Historic Philadelphia

✧
Left: The New Theatre in Chestnut Street
presented its first plays on February 17,
1794, a “double feature,” The Castle of
Andalusia followed by Who’s the Dupe?
The 90-by-134-foot building held two
thousand playgoers, nine hundred of them
in the boxes. The stage was thirty-six feet
wide and ran back seventy-one feet from the
footlights. A New York writer called it
“incomparably the finest home of the drama
in America.”
COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA.
Spanish flies, and Jesuits bark (an alkaloid
related to quinine.) A French observer
reported that servant girls “like to dress up for
the evening promenade, which lasts from nine
until eleven and, it’s said, leads them to places
where they traffic their charms.”
The Assembly had repealed the law against
theaters in 1789. On January 6, 1790, the old
Southwark Theatre reopened, presenting
Sheridan’s The Rivals.
President Washington became a regular
theatergoer. He would be met at the door by
Thomas Wignell, a comedian and cousin of
Lewis Hallam the Younger, dressed in black
and carrying a silver candlestick in each hand,
to lead His Excellency to his box.
Wignell built the Chestnut Street Theatre
on Sixth Street diagonally across from the State
House. It opened with two concerts in early
1793, but because of the yellow fever the
season was postponed at it and the Southwark.
The first performance at the New Theater,
as the holders of $8 season boxes first called
the Chestnut, was February 17, 1794. Early
presentations were lightweight stuff, but by
spring, the company would include, among
the comedies and contemporary plays,
Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and
other Shakespearean standards, and some
Bottom, left: Stephen Girard.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Bottom, right: Stephen Girard’s farmhouse
now stands in a South Philadelphia park.
Girard bought a sixty-seven-acre
Passayunk Township farm in 1798 from
Henry Seckel, in the area called the Neck,
known for growing produce and Mummers.
It was the farm on which the Seckel pear
had been developed. Girard named the
place Gentilhommiere.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER III
51