Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles Page 5

  Upjohn was under the spell of English architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, who in writings and pattern books championed the Gothic Revival mode as the one true style of Christian architecture. In 1841, Pugin published The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, an obsessive how-to book full of Gothic brackets, quoins, ogees, and arches, plus drawings of an “Ideal Church.”

  Pugin’s Ideal Church was a soaring, dramatically vertical version of the Gothic Revival, with a long central nave beneath a pitched roof and a graceful spire towering over the main entrance. Upjohn, thirty-nine in 1841 but virtually untested as an architect, was just beginning to design the new Trinity when The True Principles was published. Upjohn had already designed a very similar Gothic structure with soaring, arched ceilings, a long central nave, and a tower and spire on the Broadway end of the building. But then Pugin’s Ideal Church came along, and Upjohn copied many of its features, including, almost note-for-note, its tower and slender spire.

  The site, on Broadway at Wall Street, could not have been more public, and Upjohn’s every move was closely scrutinized. He built a temporary office in Trinity’s churchyard, close by the graves of Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton, and went about methodically demolishing the old church, uncovering seventeenth-century burial vaults in the process. Construction of the new church began in 1841, and George Templeton Strong paid regular visits to the site, admiring the “cunningly carved” brownstones littering the churchyard. By 1844 the tower was far enough along that Strong could scramble up a rickety ladder to the top and enjoy panoramic views from what was then a dizzying height—281 feet above the ground and the city’s tallest structure.

  It took five full years to complete the new Trinity. Even before its consecration it was hailed as the finest Gothic Revival structure America had ever seen. “It rivals the accurate taste of the best works of the fourteenth century, and is carried out upon a scale which we had deemed it impossible to adopt, in a country where architecture is in so chaotic a state,” Boston architect Arthur D. Gilman wrote in the North American Review.

  Trinity Church in 1900.

  Trinity was consecrated on the Feast of the Ascension, May 21, 1846. Nearly two hundred clergy led a procession up Broadway from Bowling Green to the new church, which was packed to the gills. Strong couldn’t find a seat.

  Six months later, on September 20, 1846, the most magnificent retail store America had ever seen opened at the corner of Broadway and Reade Street, ten blocks north of Trinity. One thousand people per hour, for twelve straight hours, passed through the doors of A. T. Stewart & Company on that first day, and for the next thirty years the store was so successful Stewart never bothered to put a sign on the building.

  Alexander Turney Stewart, a physically unassuming, bookish Irish protestant immigrant from a village near Belfast, was the wealthiest dry goods merchant in the city, worth a reported $800,000—$25,000,000 in today’s dollars—in an era when dry goods accounted for about one-third of all American imports. Stewart’s mercantile innovations included fixed pricing—before Stewart, everyone haggled—and it was Stewart, more than anyone else, who, by seeing to his customers’ comfort, turned shopping into a social ritual. And it was Stewart who made Broadway’s east side safe for business when he breached social protocol and built his new store not only on the shilling side of Broadway but on a block above City Hall Park, at a time when that stretch of the street was an unfashionable wilderness of daguerreotype studios, oyster saloons, music publishers, corset-makers, and thread-and-needle stores.

  Customers flocked to Stewart’s for its vast inventory of imported dry goods, its fair prices, and its considerate staff. The store consisted of long, open showrooms with counters staffed by friendly, efficient clerks who, when asked, brought out bolt after bolt of wondrous imported wool, silk, linen, and lace. Stewart’s sold dry goods directly from the case—ready-to-wear clothing hadn’t caught on yet—and so at the top floor, out of sight, were long wooden tables where hundreds of women worked as seamstresses, watched over by stern male supervisors.

  But it was the store itself, immediately christened the “Marble Palace,” that stopped traffic. It was designed by the firm of Trench & Snook and was five stories high—still tall for its time. Its exterior was off-white Tuckahoe marble quarried in Westchester County, the façades composed in a fresh new style cribbed from the Italian Renaissance that came to be known as the Italianate mode and gradually took over the city’s mid-century architecture. Interior walls and ceilings were frescoed, and the showrooms were organized around a grand, circular stair that swept around a skylit central rotunda. And there were bells and whistles, including an elevator and a spacious lounge for the exclusive use of women shoppers.

