Word: roseland
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Family Entertainment. Although professional nostalgics lamented the demolition of the old Roseland building as the end of an era, the dance hall had actually been changing its function for a long time. It started as a refuge for the "poor young clerks" Scott Fitzgerald wrote about; it evolved into a place of family entertainment. From the beginning, Founder Louis Brecker, a onetime Philadelphia accountant, was determined to put Roseland in a class beyond the average taxi dance hall. He publicized it as the "home of refined dancing" and installed two continuously playing orchestras (practically unheard of till then). He spotted...
...Roseland...
When a public dance hall named Roseland opened on Broadway in 1919, smart young people had recently deserted the waltz for the foxtrot, were just beginning to master the delicate nuances of the shimmy. Sam Lanin and his Ipana Troubadours were on the bandstand, thumping out such Ziegfeld Follies hits as Mandy and You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea. Since that distant New Year's Eve, generations of stag-line Romeos and their girls have bunny-hugged Lindy-hopped, Charlestoned, big-appled black-bottomed and jitterbugged under Roseland's star-studded ceiling...
Owner Brecker spiced Roseland's entertainment with female prizefights, yo-yo exhibitions, sneezing contests, and dozens of highly publicized jazz weddings, uniting couples who had found romance in Roseland's violet twilight. His finest inspiration, until it was banned by the police, was the dance marathon. To avoid the wrath of Mayor Jimmy Walker, he once carted a truckload of still-dancing marathoners to an excursion steamer and took them out beyond the three-mile limit, where they all became violently sick at the rail...
...years Roseland's most popular commodity was its hostesses. Brecker chose them, he said, for their refinement rather than their looks. In theory they were forbidden to date the customers. Charging 11? a dance or $1.50 a half-hour, they became something of a legend in the '20s and '30s. Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald and John O'Hara put them in their stories...