Nickelodeon (movie Theater) - Audience

Audience

Early writers on American cinema history assumed that audiences at nickelodeons were primarily working-class people who could not afford a higher ticket price. More recent historians, however, claim the importance of middle class audiences throughout the nickelodeon era and into the later 1910s. At the heart of the image of nickelodeons in traditional histories is the belief that movies were a proletarian amusement and that the "proper" middle-class stayed away until after World War I. This idea is reflected in Lewis Jacobs' 1939 survey, where he writes: "Concentrated largely in poorer shopping districts and slum neighborhoods, nickelodeons were disdained by the well-to-do. But, the workmen and their families who patronized the movies did not mind the crowded, unsanitary, and hazardous accommodations most of the nickelodeons offered." In his recent research, however, Robert C. Allen has debated that movies attracted a middle-class audience as illustrated by the location of earlier movie theaters in traditional entertainment districts. Allen writes that "In terms of social class, more nickelodeons were located in or near middle-class neighborhoods than in the Lower East Side ghetto."