History
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On May 10, 1849, one of New York City’s largest riots erupted at the Astor Place Opera House after a long-standing trans-Atlantic rivalry between Shakespearean actors Edwin Forrest and Edward Macready became entangled with years of ethnic and class resentment against the city’s Anglophile elite. Wealthier audiences embraced Macready’s refined style while the masses favored Forrest’s muscular approach, and tensions intensified during their rival productions of Macbeth at the Broadway Theatre and the Astor Place Opera House. Leaflets asked whether Americans or English would rule the city, stirring nativist Bowery Boys and Irish anger over the Famine. After hundreds disrupted Macready’s May 7 performance with insults, eggs, and chairs, thousands gathered three nights later, refused to disperse, and hurled rocks through windows and at the State Militia, which fired into the crowd and killed about 30 people, many of them bystanders. Macready fled to England and never returned, the opera house soon closed, and as the gap between rich and poor widened, theaters ceased to function as democratic gathering places and instead became segregated by economic class.
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New York, New York · United States
