Pleasure Domes.

Among the most extravagant public buildings of the 1920s were the great movie theaters that sprung up in major cities throughout America. Shrines to prosperity, technology, and entertainment, these huge pleasure domes often combined vaudeville-style acts (dance troops, orchestras, vocal ensembles) with a movie — usually last on the bill — accompanied by a "mighty Wurlitzer" organ that was raised on a platform from the orchestra pit. For the price of a twenty-five-cent ticket (before 6 P.M.), a housewife could drop of her young children at the theater nursery, which included baby sitters and a resident nursing staff. She would then pass through an opulently decorated lobby and, if so inclined, an equally opulent ladies' lounge before being escorted to her first-balcony seat by a grand personage: a scrupulously polite, impeccably white-gloved usher in a tuxedo or military-cadet-style uniform with rows of brass buttons...