Escape from New York

Mott Avenue Station - December 12, 1903

During the original Broadway run of The Wizard of Oz in 1903, much of New York City had literally ruptured with progress. 

The new subway system chiseled streets into chasms, the new and improved water, gas, and electrical infrastructure riddled the city with trenches and holes, and all of that was topped-off with a building boom. 

The New York Sun of September 13, 1903, reported: "Miles upon miles of pavements torn up to repair gas and water mains, lay cables and install power . . . New Yorkers are getting used to the chaos in the streets. They now take it as the natural order of things. They scale peaks and mountain ranges of litter, climb around isolated upheavals of earth and building materials, leap over yawning chasms and look out over scoriated wastes in an absentminded way. . . . on July 1 there were more than twenty-five miles of trenches open."  

Getting a ticket to The Wizard of Oz, then playing at the Majestic Theater just southwest of Central Park, must have provided a delightful escape from the noisy, smelly, and dangerous mayhem.

A curious image of New York City in 1903 recently surfaced, featuring an easily missed Wizard of Oz connection. Can you spot it? Click the image below to begin your hunt.

Longacre Square (soon to be Times Square)  August, 1903 CLICK TO ENLARGE

1 Times Square (viewed from 47th Street)

The image above, dating from August 1903, taken with a wide-angle lens which created a curve of sorts, warps our view as we look north across 42nd Street into the intersection then known as Longacre Square. Seventh Avenue on the left side of the hole, angles toward center, mirroring Broadway, angling toward center on the right side of the hole. 

The gaping chasm is the former foundation of the Pabst Hotel, recently demolished, and will soon become the site of the Times Building (see image at right), a new home for The New York Times. Shortly after the Times moved into the building in January 1905, Longacre Sqaure received its new name: Times Square. 

So, did you spot the Wizard of Oz connection? At the extreme right-hand side of the image, one can just make out a large billboard-sized poster advertising The Wizard of Oz. You can see another large sign advertising Juicy Fruit Gum just beneath it.

In another well-known photograph, this same poster was slathered over the entire side of a building.

A wall of Wizard of Oz posters at Fifth Avenue and 36th Street.

The Portland Oregonian of August 2, 1903, reported that "James M. Rhodes, advertising agent of the new Majestic Theater . . . recently accomplished a unique feat of billposting by covering the immense wall fronting Fifth Avenue at Thirty-sixth street with stands of The Wizard of Oz. No less than 315 sheets of paper were posted on the wall, the stands being 31 sheets long and 15 sheets high." The article stated it was one of the largest stands ever posted in New York. In gratitude, the manager of the Majestic Theater, John S. Flaherty, presented the advertising agent with "a handsome gold-headed cane."

Alas, no copy of this wonderful poster is known to survive, quite probably because it was a multi-sheet image. I've begun a small project to restore the poster using high-res scans of the photograph, above, to be included in my book when completed. Below is one of the better images of the poster.

The Wizard of Oz tornado poster circa summer 1903 CLICK TO ENLARGE

This imagery of this poster is very intriguing, featuring Dorothy (at far left), the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, along with the Cowardly Lion and Imogene, the frolicsome heifer, being blown about by the Tornado. Imogene is a bit hard to see, her head visible directly below the downstroke of the W in WIZARD. Pastoria's circus hat floats along under the O in OZ. 

But the most unusual thing about the poster is an additional mystery animal peering out between the I and the Z in WIZARD. It appears to be a dog, given the whiskers, canine teeth, and what looks like a dog collar with a chain stretching across the Z in WIZARD. 

There is no other evidence for a dog being in the show this early in the run. Did the poster artist know Baum's book and want to add Toto? Might there have been a "flying dog" image in the cyclone projections? Or a chained-up dog in the Kansas scene? Oddly, Imogene seems crammed into the composition. The poster would have been better had Imogene been placed where the mystery dog appears, thus leaving some empty space under the W and between the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman.

Another dog-gone mystery! 

Copyright © 2022 by David Maxine. All rights reserved.

Ride 'em, Cowgirl!

A while back I posted about the recently acquired archive of Wizard of Oz cast member Allie Palmer and that four of the photos were badly deteriorated. Here's an example.

Damaged photo in the Allie Palmer scrapbook.

The photo is on very thin paper and mounted in one of her scrapbooks. I think the deteriorated photos might have been "proofs" from the photographer and that is why they haven't held up. Other photos from the same photographic session are printed on heavier paper and remain quite lovely.

I wanted to see what I could do to salvage what I could from the unfortunate photograph. I scanned it, and converted the scan to CMYK color format (these are the four ink colors used in printing), and then I split the color channels so I could see which channel preserved most of the image and which channels contained most of the damage.

The Photo is split into four separate channels, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and K "Black".

As you can see there is virtually no information in the Cyan channel, there is some image in the magenta channel, and the yellow channel is very degraded. But the K or black channel has a fair amount of the original image. I deleted the other three channels and set to work on the K channel. I tweaked it a bit in curves, adjusted the contrast and got the image of Allie Palmer to look pretty good. But the background was still unsightly so I erased the background preserving Allie alone with no background at all. The results are below.

Allie Palmer as a Cowboy in The Wizard of Oz circa 1906.

Not bad for an hour's work. If I re-scanned it at higher resolution and spent some time fixing some of the minor surface damage it would look better still. The pendant necklace Allie is wearing is her own jewelry. She wears the same piece in her personal photos as well.

So, what is a Cowboy doing in The Wizard of Oz? The Cowboys (and some Indian Maidens) were added into the "Edition Deluxe" version of the show and were featured in the Scarecrow's "Sitting Bull" number during the "Ball of All Nations." The "Edition Deluxe" was a facelift given to the show in early 1904 where Julian Mitchell added some new songs, improved some of the costumes, and generally fancied up the show.

If you look closely you will notice that Allie is holding a cigarette in her left hand. This seems to have been a bit of cowboy characterization, as Allie Palmer explains in a newspaper article in the scrapbook that she doesn't smoke. Below, you will notice that another of the Cowboy chorus members, Therese Van Brune, is also smoking.

Therese Van Brune as a Cowboy in The Wizard of Oz.

It was probably considered pretty sensational to see the chorus girls smoking onstage - and dressed as boys. Bill Campbell, over at The Oz Enthusiast, located the original Caroline Siedle costume sketch for the Ozzy Cowboy earlier this year at the Museum of the City of New York. The sketch has a large "Metropolitan Opera Company" stamp in the upper-right corner. Caroline Siedle also designed for the Metropolitan Opera, and many of her sketches (including the one Oz sketch below) were in the possession of The Met at the time of her death.

Original costume design for the Oz Cowboy by Caroline Siedle at MCNY.

The beautiful costume sketch shows the Ozzy Cowboys were dressed in red and white with emerald green trim. Indeed red and green were the favored colors of the costumes in the Emerald City in the show. It's a very fetching design, quite modern looking, and a vast improvement over the often clunky chorus costumes seen in Chicago.

Copyright © 2019 David Maxine. All rights reserved.