underground, deep into their foundations. These were the first entry of the redoubtable Shubert Brothers into the Philadelphia theater market, as they attempted to directly challenge the Syndicate in all over the country. However, the Shuberts faced a real challenge when Sam S. Shubert, the most dynamic and visionary of this trio of siblings from Syracuse, was killed in a train wreck outside Harrisburg Pennsylvania in May of 1905.

That was why in 1907 the remaining two Shuberts, Lee and J.J., entered into an interesting arrangement. Calling a temporary truce to their growing competition with The Syndicate, the Shuberts instead jointly invested with them in The Forrest Theatre, named after the great Philadelphia actor. The Forrest was built with an entrance at Broad and Sansom - again with a long lobby that reached the auditorium way back in the middle of the city block. The Forrest eventually became the premiere Philly venue for the touring glitzy musical comedies and revues of the nineteen teens and twenties, including Florenz Zeigfeld and George White.

And who, exactly, was filling the seats in all these theaters, along with all the old ones we’ve already talked so much about on this podcast? Why, everybody. Even more than New York, wrote one proud local journalist - Philadelphia was a great theatergoing city. Everybody went out in the afternoon to see shows, from the lowest burlesque to vaudeville, and might go out again in the evening to legit plays to the great productions of opera that were staged at the Academy of Music on Tuesday evenings during the season.

[FADE OUT Vaudeville music and FADE IN "FIDELIO"]

And there was lots of money available to be spent in those theaters. Here, as elsewhere in the US, manufacturing was booming, immigration and high birth rates swelled the population, new homes and factories were spreading out to the very far off edges of capacious Philadelphia County. And the department stores, textile mills, breweries, ironworks, locomotive manufacturers, shipyards, hat factories, chemical plants, oil refineries, slaughterhouses, newspapers, magazines and publishing firms built the fortunes of the great Philly families whose names you still might recognize: the Wanamakers, the Clothiers, the Cramps, the Baldwins, the Pews, the Weightmans, the Cressons, the Betzes, the Wyeths and the Curtises. These joined the names of the old Philly aristocracy, who were still around - the Biddles, Peppers, Drexels and Chews. The newspapers would all breathlessly report on who was there and what the ladies were wearing as they arranged themselves by wealth, taste and status in the boxes and lobbies of the Academy - especially, of course whenever the opera was in town.

There were also transportation fortunes, too: New streetcar lines crisscrossed the city to serve the public, building the fortunes of such Philly captains of industry as William Elkins and his partner Peter Widener, whose families had built huge mansions near each other along N. Broad Street. And they went to the opera, too. As did the Cassats, whose patriarch ran the ever expanding  Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad, in fact, was invading New York, tunneling right under the Hudson River, and was creating the great terminus and cathedral-like Pennsylvania Station on the west side of Manhattan, to the south of 34th Street. 

[ MUSIC OUT]

And finally here we get back to some theater history, because the construction of this great new railroad station led one of New York’s greatest theater men - Oscar Hammerstein, to decide to build a new opera house nearby this new real terminus. This, he thought, would be the way to oppose his enemy, the Metropolitan Opera, up and their home on Broadway and 37th.

So, Okay, back to the Opera War.

[Pick up “Drama is Conflict” theme ]

Speaking of Empire builders - here’s another one. Oscar Hammerstein was one of the greatest figures in the theater world of the day in the late 19th, Early 20th century. If you want to search for him online, make sure to type a Roman number one after his name, so you don’t get an article about his much more famous (today) grandson. If you want to know the whole story about Oscar I can’t recommend enough Vincent Sheean’s 1956 biography. This book opens, by the way, with a short essay from Oscar Hammerstein the Second. And that’s the Oscar Hammerstein you likely all thought of when I said the name “Oscar Hammerstein” - the Broadway writer and lyricist of Show Boat, and together with Richard Rogers. Oklahoma, South Pacific and The King and I. But that’s not the guy we’re talking about today, we’re talking about the original Oscar Hammerstein, who always wore a tall silk top hat on his head, and a cutaway coat, and well trimmed goatee, and had a fat cigar stuck in his mouth.

