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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“The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth. The city becomes an emblem in remote minds; apart from the tangible export of goods and men, it exerts its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases.”
—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
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