Reflecting this popularity, the leisure trade acquired into the act, releasing the group-pleasing track "Ten Cents a Dance" (1930) and the motion pictures The Taxi Dancer (1927), with star Joan Crawford, and Ten Cents a Dance (1931), that includes Barbara Stanwyck. Cities have been experiencing excessive growth; indeed, Chicago's inhabitants doubled between 1900 and 1930. Many young men and women had been leaving their rural and small-city neighborhoods for the same promise of journey that the Old West had beforehand provided. At the same time taxi dancing was rising in recognition, the activity was coming underneath the increasing scrutiny of ethical reformers in New York City and elsewhere, who deemed some dance halls dens of iniquity. The taxi dancers who engaged in treating, or the receipt of "presents," sometimes drew sharp distinctions between the activity and that of prostitution, but they usually walked a tremendous line between the 2. By the mid-1920s taxi dancing had grow to be a nightlife leisure staple in many massive American cities.
