Back Story 1 - All Aboard! Curtain Up!
Young Man of Manhattan: The Life of Fred Astaire in New York City (1905-33)
Most fans of classic Hollywood films know Fred Astaire as the epitome of style and class through his dozens of movie musicals from the 1930s through the 1950s. But did you know that before he went to California he spent much of his childhood, adolescence and young adulthood in Manhattan? In 1905, when Fred was 5 years old, his mother took him and his older sister, Adele, from their hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, by train to New York City to enroll them in a dancing school. Within a year, Fred and Adele were performing in a vaudeville act, touring the country from Maine to California, but their home base was always Manhattan, which itself was undergoing tremendous changes. Just a few weeks before the Astaires arrived in New York, the subway had first started running, Longacre Square had been re-dubbed Times Square, and the Hippodrome Theater on Sixth Avenue was just three months away from opening. Twenty-eight years later, Fred would board an airplane to fly to California with his new bride to begin his Hollywood career. In those three decades, Manhattan had grown into a modern metropolis whose population had doubled and whose buildings were scraping the sky. Fred had similarly transformed himself from second fiddle to his sister in a novelty vaudeville act to a top Broadway star in musicals by George Gershwin and Cole Porter.
This publication will explore how Fred Astaire became the Young Man of Manhattan, and how both he and his city changed in the first third of the 20th century. All aboard! Curtain up!