Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan 1906-1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon

Abstract

On June 19, 1905, on Smithfield Street Pittsburgh, a vaudeville entrepreneur, Harry Davis, and his partner, John P. Harris, opened a theatre devoted to the showing of motion pictures. Audiences on that opening night sat seats salvaged from a defunct opera house and, for their five-cent admission charge, watched The Great Train Robbery unroll on the screen to piano accompaniment.1 There was little more to the performance. The Nickelodeon, as the theatre was called, could boast only ninety-six chairs, a piano, projector, and screen. Yet, with the possible exception of Koster and Bial's Music Hall, the Nickelodeon Theatre is the most famous theatre which motion pictures were shown prior to 1914. It was here, according to most film historians, that movies America entered a new era. Inside this dingy little storefront and the thousands like it which, we are told, sprang up the wake of its success, the motion picture found its own exclusive exhibition outlet and a new audience of working-class Americans. The movies had outgrown their role as minor adjuncts to vaudeville performances, and, while the middle-class patrons of variety snubbed their noses at this upstart amusement, the nickeloden proceeded to revolutionarize American mass entertainment only a few years' time.2 Most students of American film history are familiar with the descriptions of secondary sources. Concentrated largely poorer shopping districts and slum neighborhoods, writes Jacobs, nickelodeons were disdained by the well-to-do. But the workmen and their families who patronized the movies did not mind the unsanitary, and hazardous accommodations most of the offered.3 Sklar locates the (crowded, dark, and smelly rooms) working-class neighborhoods and says their programs of films and illustrated songs lasted no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.4 Hampton also describes as crowded, poorly ventilated places which film programs lasting approximately twenty minutes were given.5 North places the mostly in big industrial cities with large foreign populations of poorly paid laborers.6 Sklar and other film historians maintain that a large portion of the nickelodeon audience was made up of newly-arrived