Circuses and menageries originally developed in competition with each other. They sought the same audiences, and they often coordinated their productions so that circuses played in the afternoon and menageries were displayed at night in the same location. In 1832, Joshua Purdy Brown, a cousin of Hachaliah Bailey, toured his circus with a menagerie for the first time. Circuses and menageries prior to that had been known to be mistrustful and jealous, and even stole each other’s livestock on more than one occasion. In the ‘40s, differences between the two kinds of travelling shows grew less distinct. In 1851, Aron Turner, a North Salem shoemaker and an old friend of Hachaliah Bailey, grew tired of putting up with monopolistic control of wild animals by the Syndicate. At the urging of his manager and son-in-law, George Fox Bailey, he leased his animals from them outright for use in his own circus. He thus became another early circus owner to completely combine the menagerie and the ring acts into a unified performance. This Bailey was another one of Hachaliah’s nephews from North Salem, who would go on to become one of the top circus showmen in the country when he later inherited Aron’s circus. He died in 1903, calling himself the last of the Flatfoots. Syndicate shows quickly followed Brown’s, Turner’s and Bailey’s leads, and by the late 1850s menageries were completely absorbed into circuses. New York had been a circus town since the days of Ricketts. The French Canadian circus master, Victor Pepin, built his Olympic Circus on Broadway in 1810. The Institute moved into New York City in 1835, occupying quarters at 37 Bowery. Within three years, the Flatfoots were operating the Bowery Amphitheatre, featuring a full circus ring. In 1853, they brought the renowned French circus man Henri Franconi into town, erecting a temporary copy of his famous Paris Hippodrome in only twenty-five days. Located at Madison Square, at 23rd and Broadway, it was a two-acre building seating about six thousand spectators, with twenty-foot-high brick side walls, a canvas roof, and a wide one-thousand-foot hippodrome track. Franconi and his troupe staged recreations of the great Egyptian, Greek and Roman games, gladiatorial combats, and chariot races. Twelve years later, Lewis B. Lent, by then one of the most widely travelled and experienced of the Flatfoots, first rented and then bought another big circus building on 14th Street called the Hippotheatron, one of New York’s favorite amusement spots, and opened it as Lent’s New York Circus. It was much more permanent than either Franconi’s Hippodrome or Nixon’s Alhambra, which it had been built to replace in 1864. The Hippotheatron sported a roof of corrugated tin instead of canvas. It had a forty-three-foot ring, larger than Astley’s in London, and held about 2,300 people. Lent operated it successfully for four years, until P.T. Barnum bought it for his menagerie. Despite its reputation as the iron building, it subsequently burned down, as circuses were still prone to do. P.T. Barnum’s Great Roman Hippodrome was later built on Madison Avenue at 27th Street in 1874, and after it was remodeled in 1881, it became the first Madison Square Garden. These buildings, and others like them, represent some of the earlier American efforts to create permanent circus buildings in the European tradition.

However, Ricketts, Bailey, Lent, and their imitators were quick to discover that a different approach to performance would have to be taken by circuses in the new world from what was becoming the norm in the old world. In England and Europe, Astley, Hughes, and the Franconi Family assured themselves of big audiences by building relatively permanent circus buildings in the heavily populated major cities. Despite the experiments with semi-permanent circuses in New York, American cities did not have the population base to support the new industry by themselves, and so early American circuses grew almost immediately into road shows. Enterprising individuals designed and built their circuses to travel. They played in the open air or in whatever theatres and meeting houses they could find in the small towns they visited, and when necessary they built make-shift amphitheatres. However, they soon discovered that it simply wasn’t practical to spend the money and time required for permanent buildings, no matter how cheaply they might be built. The full canvas tent was the logical outgrowth of such limitations. According to Stuart Thayer, Joshua Purdy Brown toured the first American tented circus in 1825. N Brown was the same benevolent and gentle circus man who would eventually join his operation with the Wright Brothers menagerie in 1832 (Hoh 57, 58).