  The store’s ground-floor windows along the Broadway and Reade Street sides were imported French plate glass, each pane measuring a then-unimaginable 6 by 11 feet. Philip Hone scoffed at the extravagance, predicting that children would break the windows with marbles or snowballs. But the windows, protected at night with roll-down iron shutters, survived. Henry James, in his memoir A Small Boy and Others, recalled childhood excursions down Broadway to Stewart’s, which, he wrote, exerted a kind of gravitational pull on his aunt. The windows especially, James wrote, were “notoriously fatal to the female nerve.”

  CHAPTER 5

  BARNUM

  “BROADWAY WAS THE FEATURE AND THE ARTERY, THE JOY and adventure of one’s childhood,” James wrote, while fondly recalling Saturday visits to the American Museum’s “dusty halls of humbug,” its lecture hall smelling of peppermint and oranges.

  The American Museum was an institution that since its founding as a scientific “cabinet” in 1790 had moved repeatedly, its collection of stuffed birds, wax figures, minerals, fossils, and paintings shuttled from owner to owner and from street to street. Gradually its scientific purpose was expanded to include performances of a sensational nature. In 1807, when John Savage was operating the museum out of a building on Greenwich Street, these included demonstrations of “Electric Fluid,” a “Dance of Witches,” and a “phantasmagoria” that promised the resurrection of the disembodied spirits of “departed and lamented Patriots.”

  From Savage the museum passed to John Scudder, who moved the collection first to Chatham Street, in 1810, and then, in 1815, to the New York Institution, a cultural hub housed in the city’s old almshouse in City Hall Park. After Scudder died, in 1821, the museum continued under the management of his son John Jr., daughter Mercy, and a team of executors. But the museum faced stiff competition: Rubens Peale’s Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts opened in 1825 on Broadway, directly across the street from the American Museum, and Peale began drawing large crowds by supplementing his exhibitions with lectures, séances, and performances by dwarfs, automatons, ventriloquists, magicians, and mesmerists.

  In 1830 the city revoked the American Museum’s lease, and the Scudder family boxed up its collection and moved to the so-called Marble Building at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, one block north of Fulton Street and directly across Broadway from St. Paul’s Chapel. The Marble Building was five stories high, taller than almost every other building on Broadway, and featured a roof terrace that afforded, one 1834 guidebook noted, “some of the finest views in the City, and of the beautiful bay and surrounding country.”

  To attract business and compete with Peale, Scudder Jr. installed a brass band on a balcony overlooking Broadway, demonstrated an automated organ called the “American Apollonicon,” and presented lectures by a “Dr. Collyer,” who discoursed on animal magnetism. There was a “Grand Cosmorama” and a “Mammoth Sycamore Tree” on view, and Scudder soon acquired an anaconda and a boa constrictor and put them on display. The three blocks of Broadway between Scudder’s and Peale’s museums had become something of a sideshow well before P. T. Barnum entered the picture.

  PHINEAS TAYLOR BARNUM was born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810 and moved to New York in the mid-1830s. He was a large man with gene
rous jowls, thick eyebrows, cleft chin, tousled hair, and a mouth that turned up naturally into a quizzical smile. He wore vests, cravats, and frock coats in the style of the day, and a top hat made of felted rabbit fur.

  To make ends meet, Barnum at first ran a boardinghouse and then a grocery, manufactured “bear grease,” wrote ad copy for the Bowery Amphitheatre, and sold Bibles. Several times he left town for extended periods, traveling cross-country with a ragtag circus, and on occasion was pressed into service on the stage, where he sang “Zip Coon” in blackface.

  His first sustained success in New York came in 1835, when as a twenty-five-year-old aspiring showman he put an elderly, blind black woman on display at Niblo’s Garden, a pleasure garden at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. Joice Heth had been touring the country in the guise of a 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington, and New York audiences bought the whole charade hook, line, and sinker. Within two weeks, Barnum claimed, he made back in ticket sales the $1,000 he had paid for custody of Heth. When Heth died suddenly in 1836, Barnum rented the City Saloon at 218 Broadway and turned her autopsy into a public spectacle, with tickets priced at 50 cents, twice the admission for Heth’s show when she was still alive.

