Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles Read online

  Among the first to dream of Broadway as a vertical landscape was none other than Cyrus W. Field, who, in the summer of 1881, acquired the decaying Washington Hotel (originally the historic eighteenth-century Archibald Kennedy house) at the foot of Broadway, tore it down, and began building one of the street’s earliest tall office buildings that employed an interior frame—iron in this case—for its structural support.

  Twenty-three years after he had sutured America to Europe through the Atlantic Cable, Field, at sixty-one, was no longer “Cyrus the Great.” As the maligned president of the New York Elevated Railroad Company, he was regularly flayed in the press, his once sterling reputation sullied by questionable dealings with financiers Jay Gould and Russell Sage. The Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide labeled Field not merely a “crank” but a crank “with no moral sense”—quite an about-face for someone who had once been among the most popular men in America. Field’s late-career foray into construction was, in essence, a comeback attempt—a chance, even, at redemption.

  It was called the Washington Building or the Field Building, and its address, No. 1 Broadway, seemed to promise great things. Field invited six architects to submit renderings and, with input from his wife Mary, selected Edward Hale Kendall’s design as the competition winner.

  Kendall’s submission was a nine-story mass of brownstone and brick in the then-fashionable Queen Anne style, with entries at two corners accessed by cascading stairs guarded by iron dragons. The Washington Building was completed in 1882, but Field couldn’t stop fussing with it. Perhaps he had been goaded into a kind of architectural arms race when the Produce Exchange, a massive palazzo in maroon brick designed by the great architect George B. Post, began rising at No. 2 Broadway, just across the street, or maybe he just wanted the extra square footage, but Field ordered Kendall to add two more floors and then, in 1886, two more, pushing the overall height to 258 feet—only 2 feet shy of the Tribune Building on Park Row, then the world’s tallest building. Kendall crowned the finished building with a steeply pitched roof reminiscent of a Swiss chalet, with projecting turrets, balconies, bay windows, and, at the very top, a cylindrical tower enclosed in glass that jutted like a lighthouse high above the roof. Accessed by a winding stair, the tower functioned as an observation deck and, with its unobstructed views of the harbor, quickly became a tourist attraction. Visitors arriving in the city were often so eager to climb to the top of Field’s building they went there as soon as their ships docked—even before checking into their hotels. Field himself ascended to his roof as often as he could.

  “If I had the time I could spend all day gazing out on that beautiful scene,” he remarked wistfully in January of 1887, five months before he lost his entire fortune because of the machinations of Gould and Sage, who dumped their stock in the Manhattan Railway Company just after Field had bought 70,000 shares at a margin of 80 percent, driving down the price and forcing Field to sell the stocks back to Gould for a fraction of their original price.

  Field kept to himself what he thought about when he gazed from the Washington Building roof out over the harbor, but no doubt he considered the passage of time and the twists and turns that had brought him in his autumn years to a rooftop at the point where Broadway begins. As he watched ships steaming through the Narrows, ferries plying the rivers, and families of weeping immigrants arriving at the Battery and embracing loved ones, perhaps Field’s mind wandered back to that morning in 1858 when he had processed up Broadway past thousands of smiling people shouting his name.

  ON A HOT AUGUST MORNING in 1893, French novelist Paul Bourget arrived in New York from Southampton after seven days at sea. “Leaning over the ship’s rail on the side toward New York,” he wrote, “I succeed in distinguishing a mass of diminutive houses, an ocean of low buildings, from the midst of which rise, like cliff-bound islets, brick buildings, so daringly colossal that, even at this distance, their height overpowers my vision. I count the stories above the level of the roofs; one had ten, another twelve.” He called New York’s emerging skyline “gigantic, colossal, enormous,” and an “apparition.”

  During his first week in the city he went to the top of the Equitable Building at the corner of Broadway and Pine Street and was overwhelmed by its “hum of life” and the thousands of people coming and going. He called the Equitable a “gigantic palace” and a “human beehive” and began to wonder if New Yorkers were even human.

  Cyrus W. Field’s Washington Building (far left) in 1900.

