New York City
P.T. Barnum purchased Scudder's Dime Museum in 1841, and transformed it into one of the popular single cultural sites that has ever existed. It was called the "American Museum". P.T. Barnum and Charles Willson Peale and his sons introduced the so-called "Edutainement" which was a moralistic education realized through sensational freakshows, theater and circus performances, and many other means of entertainment. The first incarnation "American Museum" on Anne Street, burned down in 1865. It was relocated further up Broadway, but this venue too, fell victim to fire.
For many years in the basement of the Playland Arcade in Times Square in New York City, Hubert's Museum featured acts such as sword swallower Lady Estelene, Congo The Jungle Creep, a flea circus, a half-man half-woman, and magicians such as Earl "Presto" Johnson. This museum was documented in photography by Diane Arbus. Later, in Times Square, mouse pitchman Tommy Laird opened a dime museum that featured Tisha Booty "the Human Pin Cushion, and several magicians including Tommy Laird, Lou Lancaster, Criss Capehart, Dorothy Dietrich, Magician Dick Brooks, and others.
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“A restaurant is a fantasy—a kind of living fantasy in which diners are the most important members of the cast.”
—Warner Leroy, U.S. restaurateur, founder of Maxwell’s Plum restaurant, New York City. New York Times (July 9, 1976)
“As for your friend, my prospective reader, I hope he ignores Fort Sumter, and “Old Abe,” and all that; for that is just the most fatal, and, indeed, the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil ever; for, as long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis. What business have you, if you are an “angel of light,” to be pondering over the deeds of darkness, reading the New York Herald, and the like.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)