From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in New York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.

Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed.  But drink and often worse evils are characteristic of most of them.  There are parts of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly.  But the nearest side street has its “tough joint.”  The same thing is true of the big summer resorts of other cities.

The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a deteriorating effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy.  Formerly these were respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons.  Now they are a melange of dancing classes and public entertainments.  The dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors, have been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their establishments.

Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted to a dance in any kind of a dance hall.  The girls go alone, with a friend, or with a group of girls.  The exceptional girl, who is attended by a man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part ner, she must ask his permission.  An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage.  Those who go unattended are always sure of partners.  Often they meet “fellows” they know, or have seen on the streets.  Introductions are not necessary.  Even if a girl is unacquainted with any “fellows,” if she possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.

The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions is considerable.  A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.

In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of black-gowned girls.  The black gown might almost be called the mark of the dance-hall habitue, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all her evenings going from one resort to another.  She wears black because light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.

An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the “spieler.”  This is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled and untiring dancer.  The business of the spieler is to look after the wall-flowers.  He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he dances with her and brings other partners to her.  It would not do for a place to get the reputation of slowness.  The girls go back to those dance halls where they have had the best time.

The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls.  The dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.