  “At what time of day do they die here?” he wondered. “At what time do they love? At what time do they think? At what time, indeed, are they men, nothing but men . . . and not machines for locomotion?”

  PEOPLE HAD BEGUN calling the tallest of the new buildings “Sky-Scrapers.” The Chicago architect Louis Sullivan insisted that they should inspire architects to do their very best work: A skyscraper, Sullivan wrote in 1896, “must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.”

  By then it was becoming possible to trace the path of Broadway from far out in the harbor, just by following the profiles of its skyscrapers. Field’s Washington Building was still clearly visible from the decks of incoming ships, but it had been superseded in height and stature by the Bowling Green Offices, Empire Building, Home Life Insurance Building, Union Trust Building, Manhattan Life Building, American Surety Company Building, and St. Paul Building—a march of progress in glass and steel that was to culminate, in 1913, with construction of the wondrously Gothic Woolworth Building on Broadway opposite City Hall Park.

  Today the Woolworth Building still presides over Broadway, its creamy terra-cotta quoins, brackets, and finials catching the first rays of the morning sun as it rises over the park, but many of those early skyscrapers that Bourget found so heroic proved to be, like most buildings in New York, surprisingly ephemeral: The pioneering Tower Building, the first skyscraper with a steel “skeleton” that supported its exterior walls as well as its interior floors, was demolished in 1914; Post’s majestic Produce Exchange was torn down in 1957, followed the next year by his Tower-of-Pisa-like (minus the lean) St. Paul Building. Even the mighty Singer Building succumbed to the wrecking ball, in 1968. The Washington Building, which in 1921 had been stripped of its terra-cotta ornaments, covered with limestone, and renamed the International Merchant Marine Company Building, is still there at the foot of Broadway, although today the view from its roof is very different than it was in Field’s day. But the street that begins at its front door is very much the same as it was four hundred years ago. As the buildings along its edges have come and gone, Broadway itself has remained, virtually identical in its width, shape, and trajectory to the muddy path that was first surveyed there in the early seventeenth century.

  CHAPTER 2

  MUD AND FIRE

  BROADWAY WAS AMONG THE VERY FIRST STREETS—MAYBE the first path of any kind—laid out after the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was established at the southernmost tip of Manhattan in 1624. Broadway may have been the work of surveyor Cryn Fredericksz, who was sent over shortly after the first boatload of settlers—mostly desperate Wallonian refugees—arrived. The Dutch West India Company, a hugely powerful business consortium—think Walmart with its own navy—planned New Amsterdam as the centerpiece of the larger New Netherland colony, and provided Fredericksz with plans that described a network of straight streets within a fortified perimeter.

  For reasons that remain lost to time, Fredericksz’s orthogonal plan was never carried out. Instead, New Amsterdam grew up around concentric streets that resembled an incomplete version of the Grachtengordel, the remarkable system of canals the Dutch had recently completed in the center of Amsterdam. New Amsterdam’s version of the Grachtengordel was somewhat less than remarkable, but included a coherent system of streets that originated from the East River front, where ships anchored, and radiated in ever-larger quarter-circles across the island’s toe. The westernmost street was called the Heere Straat (Gentlemen’s, or Lord’s, Street) or Brede Wegh (Broad
Way) and ran along the Hudson River edge, following a primordial ridge of sand and gravel. In 1653, New Amsterdam’s director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, built a wall across the northern boundary of the settlement as a defense against possible British invasion from the north, with a path called the Cingel running along the inside. The Brede Wegh began in an open space in front of Fort Amsterdam, passed through the settlement and out the main gate in the wall, and continued to the Commons, New Amsterdam’s communally owned pasture located half a mile north of town.

  The Brede Wegh was, as advertised, broad—80 feet wide—but also short, coming to an abrupt dead end at the Commons. The street’s generous width allowed for the daily passage of the colony’s livestock from town to the Commons and back, and as houses and taverns were built along it, the Brede Wegh gradually became New Amsterdam’s main street.