[11:32 - MUSIC, under ]

Oscar Hammerstein was an immigrant from a well-off German Jewish family in Berlin, he had run away from home and his oppressive father at the age of only 15, and had arrived in New York in 1863. Ever since then he had scrambled his way through life, making and losing enormous fortunes as he went. He was wildly talented at most everything he turned his hand to - a tobacco trade newspaper, musical composition, inventing machines for cigar manufacturing, real estate speculation, theater design, theatrical producing, public relations - everything. He made vast fortunes, from the Victoria Theatre alone, the first great successful Times Square theater, just poured money into his pocket, for years.

But then this Oscar Hammerstein was also a failure at everything he turned his hand to, because whatever money he had made at all those things, he eventually lost it. That was because of the one overriding passion in life - some might say his obsession. More than his family, more than his money, more than his own personal comfort he loved opera. And if you know anything about the economics of opera, you know that historically speaking, opera is all about spending money. Huge amounts of money - you have to pay huge salaries, create huge sets, hire huge orchestras, big choruses, supply the finest costumes - both on the stage and out in the house. You expect to lose money staging opera - that’s why it’s always underwritten and subsidized by big entities or national governments or by Very Very Rich People. But Oscar Hammerstein, he always tried to go it alone, on his own dime - deliberately insulted and pushed away rich funders whom he thought wanted to control him or compromise his artistry.

The mercurial and impulsive Oscar Hammerstein - much to the dismay of his two intensely loyal and calmly competent sons, Arthur and William Hammerstein-  loved running opera companies, getting his name in all the papers, - the  making curtain speeches on opening night, paying top salaries to the greatest opera singers in the world - especially if he could use them to compete against and destroy his great enemy, the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York. This was the OPERA WAR you would see in the headlines back then, and the stakes were who would be the preeminent company in the biggest city in America, home to some of its greatest fortunes. Society matrons, critics, journalists and just plain devoted opera fans all joined in the fray.

Oscar Hammerstein loved to BUILD opera houses, too, that was part of the way he was conducting his war - building better palaces to hear and see opera in than the dark and cavernous old Met - in the course of his lifetime he personally financed, designed and built five of them. He didn’t build them for the money they would bring him, necessarily -his very first opera house, up in Harlem didn’t even have a box office in its original design - he forgot about it. But when they were all finished, he loved to sit in the wings of an opera house he had just built, perched on a plain kitchen chair, a cigar stuck in his mount watching the performance, and drinking in the sound of all the glorious music that he had brought to life..

In the year 1907 Oscar Hammerstien was riding high, for a moment, and his company, the Manhattan Opera, was the toast of New York, performing in the theater he himself had designed and built near Pennsylvania Station. To counter the influence of the Met’s big star, Enrico Caruso, he had managed to secure the services of the soprano Nellie Melba, the Australian prima donna assoluta, who was performing for Hammerstein in such standards as La Traviata. This was an astounding coup. There was no one to match the grand tones of Nellie Melba, back in the day - except maybe Mary Garden, the diminutive Scots soprano who was the queen of the Paris opera scene. Hammerstein also got her under contract to perform new and excity French language operas. In terms of box office and critical opinion, Hammerstein was killing his rivals over at the Metropolitan.

So the Met countered with two measures - first, it bought the exclusive rights to perform Puccini’s La Boheme in New York, refusing to let Hammerstein ever produce it. Then it even arranged to bring over the great Italian composer of that work Giacomo Puccini himself to come to America and to personally supervise new productions of his operas, including his most recent, Madama Butterfly on Friday, February 11th. . . And it then moved the whole show, singers, crew, cast, chorus and sets - put it on a train, for the Tuesday night show in Philadelphia on Valentine’s Day, February 14th at the Academy of Music

The American soprano Geraldine Farrar was booked to sing the role of Cio-Cio-San, and the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso played her faithless husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton. Now not only did the grandees and wealthy of the Quaker City throng to see this. All week long the Italian population of South Philadelphia had been besieging the Academy’s box office, hoping to hear their famed national hero sing in person.

Let’s let Philadelphia journalist John Francis Marion, who wrote about the event in his 1984 book about the Academy of Music, Within These Walls, take up the story:

“Giacomo Puccini, the composer who had come from Italy with Signora Puccini, and John Luther Long, the American author on whose story the opera was based, were in the Academy to hear the tragic tale unfold. ‘The two men attempted to fraternize . . . but as neither was comfortably at home in each other’s language, not much was accomplished.’”

