The Casino: Princeton's First "Campus Center"
Frist has been called Princeton's first campus center. No doubt about it, Frist is "first"--anagrametrically speaking. Older alumni, though, will remember that
Chancellor Green Library *
was reconfigured as a campus gathering place after the completion of Firestone Library under the name Chancellor Green Student Center. However, an even earlier building was, functionally at least, Princeton's first campus center.
To 19th-century landscape architects, casinos were the grandest of belvederes and gazebos. Other contemporaries thought of a casino as a clubhouse or building used for social meetings, with rooms for public entertainment, dancing, sports--and perhaps a few friendly card games now and then. No one, however, would have thought of a casino primarily as a place used for gambling or, indeed, any other
single purpose. Thus, the multi-use meaning of casino is the key to understanding how the Triangle Club came to build and manage its first, pre-McCarter theatre--and, coincidentally and arguably, Princeton's first "campus center."
The Princeton College Dramatic Association (PCDA), the antecedent organization of Triangle, held performances in one of University Hall's dining halls, surely never designed for theatre productions. After its 1892-93 production, The Hon. Julius Caesar, PCDA's President (and later Pulitzer Prize-winning author) Booth Tarkington 1893 and his fellow officers formed a board of directors and announced "a $13,000. fund-raising campaign for construction of an adequate theatre for plays and concerts, with office space, dressing rooms, and rehearsal halls." From the beginning, the theatre was to be called "The Casino." This suggests that the board realized that a dedicated theatre was not financially feasible. They would need additional income to construct and operate the building. Ironically, a compromised theatre design was the only possibility.
The Daily Princetonian of June 13, 1893, promised that "the main auditorium will be over one hundred feet in length and will contain two tennis courts with ample room at the sides and ends. The floor will be made with a special view to its use for dancing. The . . . stage [is to be] forty-five feet wide and thirty-two deep, flanked on either side by lockers, shower baths, dressing rooms, etc." The Casino was to be built on Bayard Lane, to the rear of the old Princeton Inn.
In April, 1895, the Prince announced that "the building of the Casino is being rapidly pushed forward in order to have it ready for the sophomore dance this spring." The directors considered but later rejected a proposal to convert the basement under the dressing rooms into a "swimming tank." By then, surprisingly, the site of construction had shifted onto campus, slightly south and to the west of Dod. One can only marvel at the inspired persuasiveness of Tarkington and the other Casino directors-- very recent graduates, along with two 1895 seniors-- in convincing the University's hoary, cautious trustees to allow a privately-owned theatre on campus, housed in a building that would sell membership and the use of its tennis courts, and rent its auditorium for class dances. Moreover, the Casino's exterior design (the young architect was J. M. Huston 1892) reflected spare, modernist lines, in marked contrast to its late Victorian, Edwardian, and Collegiate Gothic contemporaries, the prevailing fashions in campus architecture.
By late May, 1897, Tarkington's committee was in sight of its goal. That fall, the Casino promoted yearly memberships ($1.50) and tennis tickets ($1.00 per dozen), and promised that "the building will be heated and a boy will be employed to set up. . . pins in the [bowling] alleys."
Despite financially successful shows in Princeton, and the permission of the faculty for the Triangle Club to tour and generate income out of town, sometime in 1900 the board sold the Casino to Company "L" of the Princeton Militia, New Jersey National Guard, for use as a drill hall. Most probably, with the proliferation of new eating clubs at the turn of the century and the construction of a new gymnasium, Casino memberships and tennis tickets became redundant. Faced with reduced income and increasing costs of repairs and overhead-- not unlike the Triangle Club's situation with McCarter Theatre a half century later--the board had no choice but to relinquish ownership of Triangle's first theatre (with proper concessions from Company "L" for rehearsal and performance time).
