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Prelude A Triumph on the Waves Austin Corbin opened his Manhattan Beach Hotel on the Fourth of July 1877. From the resort’s seemingly endless veranda near the eastern edge of Coney Island, overnight guests could enjoy carefully manicured lawns and cool ocean breezes before retiring to lavishly decorated rooms. All of this pleasure was reaped while safely isolated from the island’s seedier western edge, an area dotted with the beer gardens, brothels, and sideshows that later earned the island its nickname: Sodom-by-the-Sea. Corbin promoted an unsullied air of refinement removed from such ordinary entertainments. His gleaming expanse of white beach marked the geographic division, but the hotel also provided a security fence and Pinkerton detectives to reinforce its position as a world of class and social distinction. Despite such trappings, Corbin’s scheme relied more on scale than on exclusivity . Brown-bagging day visitors were as free to enjoy the hotel’s bathhouses, restaurants, and promenades as were their wealthier compatriots. The Manhattan Beach may have been advertised as a getaway for the highest social orders, butinrealitythecrowdsthatmingledtherewereremarkablydemocratic.Those looking to enjoy what Theodore Dreiser called a “cool, summery, airy-fairy realm” needed to travel but an hour from New York. On a pleasant summer day about thirty thousand visitors from all walks of life—many brought to the island by Corbin’s own railcars—could be found swimming in the ocean or strolling the boardwalk. Here was a place, created by design, for several diverse social classes to revel in sophistication, to be both refined and democratic.1 William Engeman opened his competing Brighton Beach within a year of Corbin’s triumph, and Corbin responded with the Oriental in 1880. These three resorts strove on every front to delight their visitors’ senses. In addition to offering meticulously planted gardens, lighted bathhouses, and a wealth of recreation, each hotel worked to secure the services of America’s most accomplished musicians. Whether it was to hear the Seventh Regiment Band led by Claudio Grafulla or the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra conducted by Anton Seidl, visitors lounging near the various band shells could enjoy music from mid-afternoon well into the summer evenings. And what music it was: the preludes of Richard Wagner, the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, xvi prelude: a triumph on the waves the latest social dances, and the newest popular melodies. Visitors flocked to the island’s eastern edge for all of these sensory delights and basked in the familiarity of old favorites and the novelty of recent hits. Amid this diversity of entertainments, none could touch the king of Coney Island: America’s most celebrated bandmaster, an immigrant turned superstar, Patrick S. Gilmore. Beginning in the summer of 1879, he and his TwentySecond Regiment Band—featuring the famed cornetist Jules Levy—delighted audiences by the thousands at Manhattan Beach. For the next decade it was Gilmore who owned the lyre of Orpheus and created waves in the air to accompany those rising from the sea. Like many celebrities, Gilmore coped with the stresses of fame by neglecting his health, and his reign came to a sudden end in September 1892. Gilmore’s deathwasablowtoManhattanBeach,butwiththesummercrowdsstillmonths away, the hotel was in an enviable position. With its loyal patrons and easy access to the New York press, Corbin’s resort was an ideal place from which to launch a musical career, and candidates to replace the departed bandmaster would not be in short supply. One contender, from the District of Columbia, was a mere thirty-seven years of age and had only recently entered the national spotlight; he was also quietly working to establish himself as Gilmore’s rightful heir. Within months of the older bandmaster’s death, he had acquired several of the Irish Orpheus’s star players and sought to lay claim to his most visible engagements. By the end of January this usurper had been promised the crown jewel: the band shell at Corbin’s Manhattan Beach Hotel. The guests who stepped off the train platform in July 1893 came to that summer’s first concert “determined not to like the new band or its leader,” but they should be forgiven their lack of faith. After all, by daring to perform on the hallowed ground of Coney Island, the young conductor was challenging not only America’s living musicians but also the ghost of Patrick Gilmore himself. The audience that gathered that afternoon, unsympathetic, greeted the new band with “only a slight burst of...

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