The House That Shadows Built (1928)

6 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT lower border, announced that the Comedy showed moving pictures. For the cinema had of late emerged from the little boxes which still occupied the Penny Arcade next door and — ^much against the judgment of Thomas A. Edison, its chief inventor — had taken timidly to a toy screen. Basement establishments on the East Side were already exhibiting European films with stories, incidents, and costumes shocking to the morals of the period; we heard the first growls of censorship. But the Comedy Theatre, like the Penny Arcade next door, stuck to “high-class family entertainment.” Though heroes shot villains and yeggs blew safes in full view of the audience and in defiance of our modern police regulations, no line or episode brought the blush to the most modest cheek. Presently, the Penny Arcade itself opened a “picture show” — admission five cents — on the floor above. A few years of this; and Fourteenth Street underwent another transformation. A Tammany clean-up wiped out the dance halls; presently prohibition was to do away with the saloons. It became the cheapest of all cheap shopping streets. The Penny Arcade and the Comedy Theatre disappeared, along with the more disreputable sister-establishments lying to eastward. A miniature department store whose windows exhibit three-dollar-and-ninety-six-cent dresses and one-dollarand-forty-three-cent hats now occupies the site. Only