Tony Pastor was an American impresario, variety performer and theatre owner who became one of the founding forces behind American vaudeville in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.
Background
He was born on May 28, 1837 in New York. After his Spanish father (Antonio Pastor) came to New York and met his future wife Cornelia Buckley, from New Haven, Connecticut, they lived in Manhattan. Their third child, and first son, Antonio Pastor, was born in Manhattan on May 28, 1832, at his parents' residence at 400 Greenwich Street, in what is now the financial district of lower Manhattan. His father was a Spanish immigrant who supported his family as a barber and part-time musician.
Career
Tony Pastor was on the stage from childhood as a clown, a ballad singer, and a comedian, but he first came to the attention of New York's public shortly after the Civil War, when he took a series of rather shabby acts and turns that had been known for years in the United States as "variety, " cleaned them up, and made a serious bid for the patronage not only of men, but of women, young people, and the family trade. In 1865 he opened Tony Pastor's Opera House at 201 The Bowery, moved to Broadway's Metropolitan Theatre in 1875, and to the Fourteenth Street Theatre in 1881. He built his own theater, Tony Pastor's, on Union Square in 1888, and here for twenty years he composed and sang dozens of songs, introduced many new stage personalities to the metropolis, including Lillian Russell, and aided the growth of vaudeville that took place between 1890 and 1929, both in New York City and on the road.
