Lodging House
| Synonyms: | lodge house, newsieverse |
| See also: | faction sites |
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A lodging house, or lodge house, is a style of fansite popular in the early Newsies fandom. They were the primary center of the Newsieverse roleplay phenomenon. Lodging houses are characterized by naming style, usually a location in New York City followed by the title of Lodging House, and a standardized page setup, including necessary "bunk room" pages with character profiles (often for original characters featured in fanworks). Additional locations include a storage room or library, hosting fanfiction, and an attic, often including webrings and affiliates. Some pages include a roleplay-style introduction which treats the reader as a new newsie and introduces them to the location.
Fanfiction hosted at lodging houses almost always centers the original characters, usually newsgirls, said to reside in them. This sometimes means these stories follow entirely original settings only loosely based on the world of Newsies.
Since most lodging houses are named for locations featured in Newsies, names are frequently repeated. To avoid this, some sites are named for places completely unmentioned in the original movie. Prominent locations like the Manhattan and Brooklyn boroughs are the names of many separate sites. The Brooklyn Lodging House listed on Fanlore does not follow the typical structure and could potentially not be considered a traditional lodging house, instead only being named for one.
History
'This may have started out as a bunch of teeny-boppers writing cheesy stories with bad characters and even worse dialogue, but it's grown into something much more than that. I've learned a great deal about not only myself as a person, but also how to really, truly write from the heart.
Flare's New York Newsies Union existed in 2011, providing a short, organized list of both fan-made and historical locations, some of them with websites of their own.[2] The page cites Maria Hanton, known online as Goldie, as the original organizer of the Newsgirls' Union, by which the site was inspired.[3] A masterlist was run by Tuesday and later Angela and Spacey.[4] Smaller unions also existed, such as Crivelli, West, & Co.[5], the National Newsies Union,[6] and the Newsie Union.[7]
The idea behind the lodging house was to have a place for girls to form a sort of community in which they could all write Newsies fan fiction and post it. These lodging houses work sort of like a real one would, where people who want to "stay" at the house will sign in and "live" there, that being that people will fill out a profile and post their stories on the website. Several years later, these lodging houses have ceased to be only places to write Newsies fan fiction, and have become simply historical writing circles and formed strong friendships and "nationalistic" attitudes toward houses.[8]
A 2002 article in the New York Times went into detail on the phenomenon as it originally happened. It pinpoints the origin as Goldie's Lower Manhattan Lodging House in early 1999 (which one site says was March)[9]. At the time of writing, there were twenty-six connected locations.[1]
Once the first lodging house became full, more and more were created to accomodate the number of people wanting to join, and the once lone house for newsgirls became several, and hence the Newsgirls Union was formed. Now the Union has grown to not only a center for Newsies fan fiction, but has now encompassed all aspects of historical fiction pertaining to the relative time period of Newsies (1899). But the Newsgirls Union is not only a place for stories to be posted. Yes, that is an ideal part of it, but not everything. The Union is an actual community of people, where each writer has a specific newsgirl character and profile. That character stays and lives at the lodging house they have joined. Most of the lodging houses have chats in which that character (as well as any other characters that the writer has in their story, or a newsboy character) can be played, so other people in the Union can meet him/her.1344 South Street Lodging House[9]
Mouse's Midtown Newsies Lodging House, which has been online since 1998, contradicts this order of events.[10]
Union Timeline.[11]
Example Sites
Lodging houses still available to access online, most hosted on Angelfire or Tripod, include the following:
- 1344 South Street (created February 2000)
- The Rose Theatre
- Astoria Lodging House
- Little Italy Newsgirls Lodging House
- The Girls' Midtown Lodging House
- The Docks
- The Brooklyn Lodging House
- Marion Street Lodging House
- Shadow Street Lodging House
- The Midtown Boys' Lodging House
- Grand Street Lodging House
- Duane Street Lodging House
- Central Park Lodging House
- Hoboken Lodging House
- Bogart's House
- The French Quarter Lodging House
- The Ravenswood Lodging House
- Department of Police
- 87 Orchard Street
- Manhattan's Girls
Reflection/Retrospective
sitting around remembering the newsieverse todayfor folks who have never heard of the newsieverse, imagine early web 1.0 in the mid-90s and a bunch of afab early teens obsessed with the one (1) live action musical made during our childhood, which happened to have a cast of extremely attractive teen guys singing and dancing and teaching us about workers’ rights
we role-played the hell out of that shit. we wrote the most cringe storylines. we were embarrassing. one girl and her irl friends sang a newsies song on her local radio station
we hand-typed the html and css for our geocities sites, because it used to be pretty easy to learn actually
iirc at our peak we had a solid half-dozen “lodging houses” of active members
the newsies fandom was hardcore. we obsessed over that shit long enough to get a stage production made. i remember seeing articles of confusion wondering where all the sudden interest in this obscure early 90s musical had come from, and the answer was we were right there in a corner of the internet very few people foundnyxlyx[12]