Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles Read online

  Poole, or “Pool” as it was often spelled in newspapers and city directories, was a less lovable, and very real, version of the “Mose” character, a tough butcher who liked to settle differences with his fists. But unlike Mose, Poole was also a politician, a Whig Party operative who often chaired Whig conventions at the Broadway House, a tavern at the corner of Broadway and Grand Street, and was repeatedly accused of rigging primary elections. Poole fancied himself a stalwart patriot and was active in nativist societies like the Lundy’s Lane Club and the Order of United Americans. Poole ran his own barroom at the corner of Broadway and Howard Street, where he routinely refused service to Irish Catholics.

  Poole was one of the most notorious of the city’s “sports,” men who moved with a “fast” crowd and frequented brothels and gambling dens, drank until the wee hours, were known to carry concealed pistols and knives, and, in general, raised hell. One contemporary print depicted Poole as a dandy, a young blade with a devil-may-care grin and a jaunty, waxed mustache. But a photograph from the same period reveals a slack-jawed, street-hardened lout with a drooping mustache and the vacant gaze of a man who had been punched in the face too many times.

  What ultimately did Poole in was a long-running public dispute with a younger, Irish-born boxer named John Morrissey, who ran a notorious barroom and gambling den on Leonard Street called the Belle of the Union. Morrissey, like many of the city’s Irish, was aligned with Tammany Hall Democrats, who were despised by nativists like Poole.

  William Poole, ca. 1854.

  Both Poole and Morrissey were usually accompanied on their rounds by flocks of heavily armed acolytes, and on several occasions Poole and Morrissey had led their gangs into combat against each other. During the summer of 1854, Poole, age thirty-one, had severely beaten Morrissey, twenty-four, at the Amos Street dock on the Hudson River, and Morrissey and his backers had vowed revenge.

  On the fateful night, February 24, 1855, Poole and Morrissey met by accident at Stanwix Hall, a newly-opened hotel, restaurant, and barroom at 579 Broadway, directly across the street from the Metropolitan Hotel. Morrissey and some of his goons were stuffing themselves in the rear dining room—Stanwix Hall specialized in terrapin soup and boiled sea bass—when Poole arrived with a few flunkies and began eating supper in the front barroom. Then Morrissey noticed Poole.

  “Hallo, you here. You are a pretty fighting son of a bitch,” Morrissey shouted. The two approached each other and Morrissey promised to best Poole in a match.

  “You said that once before, down at the City Hotel, and, Honey, you tasted me and did not like it,” Poole replied, before offering a few cutting remarks about Morrissey’s Irish ancestry.

  Morrissey: “I am as good an American as you are.”

  Poole: “You are a damned liar.”

  Morrissey aimed a pistol at Poole. One eyewitness claimed Poole remained calm, standing on a platform behind the counter with arms folded. Another witness said Poole held a revolver pointed at the floor, and still another claimed Poole pointed a gun at Morrissey. Then, with theatrical timing, the police arrived before any shots were fired. One cop took Morrissey outside onto Broadway, and then inexplicably let him go. Poole went to a nearby police station to make a complaint against Morrissey, and then unwisely returned to Stanwix Hall, where he and his friends ordered two more bottles of wine as the owners locked the doors for the night.

  Around midnight four of Morrissey’s associates—James Turner, Lewis Baker, Charles van Pelt, and an especially violent thug named Patrick McLaughlin, alias “Paugene”—left John Lyng’s barroom and gambling den at the corner of Broadway and Canal Street and marched up Broadway the five blocks to Stanwix Hall. When they found the restaurant closed and the front door locked, they burst in and surprised Poole and his gang, who were still drinking at the bar.

  McLaughlin grabbed Poole by the lapels. Turner drew a pistol but, instead of shooting Poole, shot himself in the arm by mistake. Turner fell to the floor in agony, but managed, from a lying position, to shoot Poole in the thigh. Poole staggered and fell. Baker pinned Poole to the floor and, at point-blank range, shot him in the heart.

