Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles Read online

  BROADWAY

  A HISTORY OF

  NEW YORK CITY

  IN THIRTEEN MILES

  FRAN LEADON

  FRONTISPIECE:

  Lower Broadway, looking south from Ful ton Street, 1899.

  For Leigh Blue Sky Coming

  A walk through Broadway revives recollection; makes life flow backward for the hour; lifts the curtain from scenes of the past; recreates feelings often pleasant, oftener painful,—all ghosts of

  the dead years that shimmer through our darkened memory.

  —JUNIUS HENRI BROWNE, 1869

  CONTENTS

  “A Sort of Geographical Vivisection”: A Note on Structure

  Preface

  MILE 1

  BOWLING GREEN TO CITY HALL PARK

  1. SOARING THINGS

  2. MUD AND FIRE

  3. PROMENADE

  4. FIRE AND PROGRESS

  5. BARNUM

  6. TRAFFIC

  MILE 2

  CITY HALL PARK TO HOUSTON STREET

  7. ACROSS THE MEADOWS

  8. “A GLANCE AT NEW YORK”

  9. MILLIONAIRES AND MURDERERS

  10. “BROADWAY IS NEVER FINISHED”

  MILE 3

  HOUSTON STREET TO UNION SQUARE

  11. THE BEND

  12. GRACE

  13. UNION

  14. THE RIALTO

  15. INCENDIARY SPEECH

  MILE 4

  UNION SQUARE TO HERALD SQUARE

  16. LADIES’ MILE

  17. THE “MERRY CHAIR WAR”

  18. THE FREAK BUILDING

  19. THE “LIGHT CURE”

  MILE 5

  HERALD SQUARE TO COLUMBUS CIRCLE

  20. GREAT WHITE WAY

  21. EDEN

  22. TIMES SQUARE TYPES

  23. BROADWAY GHOSTS

  MILE 6

  COLUMBUS CIRCLE TO 79TH STREET

  24. THE BOULEVARD

  25. “DOWN THERE”

  26. CHICKENS ON THE ROOF

  27. HARSENVILLE

  MILE 7

  79TH STREET TO 106TH STREET

  28. THE RAVEN OF SPECULATION

  29. BOOMTOWN

  30. HOMETOWN

  MILE 8

  106TH STREET TO 122ND STREET

  31. ASYLUM

  32. ACROPOLIS

  33. GOD’S SKYSCRAPERS

  MILE 9

  122ND STREET TO 143RD STREET

  34. “HONEST TO GOODNESS SLUM LAND”

  35. MURDERVILLE

  MILE 10

  143RD STREET TO 165TH STREET

  36. THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

  37. NECROPOLIS

  38. MINNIE’S LAND

  MILE 11

  165TH STREET TO 179TH STREET

  39. THE HEIGHTS

  40. HILLTOPPERS

  41. THE FOURTH REICH

  42. THE BRIDGE

  43. THE CUT

  MILE 12

  179TH STREET TO DYCKMAN STREET

  44. MR. BILLINGS

  45. MR. MOLENAOR

  46. MR. BARNARD

  MILE 13

  DYCKMAN STREET TO 228TH STREET

  47. LIFE AND DEATH IN INWOOD

  48. THE LAST FARM

  49. INDIAN TRAIL

  50. WHERE DOES THIS ROAD END?

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  “A SORT OF GEOGRAPHICAL VIVISECTION”

  A NOTE ON STRUCTURE

  “THE BEST WAY OF FINDING OUT THE INSIDE OF AN ORANGE is by cutting it through the middle,” William Henry Rideing wrote in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in December of 1877, “and if, in a sort of geographical vivisection, a scalpel should be drawn down the middle of New York, it would fall into the channel formed by Broadway.”

