Commercially Organized Recreations

From, Michael M. Davis, Jr, The Exploitation of Pleasure
A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York City
(New York: Department of Child Hygiene of the Russell Sage Foundation, 1911, 5-6.

Read for the breadth of commercial recreations available in New York City in 1910.

Picture children that we know—hungry-eyed youngsters with abounding surplus energies, seeking passionately to touch, enjoy and understand this world of wonders. From the home, the logical and the actual beginning, stretches a series of stages, linked with a chain whole logic is life. Yearly the circles of activity widen: the tot plays beside the family stoop, the little boy’s range is his block, the older urchin scours the district, the young man travels about the city.

In a crowded city there is human pressure upon the street hardly less great than that within the home: offshoots from the street arise to meet this pressure,—the candy shop for the children, the ice cream and soda parlor, the moving-picture show, the vaudeville, the dance hall, the saloon. To these places people pay to go, partly to seek positive pleasure, partly because to remain within the straits of the home or the moil of the street means positive pain or discomfort. Out of the twofold impulse,—towards the pleasant and away from the unpleasant,—commercial enterprise builds this gaudy structure of profit–paying recreation.

The logic of the situation can be summed up in the following scheme. The recreation opportunities are listed, roughly, in the order of the ages to which they chiefly appeal. This order does not correspond to the age at which attendance ends, but that at which interest begins. Thus, large numbers of young children frequent candy-shops, where only a penny need be spent; at a little older age, active attendance commences at the indoor shows and soda fountains. Girls of fourteen to sixteen flock to the dancing academy, while public affairs in the dance halls see few under sixteen (most are older). At this point we reach the theatre-going age. The meeting-hall, again, draws chiefly the young men, hardly any boys, if only because of the rental demanded.