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needed a patroness among Boston's elite to connect him with potential students. He found the perfect supporter in Elizabeth Harrison Gray Otis. Otis was a wealthy widow from a well-established family who enjoyed “going against social norms for women.”8 She seemed directly responsible for Papanti's great success, as he is widely credited with “teaching three generations of Bostonians how to dance.” One Bostonian recalled,
Papanti and Otis shocked and titillated Bostonians by dancing the very first closed-couple dance in the form of the waltz in 1834.10
Papanti's success allowed him to build an exclusive ballroom for his school on Tremont Street with what may have housed the first sprung floor in America. This floor made a strong impression on his students; one recalled, “The hall had a delightful sprung floor, the likes of which I have never beheld. It yielded beneath your feet like a living thing!”11 “…his hall was a paradise, the stiff little dressing room, with its rows of shoe boxes, the antechamber of delight.”12 Papanti was also a strict disciplinarian who taught etiquette and formality for the ball. He was described as “always in evening dress” with a “dark wig” and fiddle.13 Students who were slow to learn or misbehaved were dealt with expediently:
These children of the upper classes needed a place to demonstrate their accomplishments, and Boston provided balls where the wealthy could demonstrate their social graces and interact with other wealthy Bostonians.
Boston Assemblies, a name curiously close to that earlier institution of wealth and class known as the Boston Associates, were balls held