  P. T. Barnum, ca. 1865.

  In 1841, Barnum bought the American Museum’s collection from the Scudder family, assumed the Marble Building’s lease, and changed the name on the façade from “Scudder” to “Barnum.” Barnum added live snakes, bears, tigers, whales, and alligators to the museum’s menagerie, and installed wax tableaux depicting various biblical scenes and allegorical vignettes that compared the advantages of temperance to the ravages of whiskey. But most of the museum’s exhibitions and many of its performers, including the brass band that continued raising a ruckus on the balcony, were leftovers from the Scudder era. Barnum’s genius was in advertising, and he reenergized the museum through witty, constant promotions that promised spectacular, unimaginable wonders but often turned out to be nothing more than examples of Barnum’s trademark sideshow “humbug.”

  A typical afternoon in Barnum’s “lecture hall,” the museum’s dingy theater that Henry James remembered so fondly, included performances by “Signor Blitz, the celebrated Magician and Ventriloquist,” the “Industrious Fleas,” and the “Gipsy Girl” and culminated in a hot-air balloon launch from the museum’s roof. Then there was Barnum’s famous “Feejee Mermaid,” which turned out to be a pickled monkey corpse attached to the desiccated remains of a fish, and a replica of Niagara Falls that he promised was gigantic and awe-inspiring but proved to be nothing more than a tiny scale model. Scudder’s dusty collections of minerals, fossils, and Indian artifacts were still on display, but many of Barnum’s attractions were blatant rip-offs. His loyal customers didn’t seem to mind, since the rip-off was part of the fun. The carefully straddled line between the real and the fake was what made Barnum so intriguing as a public figure, and his unapologetic humbug turned the American Museum into the country’s foremost tourist attraction.

  “The public appeared to be satisfied,” Barnum shrugged, “but . . . some persons always will take things literally, and make no allowance for poetic license even in mermaids.”

  Barnum wasn’t particularly original: Rubens Peale had found success displaying “Major Stevens, the American Dwarf” at his museum in the 1830s, and so Barnum followed suit by casting Charles Stratton, a four-year-old dwarf from Connecticut, as “General Tom Thumb.” Stratton became a star, and in 1844, at the age of six, accompanied Barnum on an extended tour of Europe that culminated in two performances before Queen Victoria.

  In 1850, Barnum orchestrated the American debut of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind with such precision that she was welcomed to town with a Broadway parade and something approaching mass hysteria. Barnum was by then world-famous and wealthy, with a palatial Moorish Revival-style estate called Iranistan in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1857, Barnum’s mansion, in a sign of things to come, burned down.

  BY 1865, TRIPLER HALL, Niblo’s Garden, the City Assembly Rooms, and the Lafayette Circus had all been destroyed by fire; the Park Theatre and the National Theatre had both burned twice; the Bowery Theatre four times. Peale’s Museum, the Broadway Tabernacle, and Contoit’s Garden had all closed. But Barnum’s American Museum had survived both the Draft Riots of 1863 and a firebombing by Confederate agents the following year, and as Broadway’s places of amusement gradually shifted north to the Union Square area, Barnum’s museum remained at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, impervious to misfortune and time.

  But on July 13, 1865, a mundane Thursday morning, museum employees on their lunch break smelled smoke. A fire had broken out on the museum’s Ann Street side, quickly spread to adjacent offices and stores, and soon threatened the offices of the New York Herald around the corner. Firemen trained their hoses on the museum and rushed inside to save what they could, hurling melting wax effigies of George Washington, Patrick Henry, Franklin Pierce, Benjamin Franklin, and Lucrezia Borgia out the windows. A waxen Jefferson Davis was kicked and pummeled by a crowd of onlookers in the street and finally hung from the awning of a store.

  The screams of panicked animals came from the museum’s second-floor menagerie. Bears, lions, tigers, alligators, and a beluga whale all died in the fire, while monkeys, snakes, parrots, cockatoos, hummingbirds, eagles, vultures, and a condor escaped through the museum’s broken windows, much to the delight of the crowd of onlookers below. “Ned the Learned Seal,” meanwhile, was rescued and temporarily sheltered at the Fulton Fish Market.

  The burning of Barnum’s museum in the summer of 1865.

