The amusements of New York were somewhat limited in their number and rather crude in their character when Barnum bought the American Museum. New York had its native favorites and its imported celebrities in the persons of Edmund Kean, Junius Booth, Edwin Forrest, Tyrone Power, William Macready, and Charlotte Cushman, but the opportunities offered to see these and their less talented contemporaries were not many, for the God-fearing section of the population were certain that the theater was under the management of the devil, and there was an even larger number who did not care whether it was or not, so that between indifference and straight-laced morality theatrical property suffered from a general depression. There were only three theaters in New York that were recognized by those who guarded their human contacts carefully, so that they might always be fit to associate with each other. These theaters were the Park, the Bowery, and Mitchell’s Olympic. The Park Theater was the theater of fashion, and the Bowery was just a grade lower, although the circumspectly critical Mrs. Trollope called it “as pretty a theater as I ever entered.” At the Park during the season of 1841 Fanny Elssler began an engagement in “The petite comedy of ‘The Dumb Belle.’” Edwin Forrest was playing at the Bowery Theater one night in “Metamora! The Last of the Wampanaogs,” an Indian play, and the next night, October 13, in “Damon and Pythias.” The Chatham Theater, which was out of bounds for fashionable society, offered “The Six Degrees of Crime, or Wine, Women, Gaming, Theft, Murder, the Scaffold.” It was in this theater, where she went in spite of the warnings and pleas of her New York society friends, that Mrs. Trollope saw a woman in one of the boxes “performing the most maternal office possible” during the intermission. Mitchell’s Olympic presented on Friday evening, December 17, 1841, “Why Did You Die, after which Tableaux Vivans.” (The spelling of _vivants_ is Mitchell’s.) “Jonah, or a Trip to Whales,” ran for several nights at the Bowery Theater, and Niblo’s Garden, adhering to its policy as a summer garden, offered during the summer of 1841 “Godenski, or The Skaters of Wilna, a pantomimic ballet.” The attraction in the hall of the American Museum just before Barnum took charge was “Love and Physic.” Dickens described the Bowery and Park theaters as “large, elegant, and handsome buildings, and are, I grieve to write it, generally deserted.”