Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan. By Burton W. Peretti. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. xviii, 284 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-3997-3.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a New York Times op-ed in June 2007, Barbara Ehrenreich referred to a recent protest against New York City's “80-year-old restrictions on dancing in bars.” On a chilly Sunday in May, a large crowd shimmied down Fifth Avenue to lay claim to what many would consider a human need if not a right. For Ehrenreich, the author of a recent history of dancing, kicking up your heels in a public venue—such as a nightclub—is connected to “the deep human craving for free-spirited joy.” While readers of Burton W. Peretti's Nightclub City may find less focus on the joy of such pleasures, they may nonetheless find an explanation for the incongruous enactment, and continued existence, of such a kill-joy measure in a city long renowned as an adult playground. Peretti's book is a history of the New York nightclub from its heyday in the 1920s to its gradual decline during the 1930s, and it offers an examination of “the ways in which nightclubs became implicated in the civic life of the city” (p. xi). Organized into nine chapters, Nightclub City takes the reader through the various interwar reform and regulation efforts directed at nightclubs by successive municipal governments and mayors, private reform organizations, and federal and state legislators and agencies. Peretti's strongest chapters chart the most difficult times for nightclubs—the early years of the Depression and then of the New Deal (chapters 5 and 8 respectively). Those two chapters allow Peretti to marshall his strongest and most interesting evidence on the relationship between structural and cultural change at the local and national level and material changes in nightclubs. For example, in chapter 5 he gives a detailed account of how, lacking a large customer base with money to spend, many clubs from the heyday of the late 1920s closed their doors during the Depression. The clubs that survived those hard times, such as the Hollywood Restaurant, adapted by offering a new model for a night on the town: large-scale, less elite surroundings with a good deal on a dinner and a show for middle-class customers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.088 | 0.020 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".