  This book takes up Rideing’s suggestion and not only flays Manhattan south to north along its most vital street but also examines Broadway mile-by-mile from Bowling Green to Marble Hill. Exactly where one of those miles ends and another begins is, it turns out, an inexact science. Milestones set up to measure Manhattan’s length in 1769 were famously inaccurate, compressing the distance between the miles so that the island became over fourteen miles long. Adjustments were made and new series of milestones erected, each time with similar miscalculations. Measurements became standardized when John Randel Jr., the remarkably scrupulous surveyor of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, spaced the city’s grid of streets so that twenty blocks equaled one mile.

  But it doesn’t always pay to be so precise, and Broadway’s miles are often best measured according to matters of personal routine: the distance from home to the subway; from your favorite coffee shop to your favorite park; from the Flatiron Building to the Times Building; from the Ansonia to the Apthorp. In the 1840s, lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong was in the habit of walking up Broadway from his Wall Street office to his sweetheart’s home on Union Square, a distance that he measured not in miles but in how many cigars (four) he could smoke along the way.

  Today, measurements taken by a GPS device, the odometer in a car, or Google Maps will each give slightly different mile demarcations. For our purposes, it seemed best to embrace imprecision—to push and pull the miles a bit—for the sake of the story.

  PREFACE

  BROADWAY BEGAN IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY as a muddy path running through the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and out the settlement’s back door, where it dissolved in the farms that lay north of town. Over the next two hundred years the farms gradually disappeared and Broadway grew in length, absorbing older roads in the process, until it had become New York City’s “Path of Progress,” its legendary traffic and unrelenting commotion, lively public squares, and impressive mansions, hotels, stores, theaters, and churches providing ample evidence of American virtue and industry. Walt Whitman was just one of many poets to compare Broadway to a river—a “mighty ever-flowing land-river” in Whitman-speak—flowing through the heart of America’s great metropolis.

  “Broadway represents the national life,” journalist Junius Henri Browne wrote soon after the Civil War. In order to see America, he suggested, all that was required was a station point along Broadway. “Take your stand there,” Browne advised, “and Maine, and Louisiana, the Carolinas, and California, Boston, and Chicago, pass before you.” In 1896, illustrator Valerian Gribayedoff, a Russian immigrant, described Broadway as “a kind of animated mirror, looking back at you with its myriad faces in the same mood in which you regard it.” By the end of the nineteenth century, Broadway’s mirror had reflected, along with millions of merchants, bankers, politicians, pickpockets, preachers, and prostitutes, the faces of George and Martha Washington, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Alexander and Elizabeth Hamilton, Lafayette, John Jacob Astor, Edgar Allan Poe, P. T. Barnum, John James Audubon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Henry James, Emma Goldman, Stephen Crane, and even (supposedly but not quite) the exiled Louis Philippe I, king of the French.

  During the twentieth century, Broadway became a state of mind as much as a street, a ribbon of light that song-and-dance man George M. Cohan celebrated as the most American of American places. And yet Broadway has always had a pronounced dark side, and the dark side grew proportionally with the street until the Great White Way became emblematic of a certain social carelessness, even dissolution, a “street of broken dreams” beset by crime, loneliness, and urban decay. In 1930, playwright William Anthony McGuire’s famous declaration—“Broadway’s a great street when you’re going up. When you’re going down take Sixth Avenue”—needed no f
urther explanation.

  More recently Broadway has been spruced up and lined with pricey cafes, family-friendly theaters, and festive pedestrian plazas. Most people experience Broadway in fragments—a shopping trip to Herald Square, a cup of coffee near Union Square six months later, a stroll down the West Side the following year, a hike up the stairs from Broadway to Fort Tryon Park five years after that—but those who walk its entire length in one day-long jaunt, from Bowling Green all the way up to Marble Hill, are often surprised to find that Broadway is the one thread that keeps the city stitched together in time and space. This story, a south-to-north journey up one famous street, follows that thread back into America’s deep memory.