  The museum’s walls fell one by one, beginning with the Ann Street façade. Five minutes later the angled corner façade, which faced the diagonal of Chatham Street and bore the inscription “Founded in 1810,” a remnant of John Scudder’s proprietorship, came down in a “graceful sinking motion, not unlike the rolling down of an avalanche,” the New York Sun reported. When the Broadway façade went, it didn’t tumble inward or collapse straight down in the usual manner, but sprang suddenly forward into the street, injuring several bystanders.

  The fire raged until three o’clock in the afternoon, died down, came briefly back to life at one o’clock the next morning, and finally settled to glowing embers. Nothing was left. Barnum sent a telegram from Bridgeport to his manager: “Don’t fret a bit over the Museum,” he wrote. “I can replace many of the curiosities, by looking out sharp for them, and having agents in England and France ready to buy them.”

  Less than two months after the museum was destroyed, Barnum leased the former Chinese Museum on Broadway between Spring and Prince streets, and on September 6, 1865, having joined forces with famed animal trainer Isaac van Amburgh, reopened as Barnum’s and Van Amburgh’s American Museum & Menagerie Company. The new museum was larger but no more fireproof than the original one, and on a frigid night in 1868 it was destroyed by fire. In 1872, Barnum leased Lewis B. Lent’s New York Circus on 14th Street, but after only two months it, too, burned down. Harper’s Weekly called him “Phoenix T. Barnum.”

  CHAPTER 6

  TRAFFIC

  BARNUM’S ORIGINAL MUSEUM AT BROADWAY AND ANN STREET looked down on a perpetual quagmire of traffic, where Broadway and Chatham Street joined at the southern tip of City Hall Park and omnibuses, trucks, express wagons, coaches, carriages, cabs, and pushcarts converged and met more of the same coming up from ferry slips on Fulton and Wall streets. The resulting tangle was often stuck in one place for hours, creating a captive audience for Barnum’s brass band and giving illustrators more than enough time to capture the scene. One drawing in Harper’s Weekly in 1860 depicted the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street as a kind of Hieronymus Bosch maelstrom of tortured humanity, a tangled knot of careering sleighs, screaming omnibus drivers, rearing horses, sledding children, gesticulating police, and jostling pedestrians.

  There were no rules, no lanes, no traffic signals. Traveling on Broadway was inevitably a “work of time and dif
ficulty,” English tourist Isabella Lucy Bird complained in 1856. “Pack the traffic of the Strand and Cheapside into Oxford Street, and still you will not have an idea of the crush in Broadway.”

  Not everyone minded the traffic: Walt Whitman loved the “tramp of the horses, the voices of the drivers, the rattle of wheels, the confusion, stoppages, expletives, excitement, [which] are such as only Broadway can exhibit,” and credited the declarations, insults, and retorts of Broadway’s colorful omnibus drivers for the bold, aggressive rhythms he employed to such winning effect in Leaves of Grass. But most people found Broadway’s traffic intolerable.

  The corner of Broadway and Fulton Street, 1860.

  The “relief of Broadway” became a favorite topic of discussion, and plans were put forth over the years to widen the street, or to open new, parallel avenues to the east and west. One far-fetched proposal, published in Harper’s in 1857, suggested that Broadway could be widened by moving its sidewalks to the interior of buildings along its edges, creating a continuous Parisian-style arcade 12 feet wide along both sides of the street. “It is true here and there a church may interfere,” the plan’s anonymous designer acknowledged. The idea was never implemented.

  Pedestrians were run down on Broadway so often it barely registered with passersby. If a victim died, or was, at least, memorably mangled, the accident might get a brief line in the next day’s newspapers. “Scarcely a day passes,” the Tribune reported in 1859, “but some person—generally a female—is knocked down by some vehicle, and seriously, if not fatally wounded.”

  Footbridges seemed like obvious solutions, a way for pedestrians to pass safely over, rather than through, the relentless stream of oncoming vehicles, and in 1867 the cast-iron Loew Bridge was built over Broadway at Fulton Street. But the view of Broadway from the bridge was especially fine, and crowds began gathering at mid-span in such numbers that the bridge itself became perpetually jammed and, “laughed at and condemned,” was torn down after only two years.