Museum Collections

Nicknamed the “Gay White Way” because of the never-ceasing splendor of lights from street lamps to marquee boards, the classic way to spend a night on Broadway during the late 1890s through the 1910s began with cocktails, a show, and then on to one of the gaudy, extravagant “lobster palaces.” These “lobster palaces,” were elegant, expensive new restaurants that emerged in New York City, specializing in lobsters and attracting the rich and famous. These establishments catered to the theatrical crowds that nightly surged out of limousines, taxis and theatres in search of dinner or an after-theatre supper. And “lobster palace society,” comprised of playboys, professional beauties, stars such as Lillian Russell, chorus girls, kept women, sportsmen, newspaper men, celebrities of the Bohemia of the arts, and businessmen from the hinterlands. Beginning with the opening of Café Martin in 1899, the lobster palace, and its accompanying society both challenged and changed New York society and its nightlife.