  MILE 1

  BOWLING GREEN TO CITY HALL PARK

  CHAPTER 1

  SOARING THINGS

  IT HAPPENED FOR THE FIRST TIME NOT ON BROADWAY BUT on Wall Street. It was a rainy, overcast afternoon, October 28, 1886, and a group of revelers—army veterans, firemen, and a contingent of Columbia and City College students—peeled off onto Wall Street from Broadway, where they had been marching in a parade celebrating the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. They were in high spirits and making noise. Office workers heard the commotion and as a practical joke began dumping used ticker tape from their windows onto the street below. “Every window,” the New York Times reported the next day, “appeared to be a paper mill spouting out squirming lines of tape.”

  Ticker-tape parades didn’t really become a Broadway tradition until 1899, when Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, was welcomed back to the city at the end of the Spanish-American War. But Broadway processions were hardly a new idea: There had been celebrations, military parades, and funerals up and down Broadway since at least as far back as the Colonial era. Many of those parades, long forgotten, were nothing if not ambitious: An 1825 parade marking completion of the Erie Canal began and ended at the Battery and took in not only Broadway but also the Bowery and Greenwich, Canal, Grand, Broome, and Pearl streets, a tour of cheer and hoopla that took five hours to complete.

  In 1842 a parade inaugurating the Croton Aqueduct wound its way from the Battery up Broadway two and a half miles to Union Square, then turned around and headed south down the Bowery, detoured to the east along Grand Street, and returned along East Broadway and Chatham Street (present-day Park Row) to City Hall Park. Fully 15,000 people marched in the parade while 200,000 spectators, “crowded to suffocation,” the New York Tribune reported, watched from the sidewalks—at a time when the city’s population was less than 400,000. The mass of people and festive floats took over two hours to pass a single spot along the route. The parade was so long—six miles in total—that by the time John Aspinwall Hadden, a young soldier marching at the head of the parade, completed the circuit and returned to City Hall Park, the tail end of the procession was still visible slowly making its way up Broadway.

  The 1858 “Cable Carnival” celebrating the first successful connection of the Atlantic Cable included as its centerpiece a Broadway parade hailing Cyrus W. Field, a wealthy local paper merchant and the driving force behind the cable project, as a conquering hero. As Field was trundled up Broadway, he was accompanied by the crew of the steam frigate Niagara, one of two ships that had unspooled the cable across the ocean. They carried a scale model of the ship and marched just behind a wagon loaded with a huge coil of the cable itself. Then came the inevitable aldermen, policemen, firemen, and representatives of trade societies that were part of every Broadway parade, plus 2,000 laborers then occupied in the construction of Central Park, their hats festooned with sprigs of evergreen.

  Thousands of people watched from rooftops and balconies along the parade route, hoping for a glimpse of the renowned Field; one balcony collapsed under the weight of spectators. It took six hours for the procession to make its way from Bowling Green to a reception at the Crystal Palace at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, where Field said he was overwhelmed by the “vast crowd testifying their sympathy and approval; praises without stint and friends without number!” He was hailed as “Cyrus the Great,” “Gallant Cyrus,” and the “Columbus of America.”

  Cyrus W. Field in 1858, following his Atlantic Cable triumph.

  Broadway gave itself over to cable mania. The famous Broadway jewelers Tiffany & Company struck a commemorative gold coin in Field’s honor and bought miles of leftover cable from Field and cut it into short strands to sell as souvenirs. A musical production, Love and Lightning, or the Telegraph Cable, was performed at Laura Keene’s Theatre, on Broadway near Bleecker Street. A special service was held at Trinity Church. Archbishop John J. Hughes buried a written tribute to Field in the cornerstone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, then under construction on Fifth Avenue. The “Atlantic Telegraph Polka” briefly became a dance craze.

  That evening the city’s Common Council gave a banquet in Field’s honor at the swank Metropolitan Hotel at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, with a dinner menu featuring turtle soup, lobster, salmon, oysters on the half shell, stewed terrapin, wild duck with olives, lamb tenderloin, broiled English snipe, and chartreuse of partridge with Madeira sauce. The table was ornamented with ice sculptures approximating the shapes of Queen Victoria, President James Buchanan, and Field himself. The celebration continued into the night, with a second procession down Broadway by torchlight. There were illuminations, fireworks, and strings of colored lanterns, lending Broadway “a carnivalesque appearance which it is almost impossible to describe,” one reporter for the New York Herald raved.

