"You had the spectre of this smoking ruin with the remains of the ballroom rotting away at the end," says Simon Opie, chief executive of the charity that rebuilt the pier.
More than 150 years later, in a beige and windowless hotel ballroom thousands of miles away, hundreds of American medical coders are diligently chipping away at the exact same task.
The trend in dancing is away from ballroom to solo; witness Elvis Presley, the Twist, and the Frug.
The Surf Ballroom a few blocks away drew entertainers from Count Basie to the Beach Boys.
When he first saw it, more than a year ago, a ballroom wall was torn away, exposing exterior brick.
But the mirrored art deco walls of his ballroom are finally stripped away – in a rather cumbersome scene change – to reveal a supporting framework of cages hidden beneath.
"Americans trusted that George Bush would be straight with us about the state of the federal budget, but he used the same accounting gimmicks that destroyed Enron to hide his descent into deficit spending," Mr. McAuliffe said to whistles and boos from a partisan crowd gathered in a ballroom just a hallway away from the slot machines and rows of gambling tables at the Las Vegas Hilton.
A number of other credentialed reporters will be a mile away in a ballroom at the Marriott Sawgrass, outside the east gate of the PGA Tour complex, watching Woods on television.
Wayne Pacelle, the president of the organization, said a society employee retrieving a microphone found the notes on a hotel ballroom podium after Vick walked away from it at the end of his news conference.