  His assassins fled back down Broadway to Lyng’s barroom, while Poole’s cronies took him home. Amazingly, Poole could walk, and for a few weeks it looked as if he might make a full recovery. But he began to decline and finally died, probably of infection, early in the morning of March 8. The coroner found the fatal bullet wedged between the ventricles of Poole’s heart.

  POOLE’S CORPSE WAS laid out in the parlor of his home at 164 Christopher Street, a stone’s throw from the Hudson River. The body was dressed in black broadcloth, and the badge of the Order of United Americans was laid across the breast. A Methodist minister read the 90th Psalm. The coffin was covered with a silk American flag and, borne on the shoulders of ten pallbearers, carried three blocks to Hudson Street. It was placed in an open hearse pulled by four white horses cloaked in black, with white plumes on their heads. A gilded eagle covered in black crepe was placed at the head of the coffin, while both sides of the hearse were decorated with black crepe, silver fringe, olive wreaths and, in silver letters on black velvet, the inscription “I die a true American”—supposedly Poole’s dying words.

  The funeral procession passed through Christopher and Bleecker streets and turned south onto Broadway, then proceeded down Broadway two miles to South Ferry. Buildings along the way, including the Metropolitan and St. Nicholas hotels, Wallack’s Theatre, and the City Assembly Rooms, were draped in black.

  One year earlier, Broadway had been the scene of a funeral procession for ten firemen killed in a tragic fire that destroyed the William T. Jennings & Company clothing store at 231 Broadway, opposite City Hall Park. Three years earlier, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, who both died in 1852, had been honored with elaborate Broadway funeral processions. But this time the street was lined with mourners paying tribute not to lamented firemen or senators, but to a decidedly sketchy character. And yet, 4,000 people marched in William Poole’s funeral procession, while a crowd estimated at 100,000 watched from sidewalks, rooftops, balconies, lampposts, and trees. The pageant got underway at three in the afternoon and didn’t reach South Ferry until six o’clock.

  Dodworth’s band, its fifty-two members dressed in black, led the way. Two companies of firemen were next, followed by the notorious nativist henchman Isaiah Rynders and members of the Order of United Americans. Then came the hearse and one hundred carriages filled with Poole’s “friends and associates.”

  “It is generally conceded,” the Tribune reported, “that the procession contained the largest representation of the sporting fraternity which ever passed our streets.”

  And that was only the Manhattan segment of the procession. Thousands more waited in Brooklyn, lining Atlantic Avenue and Court Street, for a glimpse of the hearse as it made its way slowly south to Green-Wood Cemetery.

  What to make of 100,000 New Yorkers mourning the death of a thug? The outpouring of sympathy for Poole may have been a misguided tangent in a larger search for a collective American identity.

  “We are so young a People that we feel the want of Nationality, & delight in whatever asserts our national ‘American’ existence,” George Templeton Strong had written the previous year, after nativist, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing” candidates nearly won campaigns for mayor and governor. “We have not, like England & France, centuries of achievements & calamities to look back on—we have no record of Americanism and we feel its want.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “BROADWAY IS NEVER FINISHED”

  HOW TO HAVE A TANGIBLE RECORD OF AMERICANISM, OR a record of anything, really, on Broadway, when everything came and went so quickly? A building boom in 1860 added thirty-three new commercial buildings to the street—$5 million worth of bricks, wood, stone, iron, and glass—and even beloved landmarks were sacrificed in the name of progress. Thompson’s Saloon, a once-fashionable restaurant opposite Stewart’s Marble Palace, wa
s converted that year to a wholesale warehouse, while the city’s most renowned bookstore, D. Appleton & Company, a wondrous Greek Revival emporium at the corner of Broadway and Leonard Street, was altered into offices. Broadway, the Tribune reported that summer, was “in the hands of contractors, masons, carpenters, cellar-diggers, and hod-carriers, and there is not the least hope to be entertained that building operations on this street will ever cease.”