“The evening was a brilliant triumph in every way . . . The beautiful Geraldine Farrar in the title role . . sang with ‘a radiant beauty of voice and with surprising fluency and command of nuance.’ and her acting ‘denoted a keen sense of unusual tragic opportunities her dominating role afforded. . . . Caruso’s share in the proceedings seemed on the whole rather incidental.’”

So, It Was On. In March of 1907 Hammerstein made his move in response, bringing his Manhattan Opera to the Academy, so could he. And for this the great coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini to Philadelphia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, with its great mad scene aria.  And it too, was a huge success. In an era when grand European opera was still popular music, people just could get enough of it, they were mad for it. They were just spoiled by the variety and wealth of offerings that came their way as a result of The Opera War. In fact, over the course of the subsequent 1907- 1908 season, despite the fact that there was a financial depression going on, it is estimated Philadelphian spent $150,000 on opera tickets alone. Again and again, the streets around the Academy were jammed as hopeful patrons packed the entrances and besieged the box office. There just wasn't enough room in the grand old theater - a fact that was not lost on Oscar Hammerstein, who quietly began to tour about Philadelphia, scouting for new places where he might build yet another opera house of his own. He especially was looking in North Philadelphia, where broad city blocks and easy access to railroad lines looked promising indeed.

On March 26th 1908, Hammerstein was back again, he had engaged Mary Garden again, to repeat her performance of the new French opera Louise by the composer Gustave Charpentier. Again, the response from the public was huge. People were paying up to 25 dollars a ticket! In all the boxes of the Academy, extra chairs had been jammed in, and nearly every Philadelphian of social distinction was present. [21:39 FADE MUSIC OUT, end with APPLAUSE] [21:42] At the end of the show, the diva took her final bows, and then led Hammerstein out onto the stage and left him there as all eyes fell upon him. To a hushed crowd of thousands of people he announced:

“After the reception of the past week I concluded that you wanted me. Last fall I purchased a property at the corner of Broad and Poplar Streets on which I proposed to erect an opera house as fine as those in Berlin, Paris, Vienna and other European capitals. . . .I have submitted to the city’s building department a plan for one of the grandest edifices ever devoted to musical art, in which 4000 persons, a thousand more than the academy, would be a house in which rich and poor alike can enjoy the performances.  . . The dream of my life will be realized if I erect a monument to music which shall endure . . only to add culture and delight to this city of yours. I hope in a year from now you will all be pleased. On November 15th I will open my new opera house.’” 

Of course, in his own mind, Hammerstein secretly dreamed it would be the first of a string of opera houses that he would one day build all across the country - Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco! Like I said, he was by nature an Empire Builder. But this first one, this new Philadelphia Opera House, would simply dwarf all the others we’ve mentioned already, including the Manhattan Opera House and the grand old Academy of Music. And he wanted to do it in seven months. Hammerstein, as we’ve said, was always in a hurry. There would be lots of work to do, and fast. That’s why, just a week later, on April 1st, 1908, on the corner of Broad and Poplar - a riot broke out.

Now when I started researching this episode - I swear, I DID NOT KNOW there was going to be another Philly riot in it! The voices in my head keep saying: “Every show, you’ve got a riot, Peter, I swear to God! You’d think we do nuttin’ else here!” Well, yeah. But I looked in the newspaper archives, and there it was. I had to talk about it, so here we go.

Hammerstein had bought a large lot the entire end of a city block, with lots of open gardens and with a large building already on it - the gracious Italianate mansion once belonging to the late Charles J. Harrah, a Philadelphia steel maker. To get the whole project started, the Harrah mansion needed to be immediately demolished and an enormous hole needed to be dug for the foundations of the new building.

We’ve mentioned that there was an economic downturn at the time, and 2000 unemployed Philadelphia laborers had shown up at this job site, desperately hoping to be hired for the work. Most of these Philly men, apparently, were African American or Irish. But they found when they got there that a gang of Hammerstein’s own crack demolition men from New York had started to do the skilled part of that job, and - here’s the breaking point - an additional 100 Italian immigrant laborers had shown up from South Philly with shovels and pickaxes in their hands, offering to do rough excavation work at very low wages.

