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Six Revolutions Chapter 4 p.2
by 顏靈 2011-02-25 02:22:37, 回應(0), 人氣(1411)
Electrification made going out at night not only safer and more exciting but easier and cheaper than ever before. The dynamos and generators that lit the street lamps also powered the trolleys that tied together the city and its neighborhoods....On downtown streets, something new called department stores were built.

In connecting the city's business and residential districts, the electric streetcars fostered
the growth—and the transformation—of "downtown" into a central shopping and entertainment district.


For centuries, local fairs and religious festivals had brought people together for shared amusements. Now national expositions and a series of world's fairs, starting in the United States with the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, enjoyed a thriving business. They began as centers
of information about the new world of industry, but soon became primarily places of recreation. Parks were constructed for the recently introduced game of baseball and for such amusement centers as New
York's Coney Island, just a nickel subway ride away on the BMT for millions of New Yorkers.


Money from the Poor

The early income from projected films did not come from music halls, although throughout the country these theaters catering to middle and some upper class patrons began alternating their vaudeville acts with films. Money was drawn from the pockets of the poor in the cities, many of
whom lived in crowded slums and worked in unheated, badly lit, unventilated, and often dangerous factories, long hours for meager wages. Or they worked at home doing subcontracted piecework for even meaner wages.

The poor certainly had little money to  spend on entertainment, let alone dress up to go to a theater. But if you earned a dollar a day, you might be willing on a Saturday night to spend a nickel or two amid blazing lights and cheerful crowds. A penny could go into a machine testing your skill or your
strength. You could listen to a penny's worth of phonograph music. You could put a penny in to crank a Mutoscope and see motion pictures or, better yet, sit in a room with your friends and neighbors for a nickel to share the experience of watching a program of movies projected against a wall. In
Not So Long Ago, Lloyd Morris wrote: 

In the slums of the great Eastern and Middle Western cities there were herded vast immigrant populations. Largely unfamiliar with the English language, they could not read the newspapers, magazines or books. 
But the living pictures communicated their meanings directly and eloquently. To enjoy them, no command of a new language was essential. They made illiteracy, and ignorance of American customs, seem less shameful; they broke down a painful sense of isolation and ostracism. Dwellers in tenements, workers in sweatshops, could escape the drabness of their environment for a little
while, at a price within their means. In the penny arcades, moving pictures took deep root, both as an agency for information and as a cheap form of entertainment for the masses. In the small rural communities to which they were taken by traveling showmen, they met equally responsive audiences.
A broad popular foundation was being laid for a major industry, as well as a social instrument of incalculable power.

As the Industrial Revolution gained strength, it gave rise not only to mass information, but to mass entertainment. Thanks to assembly lines and new technology, people could afford to buy cameras to take pictures of each other and their annual vacations. They put Victrolas in their parlors.

They bought novels and magazines. In the new century, they went each week to the picture show. A few went from nickelodeon to nickelodeon. An entertainment industry grew to feed a discovered public hunger for packaged pleasure, the world's fourth information revolution.