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184 22 John The Men at Allen's Dance House In order to understand how the experiences of the men at Allen's dance house contributed to the dancing, it is relevant to look at the role of the dance house in the lives ofthose men. Therefore in this chapter we will consider the men other than Allen who attended the event - the customers , employees, and observers of various kinds. The Customers: Seamen John Allen's was known as a "sailor dance-house,"l a "sailor dive."z He must have opened the dance house especially to cater to seamen, for in the 1840s and 1850s New York port was at its height, crowded with clipper ships unloading their crews and cargoes; with markets, hotels, and businesses catering to the needs ofthe shipowner - chandlers, sailmakers, clerks, and so on; and with those who catered to, or rather exploited, the needs of the sailor ashore. John H. Warren, Jr., was a detective who surveyed various types of houses of prostitution in Thirty Years' Battle with Crime. He describes the Water Street dance houses as "the lowest, if not the very lowest, link of the Upas of lewdness." Warren explains succinctly why the dance house thrived: Itseems to have been invented originally by some fiend to catch the sailor on his return from a voyage. The first thing "Jack" wants when he gets on shore is a glass ofgrog, a female companion, and then a dance; and when all these are in his possession there is no happier creature alive, until the last cent goes into the till of the "lubber" who robs him, and then kicks him into the street. Armed with these, he will spend in a single week, the earnings of a year, and do it with a lavish generosity known to no other spendthrift.3 This essay was part of a collective research project written when I was a graduate student at New York University's Graduate Drama Department, for a course on nineteenth-century popular dancing taught by Gretchen Schneider. The other sections ofthe projectwere written by Ginnine Cocuzza and Sally R. Sommer; they concerned other aspects ofthe dance house run by John Allen, dubbed by journalists "the wickedest man in New York." John Allen's Dance House The changes industrialization had brought to shipping made it a growing business that by midnineteenth century paralleled the factory system. Instead of small vessels owned singly or in small fleets by families, ships were larger, parts of fleets that were owned by corporations, and carried heavier cargoes and bigger, unskilled crews. The hierarchy of authority on board, always observed when crises demanded discipline, crystalized into impersonal, stratified social systems. Though ships traveled faster, they went to places that were further away, and therefore voyages were longer. This created a new development in the lives ofsailors that had a double effect: they were torn from sustained participation in communities on shore; and they became participants in new, cramped, transient communities - all male, without privacy but without conditions for close personal relationships, highly regimented in terms of time and space, and inescapable for the duration ofthe voyage. But these communities dissolved when the voyage ended, leaving the sailor once again without home, family, or community ties. The nineteenth-century sailor was an outsider to normal American society. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., describes in Two Years Before the Mast the harsh authoritarian organization ofa ship in the 1830s, likening the status of a sailor to that of a prisoner or a slave. Dana argues that the sailor's special code ofdress sets him outside the pale ofthe community, though he reports from the vantage point ofa landsman who perceives himselfas the outsider: A sailor has a peculiar cut to his clothes, and a way of wearing them which a green hand can never get. The trousers, tight round the hips, and thence hanging long and loose round the feet, a superabundance of checked shirt, a low-crowned, well-varnished black hat, worn on the back ofthe head, with halfa fathom ofblack ribbon hanging over the left eye, and a slip-tie to the black silk neckerchief, with sundry other minutiae, are signs, the want of which betrays the beginner at once. Besides the points in my dress which were out ofthe way, doubtless my complexion and hands were quite enough to distinguish me from the regular salt, who, with a sunburnt cheek, wide step, and rolling gait, swings his bronzed and toughened...

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