There was evidently a history of very bad blood between all these various groups, and angry shouting and confrontations soon were happening everywhere you looked. “Don’t Hire the Italians! Hire US Instead!” The police soon had to call hundreds of officers to the scene, but not before the outnumbered Italians were being chased and assaulted all along Broad Street and in the side alleys of North Philadelphia. Anyone who even looked Italian was being viciously attacked. We have photographs of the chaotic scene  which were published in the newspapers the next day, along with the predictable headlines that screamed, of course “RACE RIOT” - because of course, by the journalistic standards of the day, Italians, Irish and Black people were three entirely different and distinct races. The worst injury was to one Italian man who had his head bashed in, and he was not expected to live, said the papers. Dozens of other men were arrested before the police finally quieted things down.

But the next day, another disturbance broke out as other enterprising Philadelphians swarmed over the old Harrah mansion, ripping decorations and fine architectural details off the walls and carrying them away. So, a rather inglorious start to the whole enterprise, on the whole.

But then for the rest of the Spring and Summer of 1908, the Hammerstein crews got things sorted out and work really started in earnest. The entire Harrah mansion was rapidly disassembled brick by brick, and the material saved to eventually help form the walls of the new structure. Oscar’s son Arthur, who was highly talented in the building trades and was a master plasterer, directed all the work. Astoundingly, by mid August, the walls of the new theater were already completed.

The design of the opera house was ostensibly done by the firm of William H. McElfatrick, the most experienced theater designer of the day, and they had filed all the building plans. But everybody knew Oscar would never entrust his theaters to mere architects. He knew how to create curves and ceiling and railings that embraced the audience and enhanced and amplified sound coming from the stage. And he knew how to create sweeping balconies with no pillars, posts or railings to impede the audience’s view. And there were always capacious lounges and promenades for the audience to enjoy on their way to and from their seats, as well as roof gardens to enjoy after the show, and rehearsal rooms for the cast, and an enormous stage. The proscenium was 52 feet wide and 40 feet high. The backstage area was 120 feet high, 116 feet wide and 66 feet to the back wall. Plenty of room for huge opera sets to fly around and trundle about - and again, this was meant rather a poke in the eye to the old Metropolitan up in New York, which due to its rather cramped backstage sometimes had to bring set pieces out onto the street when doing a big set change.

The outside of the building was faced with cream colored brick, terra cotta, and marble. It had a cornice 75 feet high. Immense cast iron marquees extended over the sidewalk from the first floor, covering dozens of entrances, all carefully designed to provide easy and quick access to all the various levels and balconies of the house. A line of special boxes extended all across the underside of the wide upper balcony section. Red velvet and gold paint gleamed everywhere, lit by chandeliers and surrounded by galleries filled with statuary.

And here’s the incredible thing, to me. The whole project was finished exactly when Hammerstein had said it would be, Mid November that very same year, and he had already planned, rehearsed and prepared the opening night performance and the whole rest of the entire season. George Bizet’s Carmen, starring yet another imported European star Maria Labia. And pictures of Hammerstein, Labia and the new opera house were printed in newspapers all over the county. Everybody was watching this Opera War, in Billings Montana, Portland Oregon, Los Angeles . . .. .The Metropolitan Opera, to counter him, offered Philadelphians Puccini's La Boheme that very same night with Caruso himself singing the role of Rodolfo and the great Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich as Mimi. What were Philadelpians to do? Surely, if they had to choose sides, they would stick with the tired and the true! This was sleepy old, comfortable Philadelphia after all, thought the rest of the country. 

But the real truth being that this was the unpredictable and culturally obsessed Philly of 1908., So, people decided to go to both. 

Once again, to tell the story, I’m quoting heavily from the work of John Francis Marion. Maestro, music, if you please! [MUSIC, UNDER]

“[At first] there seemed no doubt that the Academy had triumphed. When the curtains rose on Rodolfo’s attic room, its double horseshoe of boxes was three quarters full. Within a short time every seat in the was filled, and ‘only the hum of rustling silks and soft satins made gentle accompaniment to the strains of Puccini’s music.’ However, not even Caruso, Scotti and Sembrich could hold certain of the curious. There was a partial exodus throughout the first act, when those who also held boxes in the new opera house left to discover what was happening at Hammerstein’s.” [FADE out BOHEME]

“What was happening at Hammerstein’s was pandemonium.”

