New York night
Subtitle: the mystique and its history
By: Mark Caldwell
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 404
ISBN-13: 9780743242769
Subjects: Social life and customs; Nachtleben; City and town life; Street life; Night; Social conditions; Biography; History
Description: "From glittering opulence to sordid violence, from sweetest romance to grinding lust, critic and historian Mark Caldwell chronicles, with both intimate detail and epic sweep, the story of New York nightlife from 1643 to the present, featuring the famous, the notorious, and the unknown who have long walked the city's streets and lived its history. New York Night ranges from the leafy forests at Manhattan's tip, where Indians and Europeans first met, to the candlelit taverns of old New Amsterdam, to the theaters, brothels, and saloon prizefights of the Civil War era, to the lavish entertainments of the Gilded Age, to the speakeasies and nightclubs of the century past, and even to the strip clubs and glamour restaurants of today."

"We see madams and boxers, murderers and drunks, soldiers, singers, layabouts, and thieves. We see the swaggering "Sporting Men," the fearless slatterns, the socially prominent rakes, the chorus girls, the impresarios, the gangsters, the club hoppers, and the dead. We see none other than the great Charles Dickens himself taken to a tavern of outrageous repute and be so shocked by what he witnesses that he must be helped to the door. We see human beings making their nighttime bet with New York City. Some of these stories are tragic, some comic, but all paint a resilient metropolis of the night."

"In New York, uniquely among the world's great cities, the hours of darkness have always brought opposites together, with results both creative and violent. This is a book that is filled with intrigue, crime, sex, violence, music, dance, and the blur of neon-lit crowds along ribbons of pavement. Technology, too, figures in the drama, with such inventions as gas and electric light, photography, rapid transit, and the scratchy magic of radio appearing one by one to collaborate in a nocturnal world of inexhaustible variety and excitement."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 378-390).
Table of contents: title: New Amsterdam noir : the dark nights of Dutch Manhattan; title: Rattle watch nights : city streets after sundown, from Peter Stuyvesant to the early republic; title: Hearthside and rushlight : old New York at home; title: Broadway after dark : pleasures and hours of federal New York; title: Bowery gals will come out to-night? : nighttime on the Bowery before the Civil War; title: Under the rain of gaslights : from the Civil War to the gilded and gruesome 1870s; title: Electric costumes and brass knuckles : glamour, crime, sports, and the commercialization of night in the 1890s; title: Mr. Dieter vanishes, November 1923 : the Volstead Act, jazz, and Earl Carroll's Vanities; title: From poorhouse to penthouse and back : at home, homeless, and on the town in mid-1930's; title: When the lights went out : World War II, the 1950's and the suburbanization of night; title: Full moon over the Stonewall : the gay epiphany, discomania, and the surfacing of hidden night.