8. It Was First “Legitimate” Broadway Theater to Show Topless Girls

Interior Lobby of Hammerstein Theater, 1928. Via Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Photo by Roege.

Long before the current kerfuffle over topless painted ladies in Times Square, Golden Dawn also featured topless chorus girls, a first for “legitimate” Broadway theater.

Otherwise, Golden Dawn is mostly remembered for a racist story line involving the rescue of a light skinned woman from an African villages by white colonialists.