There were 4000 ticket holders expected in the new house to hear Carmen, and thousands of the curious and starstruck milling around outside. Many of the expected audience were already in place, including out-of-town celebrities like Mr. and Mrs. E.F. Albee and Luisa Tetrazzini as well as Mayor of Philadelphia and the Governor of Pennsylvania and their wives, but a sizable portion of the audience - including the most socially prominent ones - were still downtown and miles away.

Back there, the energy dropped inside the old Academy, as the audience quietly dwindled. Suddenly, things reached the breaking point, and there were large groups people all rushing out, climbing into hastily summoned carriages and automobiles, which then all went streaming up Broad Street, circling round the imposing bulk of City Hall in the Center Square in a huge convoy. . seven columns of them, in a parade stretching several blocks long. “It was the most wonderful sight I have ever witnessed,” said a devoted opera patron, years later.

But when this convoy finally arrived, the carriages and cars were impeded by a crush of spectators outside the Hammerstein house, all eager to see the swells and richly dressed ladies come and go. Outside the new theater on North Broad alone there might have been up to 10,000 people gathered. When this huge parade of migrating opera goers from the Academy actually showed up, however, there was mass confusion.

“Three calls for police reinforcement were sent out,” reports Marion, “Every artery of travel disgorged its hundred of persons, anxious to see society walk from curb to door. . . . This constantly moving mass was described as no longer being just a crowd but a dense unreasonable mob.’ .  . . At last patrol wagons brought fire ropes [to hold the crowd back on the sidewalk],. . the [sloping] garden of a home opposite was trampled by the crowd. The police stormed the place twice to drive out the throngs, but no sooner had the squad of bluecoats turned than the natural grandstand again was filled.”

Finally, all the operagoers made their way  from the cars to the curbs, sent their carriages off, and due to Hammerstein’s numerous and commodious doorways, they quickly got inside, marveling at the glowing interior of their new Philadelphia opera house. All the Pews, Elkins, Wideners, Cramps, Clothiers, Cassats, Yarnalls and Van Rensselaers found their seats. The canny impresario Oscar Hammerstein had held the curtain for them, you see, and then the show finally began. The only hitch was that Hammerstein at the last minute realized there was no kitchen chair for him to sit in his accustomed spot in the wings, but fortunately a suitable replacement was found for him, and he sat down and drank in the evidence of his total triumph.

And at the end of the second act, the stage curtain parted, and there was the New York impresario, bowing modestly to his new Philadelphia patrons, and making one of his patented  gracious speeches of thanks and appreciation, while still challenging Philadelphia to continue to support this great new endeavor he had brought to them.

“It is for you to decide, and it is for you to make it the greatest opera house in the world. I have done my part. I promised, and I have fulfilled. I have not come here as a shopkeeper or a producer of opera, wholesale or retail. I have come to ask your aid in promoting great music, which . . makes us all kin.  . . and when at the end of the season I have artistically completed what I intended to do, call me out again and tell me you are satisfied.”

As the Public Ledger wrote the next day: “It is not often it can be said with genuine verity that an event marks an epoch, but last night’s inaugural performance in the beautiful white structure, now one of the city’s chief architectural adornments, was actually the beginning of newer, broader, better things in Philadelphia . . . [it was as if]  some master magician’s wand had called the great glowing life-full fabric into being.” It was, perhaps, Oscar Hammerstein’s finest hour. 

[“Drama is Conflict” CLOSING THEME]

And there, in our mind’s eye, we’ll leave Hammerstein, and his opera house, at his moment of triumph. Because his fortunes were certainly going to turn, just as they always had before. Eventually this great glorious enterprise was going to become the millstone around his neck, pulling him down to disaster. 

I’m Peter Schmitz. Our theme music and sound engineering are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thank you, once again, for your kind attention, please check out our social media feeds on Facebook and Instagram. Please visit our website www.aithpodcast.com for additional images and blog posts and information and to listen to earlier episodes if you need to. Like us and subscribe to our feed on whatever platform you are using to get  your podcasts. And you can get extra special info, early releases and bonus episodes if you become a supporter of the show on Patreon. If you want to be in touch, our email is aithpodcast@gmail.com.

Join us again, won't you please, in a few weeks time, to hear the rest of the story, in the next thrilling episode of Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]