Radio City Music Hall

Radio City Music Hall opened to the public on December 27, 1932. Located in New York City's Rockefeller Center, this fabulous Art Deco theater is home to the The Radio City Christmas Spectacular, a New York Christmas tradition since 1933, and to the women's precision dance team known as the "Rockettes."

Upshot of Balcony, International Music Hall, Radio City, New York, New York
Samuel H. Gottscho, photographer, December 9, 1932.
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955

International Music Hall, Radio City, New York, New York,
Samuel H. Gottscho, photographer, December 7, 1932.
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955

Designed by Donald Desky, the interior of the theater incorporates glass, aluminum, chrome, and geometric ornamentation. Desky rejected the Rococo embellishment generally used for theaters at that time in favor of a contemporary Art Deco style.

The Great Stage, measuring sixty-six and one half feet deep and 144 feet wide, resembles a setting sun. Its system of elevators was so advanced that the U.S. Navy incorporated identical hydraulics in constructing World War II aircraft carriers. According to Radio City lore, during the war government agents guarded the basement to assure the Navy's technological advantage.

The twelve-acre complex in Midtown Manhattan known as Rockefeller Center was developed between 1929 and 1940 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on land leased from Columbia University. Rockefeller initially planned an opera house on the site, but changed his mind after the stock market crash of 1929. One of the complex's first tenants was The Radio Corporation of America, hence the names "Radio City" and "Radio City Music Hall."

Rockefeller Center, Oblique Upshot of Five Buildings, New York, New York
Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., photographer, April 2, 1940.
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955

• The Gottscho-Schleisner Collection has more than one hundred detailed architectural photographs of this New York landmark; to explore, search on Rockefeller Center in Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955.
• The Today in History Archive contains many features focusing on the cultural life of New York City. Search on New York City to read about Jenny Lind's debut at the Castle Garden Theater in 1850, the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883, and the 1955 Met debut of Marian Anderson.
• John Rockefeller, Sr. and John Rockefeller, Jr. were both interested in architectural and landscape design, as well as real estate development. To landscape Kykuit, the family estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, they hired the landscape design firm of Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot. To see the results, search on the keyword Rockefeller in American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920.
• Search on the term Kykuit in Built in America: Historic Building and Engineering, 1933-Present to see additional views of the Rockefeller's Pocantico Hills estate.

Temperance

STRIKE FOR THE CAUSE OF TEMP'RANCE,
WIELD IN YOUR MIGHTIEST BLOW…

"Strike for the Cause of Temperance,"
Words by A.W. Carr, music by W. F. Heath, 1878.
Music for the Nation, Sheet Music 1870-1885

On December 27, 1900, Carry Nation brought her campaign against alcohol to Wichita, Kansas when she smashed the bar at the elegant Carey Hotel. Earlier that year, Nation abandoned the nonviolent agitation of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in favor of direct action she called "hachetation." Since the Kansas Constitution prohibited alcohol, Nation argued that destroying saloons was an acceptable means of battling the state's flourishing liquor trade.

Fred Sehick Co. Bar, Minneapolis, Minnesota, between 1895 and 1910.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

Born in Kentucky in 1846, Carry Amelia Moore accompanied her family to Missouri in the 1850s. Her first husband, a physician, died of alcohol-related illness early in their marriage. After supporting herself and her small daughter by teaching school, she married David Nation in 1877.

Arriving in Kansas in 1890, she became active in mainstream temperance organizations. The failure of Kansas authorities to enforce the ban on alcohol initially rallied some support for Nation's attacks. However, her extreme methods and unladylike behavior ultimately distanced Nation from state and national temperance societies.

Eventually, state fairs and medicine show tours became Nation's pulpit and source of financial security. Dressed in stark black and white, she promulgated her equally unambiguous views against liquor, foreign foods, corsets, tobacco, fraternal orders, and short skirts. Freeman Willis of New Hampshire encountered her on the state fair circuit. He later recalled the incident for a WPA interviewer:

The Belknap County Fair at Laconia was a great time for Dr. Greene. He had Carrie Nation…yes, hatchet and all…out there, once, for advertising. He spent a pile of money on advertising. And while Carrie was there the town was hers…as much of it as Dr. Greene's money could buy.

"An Old Yankee Innkeeper; His Story," New Hampshire
Henry H. Pratt, interviewer, circa 1938-1939.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

Yet, Nation's celebrity was based more on her notoriety as a hatchet wielding saloon buster than appreciation of her cause. Willis recounts that he saw Nation a second time at the Buffalo State Fair. There, she complained, "they don't believe…a lot of them don't…that I'm the real Carrie Nation. They think I'm a fake…dressed up to imitate Carrie. I wish you'd tell them I am the real Carrie."

Palm Garden Bar, Dayton, Ohio, between 1900 and 1910
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

Although Nation's methods were unusual and her personality colorful, many nineteenth and early twentieth-century reformers supported prohibition of alcohol. Suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton often urged adoption of temperance legislation. Lacking legal rights to their property, their wages, and even their children, nineteenth century women's lives were easily devastated if the men they depended on "took to drink."

Learn more about Carry Nation and the movement to prohibit alcohol in the United States:

• Visit the Kansas State Historical Society's online presentation Carry Nation's Hammer.
• Read the Today in History feature on the Volstead Act, which provided for enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The feature for July 10 also touches on the temperance movement.
• Search across American Memory on temperance to retrieve a variety of resources on the movement to prohibit alcohol in America.
• Bands of singing temperance advocates often accompanied Nation on her visits to Kansas liquor "joints." A few of the 40 temperance songs featured in the American Memory collection Music for the Nation, Sheet Music 1870-1885 may have been in their repertoire. One popular theme concerned alcohol's deleterious effect on the family: "Little Bessie," "The Child's Lament," and "The Drunkard's Child" are written in this vein. Hear one recorded version of "The Drunkard's Child" from the collection California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties, assembled by folk musicologist Sidney Robertson Cowell.

  
  "The Wife's Lament, a New Temperance Song," Nineteenth Century
  America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets

• Search on the term temperance in another sheet music collection, America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets. Among its many temperance tunes is "A Parody on 'Uncle Sam's Farm'" which puts forward the thought:

  …water is much cheaper,
  and much more healthy too,
  And never makes a man a fool—
  which liquors often do.
  
  …Cold water never caused man
  in the gutter to be found,
  And never, as I know of,
  to feel upward for the ground.