Nickelodeons

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Nickelodeons

Although nickelodeons did not show the first moving pictures, which had been appearing as part of the entertainment offered at vaudeville shows since the 1890s, they represented the first efforts to create a new venue in which moving pictures would be shown as the featured attraction. Also known as storefront theaters, nickelodeons experienced their heyday from about 1903 to 1915.

Named for "nickel," the price of admission, and "odeon," the Greek word for theater, nickelodeons offered the first affordable mass entertainment for lower-income urban people, and hence became wildly popular during the first decades of the twentieth century. As businesses, they were more affordable to run than the ubiquitous penny arcades, which featured hand-cranked "peep show" moving pictures (of usually quite wholesome subjects) but which could also only accommodate one viewer at a time at each machine. The rise of the nickelodeon marked a transition away from penny arcades and Vaudeville shows, and was the first institution to consider the moving picture as a credible and viable form of entertainment in its own right.

Harry Davis, a Pittsburgh businessman, is said to have first coined the term "nickelodeon" in 1904 when he converted a store into a theater, made its interior luxurious, and added a piano as musical accompaniment for the silent footage. His venture was so successful that more than 100 other similar theaters sprang up in Pittsburgh alone that same year. By 1908, there were between 8,000 and 10,000 nickelodeons nationwide. Other early entrepreneurs included men who would become future movie moguls, such as Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor, the Warner brothers, and William Fox. Locating their businesses in working-class urban districts, these men catered to workers' needs for leisure activities while acknowledging their lack of free time and spending money. Most vaudeville shows, which took place in special theaters uptown, cost at least 25 cents and were therefore economically and culturally prohibitive to the typical laborer. Going to the nickelodeon, in contrast, was cheap and required no advanced tickets, reserved seating, formal clothing, or special decorum.

The first nickel theaters were located in central business districts, but the majority sat on secondary streets near immigrant and working-class residential areas, where storefronts could be easily converted into suitable spaces. The fronts were recessed up to six feet in order to create outside vestibules that housed a box office and gave patrons a place to wait. These exteriors, often embellished with brightly paint colors, tin or stucco facades, movie posters, lurid signs, and thousands of electric lights, helped draw people in. In addition, owners often used live barkers to shout the latest attractions to passersby. The interiors were spartan in contrast, furnished with rows of simple wooden folding chairs (seating capacity at first ranged from 50-299 and later reached 600), a canvas screen, and papered-over windows and doorways. The projection booth, located in the rear of the theater, was merely a small box, six feet square, with enough room to house the projector and the projectionist who cranked the film by hand. For about $200 in equipment, an owner could be in business; since these storefront theaters were not considered "real" theaters, licenses cost much less than those for "legitimate" theaters.

The typical nickelodeon show ran about 30 minutes and was usually comprised of three ten-minute reels and an illustrated song or lecture in between. The shows sometimes ran 24 hours a day, and the programs were usually changed daily to encourage a constant turnover. People flocked to nickelodeons because of the freedom allowed within the sites themselves in addition to the films they showed. To satisfy the need for novelty, movie producers turned out thousands of these one-reel films, which took their plots from current events, Shakespearean plays, operas, novels, and even the Bible. Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery of 1903, which featured the attack of a telegraph operator, the escape of bandits with the engine, their pursuit and capture, and Western dance hall scenes, was the first "blockbuster" story film, and inspired many imitations. Other popular features borrowed from the realities of working-class life included such titles as The Eviction, The Ex-Convict, A Desperate Encounter, and She Won't Pay Her Rent. Audiences, however, were perhaps most impressed by their exposure to images they had never seen before. Film footage of sights such as Niagara Falls and train travel appealed to their appetite for wonder and their desire to see what they could not normally see, or afford to see, at vaudeville acts.

Besides exposing people to the latest technological wonders of motion pictures, nickelodeons were key social venues. They provided immigrants with their first non-work exposure to American culture. More respectable than dance halls, cheap cafes, and amusement parks, they were also considered safe and acceptable places for working women to go in the early evenings and on weekends, providing one of their few refuges away from life at home. Also known as the "academy of the workingman," the "workingman's college," and the "true theater of the people," the nickelodeon was additionally a viable place of entertainment for the working-class man, either alone or with his family.

Because of their popularity with lower-income people, nickelodeons drew the critical attention of Progressive Era reformers, who saw them as seedy, dangerous places that were as deleterious as cheap vaudeville, prize fights, honky tonks, and similar forms of entertainment. Working-class people, reformers believed, were not educated enough to watch these films critically; they lacked the intellect to read into and resist the temptations presented (it is estimated that by 1910, one out of five of the films showed characters thinking about or actually engaging in criminal activity).

The perceived threats of nickelodeons to children drew the most attention of reformers, especially because turn-of-the-century children comprised between one-fourth and one-half of all nickelodeon audiences. Jane Addams even criticized them as "houses of dreams" that encouraged dangerous flights of fancy for youngsters. But these places continued to be key social centers for working-class children, who often got rowdy after the lights went down, who sang along with the illustrated music, who shouted at the images projected on the screen, and who sometimes exchanged sexual favors in the darkened back rows. The efforts of reformers and anti-vice crusaders around 1908 and 1909 led to the first censorship drives, which historian David Nasaw defined as "'class' legislation aimed at the working people and immigrants who owned, operated, and patronized the nickel theaters." In 1909 the National Board of Censorship was formed as a response to pressures to monitor the content of nickelodeon films.

Reform efforts led to the gradual demise of the nickelodeon. By the early 1910s the film industry itself was engaged in self-censor-ship, meaning that novel and interesting films free of "harmful" images were that much more difficult to create. In addition, operators now had to spend more money to maintain the interior space of their businesses. Since entrances were blocked off, theaters presented real and dangerous fire hazards to the crowds within. In addition, the air—foul and fetid from never being circulated or replenished—was thought to cause various diseases. Fire safety ordinances and new building codes made it more costly to operate storefront theaters.

Besides these external factors, changes were being made in the films themselves. As time went by, the movies got longer and demonstrated a greater variety of subject content, including dramatic, historical, and narrative stories, comedies, mysteries, scenic pictures, and those featuring "personalities." By the mid 1910s, businessmen catering to the upper classes saw the financial potential of motion pictures, and built their own much more lavish movie "palaces" that brought in a finer trade of people and served as the precursors to standard movie theaters.

The nickelodeon, for its relatively short lifetime, was the first viable form of mass entertainment for the poor in America. It was an institution that gave workers a place to go in their leisure hours, and exposed them to various aspects of American culture. Most importantly, the nickelodeon instilled in young Americans a love of movies and motion picture entertainment that sparked and sustained an important twentieth century industry and cultural institution.

—Wendy Woloson