Editing Tony Pastor (section)

=== Later career ===
[[File:Tammany Hall LC-USZ62-101734.jpg|thumb|Tammany Hall in 1914]]
In 1874, Pastor moved his company a few blocks to take over [[Michael B. Leavitt|Michael Bennett Leavitt]]'s former theater at 585 Broadway. The theater district was moving uptown to Union Square, however, and in 1881 Pastor took a lease on the former [[Wallack's Theatre|Germania Theatre]] on 14th Street in the same building that housed [[Tammany Hall#Headquarters|Tammany Hall]]. He alternated his theater's presentations between [[operetta]]s and family-oriented variety shows, creating what became known as [[vaudeville]]. Vaudeville was popular with the masses from the 1880s to the 1910s. Pastor wanted to capture a mass audience by bringing family entertainment to the middle class.<ref name=":0">McLean, Albert F. ''American Vaudeville as Ritual''. University of Kentucky Press, 1965</ref> In order to do this, Pastor sought out to make vaudeville "respectable". He did not sell liquor in his theatre and required a level of decency to his performances which encouraged women and families to attend.<ref name=":0" />

His theater featured performers such as [[Ben Harney]] presenting a new style called "[[ragtime]]" as well as other up-and-coming talents such as [[Joe Weber (vaudevillian)|Weber]] and [[Lew Fields|Fields]], [[George M. Cohan]], [[Sophie Tucker]], [[Lillian Russell]], [[Buster Keaton]], [[Gus Edwards (vaudeville)|Gus Edwards]], [[Ella Wesner]], [[Eva Tanguay]], [[Blossom Seeley]], [[Benny Fields]], [[May Irwin]] and [[Eddie Leonard]]. Harry S. Sanderson was his business manager from 1878 until 1908. The business records from this period are available to researchers.<ref name="RansomCtr2">{{cite web|url=http://research.hrc.utexas.edu:8080/hrcxtf/view?docId=ead/00106.xml|title=Tony Pastor: An Inventory of His Collection|publisher=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center|access-date=2014-12-23}}</ref> 

In the musical ''[[Hello, Dolly! (musical)|Hello, Dolly!]]'', the song "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" includes the line, "We'll join the Astors at Tony Pastor's". It also references seeing "the shows at [[Delmonico's]]", which suggests that the character does not really know about upper-class social life in New York.{{cn|date=July 2023}}