CONSULTING ENGINEER FOR SANITARY WORKS.
Buildings for the representation of theatrical plays must fulfill three conditions: they must be (1) comfortable, (2) safe, and (3) healthful. The last requirement, of healthfulness, embraces the following conditions: plenty of pure air, freedom from draughts, moderate warming in winter, suitable cooling in summer, freedom at all times from dust, bad odors, and disease germs. In addition to the requirements for the theater audience, due regard should be paid to the comfort, healthfulness, and safety of the performers, stage hands, and mechanics, who are required to spend more hours in the stage part of the building than the playgoers.
It is no exaggeration to state that in the majority of theater buildings disgracefully unsanitary conditions prevail. In the older existing buildings especially sanitation and ventilation are sadly neglected. The air of many theaters during a performance becomes overheated and stuffy, pre-eminently so in the case of theaters where illumination is effected by means of gaslights. At the end of a long performance the air is often almost unbearably foul, causing headache, nausea, and dizziness.
In ill-ventilated theaters a chilly air often blows into the auditorium from the stage when the curtain is raised. This air movement is the cause of colds to many persons in the audience, and it is otherwise objectionable, for it carries with it noxious odors from the stage or under stage, and in gas-lighted theaters this air is laden with products of combustion from the footlights and other means of stage illumination.
Attempts at ventilation are made by utilizing the heat due to the numerous flames of the central chandelier over the auditorium, to create an ascending draught, and thereby cause a removal of the contaminated air, but seldom is provision made for the introduction of fresh air from outdoors, hence the scheme of ventilation results in failure. In other buildings, openings for the introduction of pure air are provided under the seats or in the floor, but are often found stuffed up with paper because the audience suffered from draughts. The fear of draughts in a theater also leads to the closing of the few possibly available outside windows and doors. The plan of a theater building renders it almost impossible to provide outside windows, therefore "air flushing" during the day can not be practiced. In the case of the older theaters, which are located in the midst or rear of other buildings, the nature of the site precludes a good arrangement of the main fresh-air ducts for the auditorium.
Absence of fresh air is not the only sanitary defect of theater buildings; there are many other defects and sources of air pollution. In the parts devoted to the audience, the carpeted floors become saturated with dirt and dust carried in by the playgoers, and with expectorations from careless or untidy persons which in a mixed theater audience are ever present. The dust likewise adheres to furniture, plush seats, hangings, and decorations, and intermingled with it are numerous minute floating organisms, and doubtless some germs of disease.
Behind the curtain a general lack of cleanliness exists—untidy actors' toilet rooms, ill-drained cellars, defective sewerage, leaky drains, foul water closets, and overcrowded and poorly located dressing rooms into which no fresh air ever enters. The stage floor is covered with dust; this is stirred up by the frequent scene shifting or by the dancing of performers, and much of it is absorbed and retained by the canvas scenery.
Under such conditions the state of health of both theater goers and performers is bound to suffer. Many persons can testify from personal experience to the ill effects incurred by spending a few hours in a crowded and unventilated theater; yet the very fact that the stay in such buildings is a brief one seems to render most people indifferent, and complaints are seldom uttered. It really rests with the theater-going public to enforce the much-needed improvements. As long as they will flock to a theater on account of some attractive play or "star actor," disregarding entirely the unsanitary condition of the building, so long will the present notoriously bad conditions remain. When the public does not call for reforms, theater managers and owners of playhouses will not, as a rule, trouble themselves about the matter. We have a right to demand theater buildings with less outward and inside gorgeousness, but in which the paramount subjects of comfort, safety, and health are diligently studied and generously provided for. Let the general public but once show a determined preference for sanitary conditions and surroundings in theaters and abandon visits to ill-kept theaters, and I venture to predict that the necessary reforms in sanitation will soon be introduced, at least in the better class of playhouses. In the cheaper theaters, concert and amusement halls, houses with "continuous" shows, variety theaters, etc., sanitation is even more urgently required, and may be readily enforced by a few visits and peremptory orders from the Health Board.
When, a year ago, the writer, in a paper on Theater Sanitation presented at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, stated that "chemical analyses show the air in the dress circle and gallery of many a theater to be in the evening more foul than the air of street sewers," the statement was received by some of his critics with incredulity. Yet the fact is true of many theaters. Taking the amount of carbonic acid in the air as an indication of its contamination, and assuming that the organic vapors are in proportion to the amount of carbonic acid (not including the CO2 due to the products of illumination), we know that normal outdoor air contains from 0.03 to 0.04 parts of CO2 per 100 parts of air, while a few chemical analyses of the air in English theaters, quoted below, suffice to prove how large the contamination sometimes is: