[Dance Card] "Arminia" Donnerstag, den 21 Februar '95 Maskenball in Beethoven Maennerchor-Halle

New York: Printed by Theodore Gaus, 1995. Card stock. String. Very Good. A lovely chromolithographic dance card from back when German was spoken widely in New York by its huge immigrant community. The ball was held at Beethoven Hall, located in the East Village at 210 5th Street, given on the card as 210-214 Fuenfste Strasse, which at the time was the home of a social club serving mostly working class German immigrants living in the area. Such social clubs were a common thing back then. We assume, based on the title, German was what one generally heard spoken when in the club, with a sprinkling of English as one would expect with immigrants even as they seek the comfort of conversing in their native tongue. The building, which goes back to the 1860s, is still standing, but the club which it housed is of the very distant past. The card is 12mo in size, measuring 12.5 by 9.5 cm. The card is in fact constructed of two folded sheets, the outer one, with deckled edges and chromolithographic illustration front and back, is made of card stock, while within, slightly smaller, is a thinner paper which folded, has four pages of text -- the first, the title page telling us about the event, the two center pages, listing the dance program, and the last page, providing the roster of those officiating in the event in some way. While the title page is mostly in German, we note that the list of club officers, or Beamte, as the German word used here, gives their position titles in English, and rest of the dance content text is virtually all in English, including the names of some tunes that today would probably be rendered in their original German even though the readers are generally English speakers. The dance music is probably not an unusual mix for the time, with probably a slight bias towards Germanic composers, but the music of Strauss would have been a part of any program at the time, whatever group was sponsoring the event. The evening was ended, though, with the American evergreen melody of "Home Sweet Home", which undoubtedly was sung by the invitees. Back to the card, the illustrations of a comely masked woman in what would have been provocative garb back then, as well as the vignette illustration of a wine bucket and roses on the back, we would surmise were stock images kept by a printer. That said, they served this card very nicely, and we see the card's value today for being a cultural artifact of immigrant life in New York during the late 19th Century. The outer card has light soiling. The inner leaf is age toned. (Inventory #: 20030)