  It was the heyday of iron construction, a happy coincidence of materials and labor that to this day gives Broadway and surrounding blocks its unique character and defines SoHo. In its molten state, iron could be cast into molds of wet sand and mass-produced into an endless variety of cunningly designed components—columns, beams, arches, consoles, brackets, pedestals, pediments, cornices, posts, and railings—that were strong and durable, requiring only a coat of paint now and then, and less expensive than marble or granite. They were hollow and easily bolted together, so that a façade could be erected in a matter of days instead of months, and were slim in profile, allowing builders and architects to flood the interiors of new stores, offices, and factories with sunlight. (Iron buildings were fireproof, too; at least when compared to wooden buildings, although the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 soon demonstrated that iron buildings tended to fail, and fail dramatically, when subjected to intense heat.)

  Iron foundries proliferated in New York in the 1850s, part of a mid-century boom in local manufacturing, and Daniel D. Badger’s Architectural Iron Works emerged as the foundry of choice for projects instigated by the likes of A. T. Stewart, William Backhouse Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Peter Cooper.

  Badger had arrived in New York from Boston in the mid-1840s. He later claimed he was the first to erect an iron structure anywhere in the country, although it turned out he wasn’t even the first to do it in New York—engineer James Bogardus was designing iron structures in the city four years before Badger arrived on the scene. But by mid-century Badger was dominating construction of iron buildings in the city, his horse-pulled wagons a ubiquitous sight as they ferried iron components from his foundry, at the corner of Avenue A and 13th Street, to building sites throughout the city.

  Because his buildings were modular, Badger could ship them, in pieces, all over the world, and by the 1860s there were Badger-built stores in Halifax, sugar sheds in Havana, warehouses in Egypt, and a ferry terminal in Rio de Janeiro. Closer to home, Badger built stores, banks, and commercial buildings in Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, Rochester, Albany, Troy, Utica, Syracuse, Scranton, and dozens of other cities. In Washington, he contributed ironwork for the Library of Congress, the Treasury Building, and Ford’s Theatre.

  But it was in New York, and particularly on Broadway, that Badger made his deepest and most lasting impression. By 1865 Badger had built, or had helped to build, an astonishing 544 buildings in Manhattan—166 of them on Broadway—and his career was just getting going.

  Badger’s heyday came at a time when moving north along Broadway had become aspirational, an ongoing process of civic improvement. Stores, including Tiffany & Company, Ball, Black & Company, Strang, Adriance & Company, and Devlin & Company, found it expedient to abandon their stores on Broadway’s first mile in pursuit of their customers, who were rapidly migrating north, colonizing the blocks surrounding Washington Square, Gramercy Park, Union Square, and Madison Square. Even A. T. Stewart joined the exodus, building an enormous cast-iron retail emporium in 1862 that covered the entire block of Broadway between 9th and 10th streets. (Stewart’s storied Marble Palace at Broadway and Reade Street was converted to the wholesale and mail-order branches of his business.)

  Badger wasn’t involved in construction of Stewart’s new “Iron Palace,” but he did build the E. V. Haughwout & Company store, which had opened five years earlier at the northeast corner of Broadway and Broome Street. Haughwout’s, a “fancy goods” store specializing in china, porcelain, chandeliers, statuary, clocks, and gas fixtures, was every bit as much of a palace as Stewart’s, and was one of the few stores that actually moved down, instead of up, Broadway, vacating their old store on Broadway near Prince Street in order to move two blocks to the south.

  Haughwout’s new store was designed by architect John P. Gaynor—Badger’s office may well have supplied the designs for the building’s remarkable façades—in the prevailing Italianate style: The horizontality of its façade, enlivened by repeating modules of keystone arches set within rows of Corinthian columns, was reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, except for the large clock installed in the middle of the Broadway façade—a common flourish on a street where time was money. The new Haughwout’s was five stories, with the upper two floors devoted to manufacturing. (Haughwout’s, which maintained a branch store in Paris, imported unfinished china and porcelain and then did its own painting and gilding.)

