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Rare Sterling Silver Presentation Bowl Vaudeville St

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This rare, exceptional detailed sterling silver presentation bowl was presented to 2 very important stars of Vaudeville. Inscribed in center are the names Mr. & Mrs. Antonio Pastor & Mr. & Mrs. Lew Dockstader. The bowl is marked sterling, and weighs 24 ounces. It has a beautiful floral border, measures 12" across, and is in fine condition. It is dated Dec. 23, 1902. It certainly is made in the manner of Tiffany & Co. Antonio Pastor was born in Manhattan on the 28th of May, 1837, at his parent’s residence on the 100 block of Greenwich Street across from the old Pacific Hotel in the area that one day would be occupied by the World Trade Center. His father was a Spanish immigrant who supported his family as a barber and part-time musician.[2][3][4][5] He embarked on a show business career at a very young age, obtaining a job singing at P.T. Barnum's Scudder's American Museum. During the next few years he worked in minstrel shows, the circus business, and as a comic singer in variety revues. He established himself as a popular songwriter during a four-year run at Robert Butler's American Music Hall, a variety theater located at 444 Broadway in what is now called Soho but was then the heart of the lower Manhattan theater district. Pastor published "songsters", books of his lyrics which were sung to popular tunes. The music had no notation, as it was assumed that the audience had a collective knowledge of popular song. The subject matter of his music may be shocking to modern audiences, but was intended to be bawdy and humorous rather than revolutionary.[6] Though Pastor was popular with the nearly all-male variety theater audiences, he knew that his ticket sales would double if he attracted a female audience. Eventually Pastor began to produce variety shows, presenting an evening of clean fun that was a distinct alternative to the bawdy shows of the time and more appropriate for middle class families. In 1865 Pastor opened Tony Pastor's Opera House on the Bowery in partnership with minstrel show performer, Sam Sharpley, whom he later bought out. The same year he organized traveling minstrel troupes who toured the country between April and October of each year. With shows that appealed to women and children as well as the traditional male audience, his theater and touring companies quickly became popular with the middle classes and were soon being imitated. NYPL Digital Collection Tony Pastor and Bonnie Thornton (circa 1897) In 1874, Pastor moved his company a few blocks to take over Michael Bennett Leavitt's former theater at 585 Broadway. The theater district was moving uptown to Union Square, however, and in 1881 Pastor took a lease on the former Germania Theatre on 14th Street in the same building that housed Tammany Hall. He alternated his theater's presentations between operettas and family-oriented variety shows, creating what became known as vaudeville. His theater featured performers such as Ben Harney presenting a new style called "ragtime" as well as other up-and-coming talents such as Weber and Fields, George M. Cohan, Sophie Tucker, Lillian Russell, Buster Keaton, Gus Edwards, Eva Tanguay, Blossom Seeley, Benny Fields, May Irwin and Eddie Leonard. In the musical Hello, Dolly!, the song "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" includes the line, "We'll join the Astors at Tony Pastor's." It also references seeing "the shows at Delmonico's," which suggests that the character doesn't really know about upper class social life in New York. Tony Pastor died in Elmhurst, New York on August 26, 1908 and was interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens, in Brooklyn. He was 71, and though greatly mourned at his death as one of the last gentlemen of the early vaudeville halls, the medium had passed him by with the advent of the vaudeville circuit in the 1880s. Pastor had remained a local showman in an epoch that increasingly came to be dominated by regional and national chains. Fighting against the monopolies for the rights of individual local showmen was an undertaking that marked the last years of his life, earning him the nickname of "Little Man Tony". Lew Dockstader (born George Alfred Clapp, August 7, 1856, Hartford, Connecticut - died October 26, 1924, New York City) was a United States singer, comedian, and Vaudeville star, best known as a blackface minstrel show performer in the late 19th century and early years of the 20th century. Dockstader performed both as a solo act and leading a popular Minstrel troupe. Various popular entertainers of the era performed with Dockstader's Minstrels, including Will Oakland, and the most famous being young Al Jolson, c. 1906 - 1909. Dockstader appeared on film in a number of comedy shorts from 1905 - 1907 [1] and in the title role in the 1914 feature silent film "Dan".[2]

as described, good

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