  The “Cable Carnival” procession passes up Broadway.

  In the late nineteenth century Fifth Avenue began to vie with Broadway as the city’s uptown parade route, and Broadway parades became truncated, typically encompassing only the street’s first mile between Bowling Green and City Hall Park. But as Broadway parades got shorter in length, the advent of ticker tape gave them a thrilling new vertical dimension. Between 1900 and 1970 the city was absolutely besotted with ticker tape: Over those seventy years, through two world wars and the Great Depression, ticker tape rained down on Broadway, cascading from windows high above the street and gathering in drifts along the curbs. (Budget cutbacks and the general urban malaise of the 1970s and ’80s turned ticker-tape parades—the ticker tape replaced with shredded sheets of 8½-by-11-inch paper—into exceedingly rare events.)

  But during its golden era, if someone was famous, even temporarily, they had a good chance of entering the city through a storm of paper. Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Jesse Owens, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy were obvious choices for adulation, but throngs also assembled in Broadway to cheer Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden, President-elect Júlio Prestes de Albuquerque of Brazil, and German airship designer Hugo Eckener. (Einstein insisted on an impromptu detour from Broadway to the Lower East Side, where Jewish immigrants greeted him with something approaching euphoria. “New York has been kind, most kind,” he told reporters the next day. “Your city’s landscape is not the landscape of a town. It is more like the landscape of a mountain in its impressiveness.”) Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, was honored with a parade in 1926; two weeks later so was Amelia Corson, the second woman to swim the Channel.

  The ticker-tape parade was the unlikely byproduct of a contraption invented in 1863 by Edward A. Calahan and improved upon by Thomas Edison. By the 1880s the stock ticker, an intricate brass machine about the size of a modern-day coffeemaker, was a fixture in virtually every office along Broadway. Each machine, resolutely ticking the day away, churned out continuous paper ribbons of stock quotes upon which fortunes were won and lost, but the tape itself was worthless the moment it was read. Office wastepaper bins constantly overflowed with the stuff, and it was only a matter of time before someone decided to hurl it from a window. Whoever was the first to throw it on that fateful day in 1886—the Times blamed “imps of office boys�
��—probably justified it later by saying something like “but it was just sitting there.”

  Of course, ticker-tape parades required launching pads for the projectiles—the higher the better, really—so that the ticker tape unfurled in long streams as it soared downward. And so ticker-tape parades never would have happened without the advent of tall buildings, and tall buildings never would have been possible without elevators and steel.

  THERE HAD BEEN a few buildings of seven or even eight stories on Broadway as early as the 1850s, but heights were limited because load-bearing masonry walls had to thicken with each additional floor. By law, a ten-story building required walls 6 to 7 feet thick at ground level, a restriction that severely reduced the size and value of ground-floor rental spaces, which became as dark as dungeons. And building heights were limited to the number of stairs a tenant or customer was willing to climb. Elevators existed, but weren’t generally trusted. That changed at the 1853 New York World’s Fair, when inventor Elisha Otis dramatically unveiled a new safety device that acted as a brake in the event a supporting cable of an elevator car failed. Otis demonstrated his invention by riding a platform high up into the rafters of the Crystal Palace and then ordering the supporting ropes cut. The brakes caught the platform, Otis removed his top hat and took a bow, and contractors began installing the Otis safety elevator in buildings.

  The following year English engineer Henry Bessemer developed a technique for forcing oxygen through molten pig iron to remove carbon and other impurities, creating, for the first time, consistently strong steel. The “Bessemer process” allowed for the eventual mass production of steel beams and columns, substantially lowering the cost of steel construction. In New York, where Manhattan’s narrowness made land scarce, the idea that offices might be stacked one upon the other promised a real-estate revolution. On Broadway, first iron (wrought and cast) and then steel construction transformed the street into a vertiginous canyon.