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Taxi dance hall


A taxi dance hall is a type of dance hall where dancers, usually young women, called taxi dancers are paid to dance with usually male patrons. The owners of a taxi dance hall provide music and a dance floor for their patrons and taxi dancers. In the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, when taxi dancing was at its peak, patrons of taxi dance halls would typically buy dance tickets for ten cents each. When they presented a ticket to a taxi dancer, she would dance with them for the length of a single song. Taxi dancers earned a commission on every dance ticket that they collected. The ticket-a-dance system was the centerpiece of the taxi dance halls. Taxi dance halls are vividly represented on the ouverture of Henry Miller novel Sexus, where the narrator falls in love with a taxi dancer after meeting her on a thursday night, circa 1928.

The taxi dance hall is a uniquely American institution that was first introduced in 1913 within San Francisco's Barbary Coast neighborhood. At that time reform movements were shutting down many bordellos and red-light districts within America's cities, and strength for Prohibition was gaining. In 1920, when the taxi dance halls entered their steep upward climb to popularity, prohibition was enacted and made serving alcohol in saloons, bars, and cafes illegal. The taxi dance hall's roots can be traced to a number of earlier dance establishments.

Prior to the emergence of taxi dance halls in San Francisco, California, that city popularized a different form of dance hall called the Barbary Coast dance hall, or also called the Forty-Nine['49] dance hall. Forty-Niner is a term for the gold prospectors who came to California during the California Gold Rush circa 1849. At the Barbary Coast dance halls, female employees danced with male patrons and earned their living on commissions paid for the drinks that they could encourage their male dance partners to buy. These dance halls were representative of the Old West—noisy, rough, boisterous, and occasionally violent. As writer Will Irwin described:


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