The Television Curfew (1951)

Open up the entertainment section of any big city American newspaper of the Thirties and Forties and you’ll be amazed by how much live entertainment there was, from singers in small cafés, to jazz bands, to live theater. In my own city, Los Angeles, we had ad listings for night life all over town. During World War II, industry went to triple shifts. Ports and rail transportation hubs were mobbed 24/7 with servicemen. When the war ended, new workers continued to flood America’s cities. Since before the days of the Romans, city downtowns have found ways to profit from a restless, timeless human desire for night life and entertainment.

Timeless, that is, until it faded. Within a half-dozen years after VJ Day, US downtowns lost much of their nighttime magnetism. Bars held on, but many theaters and restaurants closed, club musicians hit the unemployment lines, and even burlesque houses were shuttered. Now that’s a serious cultural change. Back then, business owners and the newly unemployed had a terse, three-word nickname for the sudden phenomenon: “The television curfew.” When people stopped going out at night, downtowns largely died in darkness. We’ve lived on into a time when downtown’s daytime is dying as well. Then as now, it was due to tens of millions of people making the unexpected discovery of being able to stay home and experience life through an electronic screen.

Television was possessive; once a family bought a TV, it quickly took precedence over radio listening and moviegoing. Both of those media had to adapt. By the mid-Fifties, radio became something you listened to in the car, and movies began to focus on the things you couldn’t show on TV.

The reason that “the television curfew” took restaurants, clubs, and live entertainment by surprise is they hadn’t suffered much of a “radio curfew” when it made its big arrival a quarter century earlier. Some claim that it finished off dying vaudeville, though that’s also attributable to the nearly simultaneous debut of talking pictures. If anything, radio may have benefited night life; it got people in the habit of staying up later, for one thing, and live music from heavily promoted local clubs and hotels was a staple of early radio.

One reason that bar business held steady was obvious: bars were the first places most early viewers were introduced to TV. For the postwar years, programming reflected that male viewership with boxing, wrestling, baseball, and news, sponsored by makers of beer, razor blades, tires, gasoline, and hair tonic. Laundromats, another postwar development, tripled their night time business when they put in TV sets. Signs read, “Watch Berle While Your Clothes Whirl”.

One enthusiasm for the future was still unresolved in the early Fifties: lavish, live television events in movie theaters. This ambitious plan, backed by Paramount and 20^th Century Fox, went well beyond what theater TV would come to be used for: boxing matches and rare special events. With broadcast TV still only a small, black and white screen, the idea of entertainment spectaculars delivered live and direct via full color, theatrical TV was regarded as a promising new hybrid art form that could enrich Hollywood and revitalize America’s downtowns.

It could have changed American popular history if it had. Yet, in one of those intriguing what-ifs, it never really got off the ground. The FCC balked at allocating the wide bandwidths needed to connect the theaters. Announced for 197 theaters, less than a hundred were equipped with first generation video projectors. Other than a handful of specialty situations, the idea quietly faded away.

By the Seventies there was widespread interest in bringing high-spending nightlife back to downtown areas. Once again, as in 1933’s 42^nd Street, downtown was where “the underworld can meet the elite”. Gentrification took hold. Old buildings were restored. Abandoned plots of land got turned into “vest pocket” parks. Mostly it worked, if we define “worked” as “Did it generate more new economic activity than it cost?” rather than “Was it realistic to claim it would restore downtown life to what it had been decades ago?” As more city halls around the country became run by Giuliani-type mayors, a big drop in street crime brought in more business and foot traffic, leading to less street crime. This virtuous circle, the seemingly miraculous rebirth of cities, went on for decades…until it didn’t.

“Broadway Treasures” is a good-hearted 2019 documentary about a successful effort to restore a group of forgotten grand theaters in downtown Los Angeles, directed by earnest novice filmmaker Haeyong Moon and made by volunteers over a nearly decade-long production period. Despite the seemingly happy outcome, there’s a realistic sense of disappointment. The old theaters are saved, but scattered across downtown’s immense size, they haven’t ignited any critical mass of night life, crowds, or development. Used for special events and a handful of limited engagements, they’re dignified islands of architectural nobility in an otherwise tired concrete landscape of daytime-only businesses and low-end retail. No chic cafes have sprung up, not yet.

Today, there is a revival of the idea of keeping movie theaters viable by presenting large-screen live events you can’t see at home. There’s no need to install a video projector, because today “film” projectors are digital. In essence, it’s already a jazzed-up video projector. Fiber internet provides bandwidth beyond the dreams of the theaters that got turned down by the FCC when they applied for frequencies in the early Fifties.

70 years ago, cities experienced the lingering near-death of nightlife. In our own time, lockdowns emptied downtowns night and day. No downtown mobs of young office workers hitting the sidewalk each weeknight means few customers for comedy clubs or impress-your-date restaurants. After the pandemic era shock of the arrival of mass Zooming, our era’s daytime version of the Television Curfew, workforces will be nudged back to the office, but real estate markets are already pricing in the unsentimental certainty that downtown office towers aren’t going to be as needed.

In 1983, I was on local TV as one of the managers of Filmex, the Los Angeles film festival. The interviewer asked if I was worried that, with all the new video cassettes and cable channels, movie theaters would eventually go away. I got beaucoup credit among my raggedy cohort by grinning confidently and proclaiming, “Every home has a kitchen, but people still like to go to restaurants”.

That statement, I have to say in my own defense, held up for a long time. But forty years later, now that every home may have a 72 inch 4K screen, a credit card and a DoorDash account…well, things change.

 

Potential comment material:

 

L.A. had a third of today’s population; by any measure it wasn’t nearly as affluent back then, and more of those Angelenos had to get up with the sun and be at work early. Yet the bars, night clubs and restaurants were packed anyway.

 

Electronovision.

It tried to exploit “live” as a virtue, a “once in a lifetime experience”, which like live theater, but unlike film or TV, would not be repeated.

 

Of course, there are other reasons why downtowns started hollowing out. Historians are quick to blame cars. True, the Fifties saw the debut of superhighways, and a V-8 horsepower race that made farther commutes possible. But note that TV reached most cities years before the Interstates did. And speaking of race… mainline sociologists would likely place racial inequality at the center of their own theory of why inner cities entered a downward spiral: crime due to abandonment, further abandonment due to crime.

Some major US cities got caught in that doom spiral. Most didn’t; they muddled through with the dull business of plant closings, recessions, a shifting tax base, meeting a payroll, and trying to stay competitive.