Tango and New York
Chapter 1 of 4 · 1900–1924
Exhibition dancers
Mouvet, Valentino and the ballrooms where tango became a business.
Theater District · Midtown
In 1910 the New York-born dancer Maurice Mouvet was offered a contract at the Café de Paris in New York, where he danced the Viennese waltz and the Argentine tango.1 Towards the end of 1913 the tango hit New York City.2
By March 1914 a Dutch newspaper was reporting that the secretary of the American Silk Association had told a New York meeting that the much-discussed tango brought some people great profit.3 That year Tango Tangles, an American silent comedy short starring Charles Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle, was made.4
Rudolph Valentino left home in 1912, at 17, for Paris and Monte Carlo, where he learned the then-controversial tango.5 In December 1914 he was introduced to the exhibition ballroom dancer Bonnie Glass, who hired him at fifty dollars a week to replace her former partner Clifton Webb; in 1916 the restaurateur Joe Pani hired him to dance the tango with Joan Sawyer.5
Roseland opened at 1658 Broadway, at 51st Street, on 31 December 1919.6 In 1921 the film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse inspired a tango craze, and fashion fads such as gaucho pants.7
The music of these years, most danced first
What happened, and where
No placed, sourced line for these years yet.