due cause to criticize the Park. In her landmark book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, the British writer Frances Trollope gave a mixed review: The piece was extremely well got up, and on this occasion we saw the Park Theatre to advantage, for it was filled with well-dressed company; but still we saw many 'yet unrazored lips' polluted with the grim tinge of hateful tobacco, and heard, without ceasing, the spitting, which of course is its consequence. If their theaters had the orchestra of the Feydeau, and a choir of angels to boot, I could find but little pleasure, so long as they were followed by this running accompaniment of thorough base. Final years By the late 1830s, blackface acts and Bowery-style melodrama had come to eclipse traditional drama in popularity for New York audiences. Simpson adapted, booking more novelty acts and entertainments that emphasized spectacle over high culture. The patronage changed, as well, as the New York Herald noted: On Friday night the Park Theatre contained 83 of the most profligate and abandoned women that ever disgraced humanity; they entered in the same door, and for a time mixed indiscriminately with 63 virtuous and respectable ladies. ... Men of New York, take not your wives and daughters to the Park Theatre, until Mr. Simpson pays some respect to them by constructing a separate entrance for the abandoned of the sex. Nevertheless, the theatre's traditional patronage continued to support it, and the Park largely maintained its high-class reputation. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a more critical editorial in the Broadway Journal: The well-trained company of rats at the Park Theatre understand, it is said, their cue perfectly. It is worth the price of admission to see their performance. By long training they know precisely the time when the curtain rises, and the exact degree in which the audience is spellbound by what is going on. At the sound of the bell [signaling the start of the show] they sally out; scouring the pit for chance peanuts and orange-peel. When, by the rhyming couplets, they are made aware that the curtain is about to fall, they disappear—through the intensity of the performers. A profitable engagement might be made, we think, with "the celebrated Dog Bill" [part of William Cole's act in P. T. Barnum's American Museum]. The Park Theatre was finally destroyed by fire on December 16, 1848. The Astor family opted