  When the long-feared British invasion finally came in 1664, Stuyvesant’s wall was of no help. Freezing colonists had already pilfered many of its wide oak boards for firewood, and the British could have simply walked through it, as the local Lenape Indians were in the habit of doing. Instead, they took the colony simply by anchoring a frigate off Fort Amsterdam and threatening Stuyvesant with wholesale slaughter. Stuyvesant reluctantly surrendered and retired to his estate north of town. New Amsterdam became New York, the Cingel became Wall Street, and the Brede Wegh became the Broad Way.

  THE BROAD WAY—the name was gradually combined into one word and eventually lost its definite article—was unpaved, poorly maintained, and muddy. Hogs foraged in the middle of the street, heedless of oncoming wagons. Gangs of Caribbean pirates infested the taverns clustered around the rechristened Fort James at the foot of the street. The remains of Stuyvesant’s wall were torn down in 1699, and in the early eighteenth century the city began extending along Broadway north of Wall Street.

  Beginning in 1673, a group of tanners and shoemakers bought up the old Cornelius van Tienhoven farm between Wall Street and the Commons, and in 1696 partitioned the land into streets and building lots. It was known as the “Shoemakers’ Land,” and when coupled with the development of the neighboring Jan Jansen Damen farm, added some 53 acres of urban fabric to a city that, in its entirety, consisted of only about 200 acres of developed land. In 1719 a ropewalk—a long, narrow rope factory—was added to the north end of Broadway, where the street terminated at the Commons, and soon the entire east side of the street was thriving as a commercial and industrial center.

  Broadway’s west side, meanwhile, remained almost completely undeveloped, as everything north of Wall Street had been given over to the 200-acre “Queen’s Farm”—the property of Queen Anne. Trinity Church, the Anglican parish built in 1698 at the T where Wall Street ended at Broadway, became the wealthiest landowner in New York, when, in 1705, Anne gave her farm to the church. For many years afterward, Trinity chose not to develop its land, and it wasn’t until the 1790s that Broadway’s west side, the former farm subdivided into streets and building lots by then, caught up to the bustling activity on the other side of the street.

  But that initial difference between Broadway’s two sides—wealthy Trinity on one side and tradesmen and manufacturers on the other—evolved into a cultural divide that resonated, as we shall see, into the nineteenth century and colored generations of New Yorkers’ perception of the street.

  IN 1733 A FEW wealthy families who had built mansions at the foot of Broadway convinced the city’s Common Council to let them close a cattle market that had occupied the open space in front of Fort James and replace it with an enclosed green for private games of ninepins. Soon wealthy merchants and ship captains built fine houses surrounding what became known as Bowling Green or the “Parade.” They included Archibald Kennedy, who in 1760 built a wide, two-story mansion at the corner of Broadway and State Street facing Bowling Green, its rear lawn sloping down to the Hudson River. The house was in the prevailing Georgian mode; symmetrical, with Classical details on the inside and a front façade dominated by a Palladian window on the second floor. Its address, No. 1 Broadway, was the most coveted in the city. When Kennedy died in 1763, the house passed to his son Archibald Jr., a captain in the Royal Navy.

  Other wealthy residents built houses on Broadway until the street, which linked Fort George (formerly Fort James), Trinity Church, and the Commons, where British soldiers were housed in barracks, became a kind of linear allegory of royal power. But Broadway also included the shops and houses of less wealthy artisans and tradesmen and featured two well-known taverns—George Burns’s, 115 Broadway, and Abraham de la Montagne’s, opposite the Commons—that became centers of revolutionary activities, and as the city edged closer to the events of 1776, Broadway became a corridor of protest.

  IN 1765, PARLIAMENT passed the Stamp Act, the first tax levied directly on American colonists, who generally viewed the act, which required the use of specially stamped paper imported from England for everything from newspapers to playing cards, as an egregious imposition, “unconstitutional and oppressive.” The first shipment of stamped paper arrived in the city on October 24. When a crowd of protestors refused to let the ship dock and unload its cargo, Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader Colden slipped the shipment into Fort George at night.