Early Rehearsal
of "They Never Come Back" - 1920-21
|
Building
a set for an
upcoming production
|
For the next quarter century, the Casino's
inherent deficiencies as a non-dedicated theatre became an ever-more-frequent
leitmotif in reviews of Triangle Club shows. Professor Donald
Clive Stuart, who would become Triangle's professional director
after World War I, wrote in his first Triangle show review (Main
Street, 1911-12) of "the wretched acoustics of the garage
known as the Casino." Tarkington's PCDA contemporary and fellow
Pulitzer-prizewinner, playwright Jesse Lynch Williams 1892, in
a review of Triangle's 1912-23 show, Once in a Hundred Years,
commented: "Perhaps the excellent orchestra was a little too loud
at times, or rather the voices were too low. The words of these
songs are entirely too good to miss. But this is a perennial difficulty
in Princeton productions, because of the notorious acoustics of
the armory (Casino). We shall never be able to hear much until
we have our theatricals in a theatre." "A rare scene, the Casino,"
wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald '17 in This Side of Paradise;
"a big, barn-like auditorium." Because the Casino was used for
tennis and dances, its main floor was level and seating was on
removable, hard wood folding chairs. The pillars blocked the view
of the stage from the sides of the house, and the middle fifteen
rows were acoustically dead.
As well, age and poor maintenance began
to tell. The roof leaked. The radiators produced plenty of noise
but little else. Alexander Woolcott told a Prince reporter
that "the Casino may have been useful as an arsenal, but that
was during the French and Indian Wars." In 1922, the Militia sold
the dilapidated, white elephant Casino back to the Triangle Club
for a nominal sum. Somehow, the club was able to secure a $10,000.
insurance policy on the building, which was condemned by the Princeton
Fire Department a year later.
On January 8, 1924, the Casino burned to the ground. Herb Sanford '27 recalled that two pianos were saved and that he and Bill Green '25, dressed in pajamas and raccoon coats, entertained spectators with "Keep the Home Fires Burning" and songs from that year's spectacularly successful show, the legendary Drake's Drum (which had opened in Trenton). That year's "Faculty Song" at Senior Step Singing took friendly aim at Professor Stuart, always so outspoken about the Casino's inadequacies, with the verse:
Here's to Stuart, Donald Clive,
He's the happiest man alive;
What was his cross became his crown,
He burned the old Casino down.
Sadly, the Triangle Club undoubtedly lost valuable office records and Triangularbilia in the blaze. Those might have provided a fuller picture of the club's earliest years and of those who strutted their histrionic stuff across the Casino's storied boards: Kenneth S. Clark '05 (composer of "Going Back to Nassau Hall"), Arthur H. Osborn '07 (composer of "The Princeton Cannon Song"), financier Herbert "Dolly" Dillon '07, Roy S. Durstine '08 (a founding father of modern advertising--the "D" in BBD& O, America's most high-octane ad agency for two generations), the Rev. Hugh Chamberlain Burr '11, James M. Beck, Jr. '14, Barry Brazelton '15, Colonel William "Fifth Down Red" Friesell '16, literary critic Edmund Wilson '16, poet John Peale Bishop '17, F. Scott Fitzgerald '17, Joshua B. Everett '18, Colonel Waller B. Booth '20, Edward Hope Coffey '20, Erdman Harris '20, Edward S. Hubbell '20, the Triangle duo of J. Russell Forgan '22 and Louis Tilden '22, W. H. Smith '24, R. M. Crawford '25 (composer of the "U. S. Air Force Song"), Avery Sherry '27, and all the other ships that passed in the night of the Triangle Club's formative years.
--article by Donald Marsden '64,
author of The Long Kickline: A History of the Princeton Triangle Club
*The Triangle Club poked fun at the inadequacies of Chancellor Green Library in its 1936-37 show, Take It Away!, in a song called "The Princeton Libraree" (words by Charlie Marvin '37, music by Bill Borden '37):
There's a spot
That's not so hot,
The Princeton Libraree;
An amazing maze of ancient days,
The Princeton Libraree.
It's far from pleasing
To sit there sneezing
While almost freezing in drafty nooks;
The chairs are squeaky,
The roof is leaky,
O where is the key to locked-up books?
You've got the north stacks,
You've got the south stacks--
Ev'rything but smoke-stacks:
This edifice wrecks the campus.
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