Eakins' Boxing Scenes - The Comedy of War ? 1898

I started out looking for the place that Eakins used as background in some of his boxing scenes and dated to around 1898. 

I was thinking that the Winter Circus Building was the setting as there were some boxing bouts there in the early 1890s but could find no references to it at there in 1898 - using Winter Circus and Boxing as search words on some of my regular Internet search sites. I saw the theatre posters for the comedic plays The Telephone Girl at the Walnut Theatre and The Ballet Girl at the Chestnut Street Theatre and thought maybe if they are being displayed, the boxing ring in both Eakins Taking the Count and Between Rounds may have been staged at another theatre owned by Nixon and Zimmerman. I had read that someone had staged a boxing match at the Academy of Music, so I thought that regular theatres could be adapted for one of a kind big boxing events. 

I did some tedious research there and gave up until this morning. This morning I used Arena and Boxing in the search engines I use and came up with the fact that The Arena, usually attributed to as the place of Eakins' paintings on this subject did exist but where. All the newspaper clippings use the phrase that the fight is to be or was at the Arena. Where was the Arena? 

I did find one clipping at gave Broad and Cherry as the location of The Arena. So I changed the search words to Arena and Broad and Cherry. And apparently the multi-purpose building aka The Cyclorama Building 1885-1892 and Winter Circus 1892-? was also called The Arena for at least 1898. 

While The Telephone Girl was still playing in February 1899 per the above Inquirer advertisement, the time when both the Telephone Girl and the Ballet Girl were simultaneously playing, it was early April and the above advertisement is dated a few days prior to the United States declaring war on Spain for the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in Cuba, the so called immediate cause of that war. 

I cannot help but seeing the symbolism of two female figures, the plays, Telephone Girl and Ballet Girl in an arena of male macho endeavor in boxing. 

That the Arena was used to recruit soldiers in April before the declaration of war, these two boxing scenes are not in active fists on fists in sporting combat. And in down time - not active - but hurry up and wait? time - military time? 

That the whole lead up to that war was a comedy errors for a U.S. government that sent soldiers to the tropics in wool uniforms and shipping beef for the troops in boats without ice, arriving in Cuba already putrid and rotting and the Rough Riders did not charge up San Juan Hill on horses as those horses had not yet been shipped to Cuba. And the Battle of Manila was a few shots across the boughs of Spanish ships that sent up the white flag rather than do heavy battle with the new and impressive high tech paper tiger fleet of the U.S.Navy. 

I do not know Eakins mind but I see some symbolism in these anatomy studies posing as boxing bout paintings and his use of background materials in them.