New York City Vaudeville (NY) (Images of America)

New York City Vaudeville provides a unique pictorial record of America's preeminent entertainment medium in the late 1800s through the early 1930s. New York's Palace Theatre

served as the flagship for vaudeville, on which stage every

vaudevillian aspired to perform. New York City Vaudeville

features photographs of some of the greatest names from

the Palace Theatre, including Jack Benny, George Burns

and Gracie Allen, Anna Held, the Marx Brothers, and Eva Tanguay, as well as legendary African American performers such as Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters, and Bert Williams. Through the photographs and the capsule biographies, the reader is transported back to a time when vaudeville was the people's entertainment, with a new bill of fare each week and an ever-changing number of performers with ever-changing styles of presentation.