Taxi dance hall

The taxi dance hall as an American institution that was first introduced in 1913 within San Francisco's Barbary Coast neighborhood.

[6] At that time reform movements were shutting down many bordellos and red-light districts within America's cities, and strength for Prohibition was gaining.

In 1920, when the taxi dance halls entered their steep upward climb to popularity, prohibition was enacted and made serving alcohol in saloons, bars, and cafes illegal.

On a fine busy night every door blared loud dance music from orchestras, steam pianos, and gramophones, and the cumulative effect of the sound which reached the streets was chaos and pandemonium.

When I got home I kept thinking of that plan as a way to get my advanced students to come back more often and to have experience dancing with different instructors.

As a former proprietor of the Colonial Dancing Academy in Chicago states: I took over the ten-cent-a-lesson idea from Johnson... Before long I began to notice that many men who came were already good dancers.

But a Greek immigrant, Nicholas Philocrates, perceived the power of this opportunity, and fully embraced the ticket-a-dance plan that he had seen on the West Coast in 1920.

I visited the different schools, and found that Mr. Swanson at the Colonial Dancing Academy was the only one conducting one of the lesson-ticket plans...

The new competition of the increasingly popular taxi-dance halls would cause many ballrooms to either adopt the ticket-a-dance system or go out of business.

[21] There were also establishments which offered male professional dancers to women such as Maxim's in New York, where dancer/actor Rudolph Valentino got an early start.

Many historians say that the return of the saloon and the cocktail lounge of post-Prohibition America contributed to the demise of the taxi dance hall.

A taxi dance club that catered to Filipino American farm workers was one cause of the Watsonville riots of 1930.

[25][26] During a period of austerity, in 1947 China ordered the closure of taxi dance halls despite the protests of dancers.

These clubs no longer use the ticket-a-dance system, but have time-clocks and punch-cards that allow the patron to pay for the dancer's time by the minute.

The dwarfed, maimed, and pock-marked all find social acceptance here; and together with the other variegated types they make of the institution a picturesque and rather pathetic revelation of human nature and city life.

[38]In general, patrons were rarely businessmen or professional people, but were typically skilled or semi-skilled workers from the lower middle class.

Frequently the patrons experienced social obstacles that prevented them from seeking feminine company through more traditional means.

For the socially ostracized, the taxi dance hall became oasis where they could temporarily experience a sense of equality, recognition, and sometimes a fantasy of romance.

Despite the frequent hardships, many of the dancers seemed to enjoy the lifestyle as they adopted a pursuit of what Cressey calls "money, excitement, and affection".

Within his book, Cressey gives scores of quotes from taxi dancers who speak very favorably about their experiences at a taxi-dance hall.

[41]And yet another dancer from Chicago [case #11] spoke very positively of her experiences: After I had gotten started at the dance hall I enjoyed the life too much to want to give it up.

At the start of the 20th century, the United States would for the first time have more inhabitants living within its cities than in rural and small-town areas.

Many young men and women were leaving their rural and small-town neighborhoods for the same promise of adventure that the Old West had previously provided.

Cressey and other sociologists like Ernest W. Burgess came to see taxi dance halls, and these other new forms of mass entertainment, as "commercializing the human interest in stimulation".

For this uprooted culture, cities provided a type of anonymity that was not found in their previous rural and family-oriented neighborhoods.

Once inside a city, young men and women were free to do as they pleased without moral criticism from their families or neighbors.

Cressey felt that cities became "inhabited by rootless, detached people who connect with each other primarily on the basis of mutual exploitation".

Near the time when Cressey finished his book in 1932, he noticed reform movements were attempting to shut down the taxi dance halls.

[43] Cressey was disturbed by the fact that if taxi dance halls were eliminated without appropriate substitutes, the human needs that fueled the phenomenon would go unanswered and possibly find self-destructive forms of expression.

For Cressey, the taxi dance hall became a symptom of the isolation, loneliness, and alienation that plagues many cities.