Astor Place Riot - Proximate Causes

Proximate Causes

Macready and Forrest toured each other's country twice before the riot broke out. On Macready's second visit to America, Forrest had taken to pursuing him around the country and appearing in the same plays to challenge him. Given the tenor of the time, most newspapers supported the "home-grown" star Forrest. On Forrest's second visit to London, he was less popular than on his first trip, and he could only explain it to himself by deciding that Macready had maneuvered against him. He went to a performance of Macready playing Hamlet and loudly hissed him. For his part, Macready had announced that he thought Forrest was without "taste." The ensuing scandal followed Macready on his third and last trip to America, where at one point the carcass of half a dead sheep was thrown at him on the stage. The climate worsened when Forrest instigated divorce proceedings against his English wife for immoral conduct, and the verdict came down against Forrest on the day Macready arrived in New York for his farewell tour.

Forrest's connections with working people and the gangs of New York were substantial: he had made his debut at the Bowery Theatre, which had come to cater mostly to a working class audience, drawn largely from the violent immigrant-heavy Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan a few blocks to the west. Forrest's muscular frame and impassioned delivery was deemed admirably "American" by his working-class fans, especially compared to Macready's more subdued and genteel style. Wealthier theatergoers, to avoid mingling with the immigrants and the Five Points crowd, had built the Astor Place Opera House near the junction of Broadway – where the entertainment venues catered to the upper classes – and the Bowery – the working-class entertainment area. With its dress code of kid gloves and white vests, the very existence of the Astor Opera House was taken as a provocation by populist Americans for whom the theater was traditionally the gathering place for all classes.

Macready was scheduled to appear in Macbeth at the Opera House – which, unable to survive on a full season of opera, had opened itself to less elevated entertainment, and was operating with the name "Astor Place Theatre". Forrest was scheduled to perform Macbeth on the same night, only a few blocks away at the huge Broadway Theater.