  On October 31, a group of prominent merchants gathered at Burns’s tavern to draft a nonimportation agreement that bound them to a boycott of British goods. The act took effect the next day, and by seven o’clock in the evening a large group of protestors had gathered on the Commons. A “moveable Gallows” was erected, the New York Post-Boy reported, and Colden, “whose public Conduct . . . has unhappily drawn upon himself the general Resentment of his Country,” was hung in effigy. The dummy held a piece of stamped paper and was outfitted with a drum on its back, while at its side hung a likeness of Satan, the “Deceiver of Mankind.” A second group of torch-wielding protestors paraded its own Colden effigy through the streets to Fort George, where they broke into Colden’s carriage house, stole his coach, and with Colden’s effigy seated inside, rolled it up Broadway to the Commons. Along the way they met the first group of protestors with its gallows and effigies heading south from the Commons to the fort.

  “The whole Multitude then returned to the Fort,” the Post-Boy reported, “and though they knew the Guns were charged, and saw the Ramparts lined with Soldiers, they intrepidly marched with the Gallows, Coach, & c. up to the very Gate, where they knocked, and demanded Admittance.”

  The protestors had designs on the despised shipment of paper inside the fort, but when they couldn’t get in made do with “many Insults to the Effigy” and then tore down the wooden fence surrounding Bowling Green. They piled up the fence pickets, effigies, and Colden’s coach and two sleighs and soon a roaring bonfire illuminated the walls of the fort and the front façade of the Kennedy mansion. “[It] soon kindled to a great Flame,” the Post-Boy reported, “and reduced the Coach, Gallows, Man, Devil, and all to Ashes.”

  Colden received several death threats over the next few days, and on November 4 he asked Captain Kennedy to move the paper onto a British warship anchored in the harbor for safekeeping. Kennedy refused—Colden said it was because Kennedy was afraid a mob would burn down his house if he complied—and Colden, eager to be rid of the paper, agreed to turn the shipment over to the Common Council, and the paper, seven crates in all, was carted up to City Hall on Wall Street.

  The Stamp Act was repealed in May of 1766, and in gratitude the Common Council commissioned a gilded statue of King George III. Fabricated in Britain, the monument, which depicted the king astride a rearing stallion, arrived in the city in July of 1770 and was placed in the middle of Bowling Green.

  FIVE YEARS LATER came the first shots at Lexington and Concord, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the yearlong siege of British-occupied Boston. When the British finally evacuated in March of 1776, filing onto ships and disappearing into the Atlantic, no one knew where they would turn up next. General George Washington guessed they would sail for New York, the str
ategically vital key to controlling the Hudson River Valley. As Washington and his ragtag Continental Army marched from Boston to New York, anxious New Yorkers, fled in such numbers that by the time Washington arrived, on April 13, 1776, the city had been practically abandoned.

  The city’s deserted buildings included the Kennedy mansion and, two doors up, lawyer William Smith’s house at No. 5 Broadway. (Kennedy, a loyalist, had departed the city ahead of Washington’s arrival. Later that summer he was captured and confined in Morristown, New Jersey, and later immigrated to England to become the 11th Earl of Cassilis.) Washington’s exhausted army took possession of both houses, plus others in the vicinity of Bowling Green. Washington stayed at first in Smith’s house but, when his wife Martha joined him four days later, moved to the vacated Abraham Mortier estate north of town.

  The British, it turned out, had reconnoitered at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they dropped off evacuating Boston loyalists, took on supplies, and awaited reinforcements. In June, British warships under the command of General William Howe set sail for New York and by the end of the month began arriving in clusters off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in New York’s lower harbor.

  On July 2, Howe, aboard the flagship Greyhound, led the fleet toward the Narrows, the passageway between Brooklyn and Staten Island that leads into New York’s upper harbor. Howe was trying to land his troops on Staten Island, but to those watching from lower Manhattan it seemed Howe was intent on the immediate obliteration of the city, and a general panic ensued. From a hall window in the Kennedy house Colonel Henry Knox and his wife Lucy watched the ships advance “with a fair wind and rapid tide” as “distress and anxiety” prevailed in the streets.