Chapters of Opera | Page 9

It was a great New York "institution" in its day--perhaps
the greatest and most beneficent one of its sort that New York has ever
known. It may be safely said that most of the elder generation of New
Yorkers now living [this was written in 1881] have had at Niblo's
Garden the greatest pleasure they have ever enjoyed in public. There
were careless fun and easy jollity; there whole families would go at a
moment's warning to hear this or that singer, but most of all, year after
year, to see the Ravels--a family of pantomimists and dancers upon
earth and air, who have given innocent, thoughtless, side-shaking,
brain-clearing pleasure to more Americans than ever relaxed their sad,
silent faces for any other performers. The price of admission here was
fifty cents, no seats reserved; "first come, first served."
Last of all there was Castle Garden. Children of to-day can remember
when it was still the immigrants' depot, which it had been for half a
century. Tradition says that it was built to protect New York City from
foreign invasion, not to harbor it; but as a fortress it must have suffered
disarmament quite early in the nineteenth century. It is now an
aquarium, and as such has returned to its secondary use, which was that
of a place of entertainment. In 1830 and about that day it was a
restaurant, but for the sale only of ice cream, lemonade, and cakes. You
paid a shilling to go in--this to restrict the patronage to people of the
right sort--and your ticket was redeemable on the inside in the innocent
fluids and harmless solids aforementioned. A wooden bridge, flanked
by floating bathhouses, connected the castle with the garden--i.e.,
Battery Park. North and east, in lower Broadway and Greenwich Street,
were fashionable residences, whose occupants enjoyed the promenade
under the trees, which was the proper enjoyment of the day, as much as
their more numerous, but less fortunate fellow citizens. There balloons
went up by day, and rockets and bombs by night, and there, too, the
brave militia went on parade. To Mr. White we owe the preservation of
a poetical description written by Frederick Cozzens in an imitation of
Spenser's "Sir Clod His Undoinge":
With placket lined, with joyous heart he hies To where the Battery's
Alleys, cool and greene, Amid disparted Rivers daintie lies With

Fortresse brown and spacious Bridge betweene Two Baths, which there
like panniers huge are seen: In shadie paths fair Dames and Maides
there be With stalking Lovers basking in their eene, And solitary ones
who scan the sea, Or list to vesper chimes of slumberous Trinity.
The operas performed in the first season of Italian opera in America by
the Garcia troupe in the Park Theater 1825-1826, were "Il Barbiere di
Siviglia," "Tancredi," "Il Turco in Italia," "La Cenerentola," and
"Semiramide" by Rossini; "Don Giovanni" by Mozart; "L'Amante
astuto" and "La Figlia del Aria" by Garcia.
CHAPTER II
EARLY THEATERS, MANAGERS, AND SINGERS
The first opera house built in New York City opened its doors on
November 18, 1833, and was the home of Italian Opera for two seasons;
the second, built eleven years later, endured in the service for which it
was designed four years; the third, which marked as big an advance on
its immediate predecessor in comfort and elegance as the first had
marked on the ramshackle Park Theater described by Richard Grant
White, was the Astor Place Opera House, built in 1847, and the
nominal home of the precious exotic five years.
The Astor Place Opera House in its external appearance is familiar
enough to the memory of even young New Yorkers, though, unlike its
successor, the Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place,
it did not long permit its tarnished glories to form the surroundings of
the spoken drama after the opera's departure. The Academy of Music
weathered the operatic tempests of almost an entire generation,
counting from its opening night, in 1854, to the last night on which
Colonel J. H. Mapleson was its lessee, in 1886, and omitting the
expiring gasps which the Italian entertainment made under Signor
Angelo, in October, 1886, under Italo Campanini, in April, 1888, and
the final short spasm under the doughty Colonel in 1896. The first
Italian Opera House (that was its name) became the National Theater;
the second, which was known as Palmo's Opera House, when turned

over to the spoken drama, became Burton's Theater; the Astor Place
Opera House became the Mercantile Library. The Academy of Music is
still known by that name, though it is given over chiefly to melodrama,
and the educational purpose which existed in the minds of its creators
was only a passing dream. The Metropolitan Opera House has housed
twenty-three regular seasons of opera, though it