  Those in search of Haughwout’s renowned china—customers included Mary Todd Lincoln, who ordered a set, in mauve, for the White House in 1861—entered from Broadway and proceeded to a dramatic stair at the rear of the store, or boarded a passenger elevator—a novelty and the first commercial use of Elisha Otis’s new safety elevator, patented only three years before the store opened.

  Haughwout’s only serious rival in the fancy goods trade was Tiffany & Company, originally Tiffany, Young & Ellis, founded in 1837 and housed in three interconnected buildings at the corner of Broadway and Warren Street, opposite City Hall Park. Tiffany’s sold china, bronzes, chairs, sofas, paintings, chess sets, tiles, and candlesticks, and in 1845 expanded into the jewelry line for which it is still famous.

  In 1854, Tiffany’s moved north, opening a new store at 550 Broadway, on the shilling side of the street between Spring and Prince streets. Designed by architect Robert G. Hatfield, the new Tiffany’s was an Italianate palazzo gone mad, a frothy five stories of faux-Venetian stone. From a cast-iron storefront built by Badger the store rose to a second story featuring a portico of five grand arches and a Henry Frederick Metzler sculpture of Atlas bearing a giant clock on its shoulders. The roofline was a frilly, multilayered cornice. It was ridiculous, too gaudy for words, but Broadway’s retail stores had long since shed any sense of architectural propriety, as architects held a no-holds-barred competition to see who could make their work stand out from the crowd.

  Lord & Taylor, a venerable dry goods retailer and wholesaler that had been doing business at the corner of Grand and Catharine (present-day Mulberry) streets since 1826, approached Broadway not from the south but from the east, moving west along Grand Street to its intersection with Broadway. Lord & Taylor spent $180,000 on construction of its new Broadway store, which opened in the spring of 1860, plus another $200,000 for the land, an oversized lot that stretched 85 feet along Broadway and 100 feet along Grand Street.

  The new store, designed by architect Griffith Thomas, was, like the new Tiffany’s, exceedingly fussy—“Florentine,” the Tribune called it. Thomas, who along with Hatfield had virtually cornered the market in store design, had dreamed up a five-story confection of Eastchester marble, with a large fanlight window arching over the Broadway entrance. Gaudy striped cloth canopies shaped like large hoop skirts shaded the display windows along the street, while the roof featured a dramatically cantilevered cornice.

  The architectural gymnastics on the exterior only hinted at the merchandise within. Lord & Taylor’s Broadway store (the company continued to operate its original Grand Street store until 1914) featured five floors of imported dry goods sold by the yard (dresses were still made by hand in those days), plus the “latest Paris novelties”: gloves, shawls, scarves, ties, and handkerchiefs. In an era when women were weighed down by layer upon layer of clothing—a typical dress of the era might feature brocade adorned with small roses, a tight bodice, a bustle, a petticoat of corded silk trimmed in lace, plus skirts and hoops—Lord & Taylor offered fabrics “suitable for promenade, dinner, carriage, and evening dresses.”

  Broadway’s second mile had become the mer
cantile center of New York, but it wasn’t destined to remain that way for long. In 1869, Tiffany’s moved north again, this time to Union Square, where it demolished, of all things, the Church of the Puritans and replaced it with an extravagant new store at the corner of Broadway and 15th Street that the press called the “Palace of Jewels.”

  The following year Lord & Taylor followed suit, building a vast new emporium at the corner of Broadway and 20th Street. And so it went. It was as if Broadway had become not a street but a notion—less a place than the very idea of movement and progress.

  “Will Broadway ever be finished?” the editors of the New York Tribune had wondered in 1850. Journalist Junius Henri Browne answered the question in 1868: “Broadway is always being built, but it is never finished,” he wrote. “The structures that were deemed stately and magnificent a few years ago are constantly disappearing, and new and more splendid ones are rising in their places.”

  MILE 3

  HOUSTON STREET TO UNION SQUARE

  CHAPTER 11

  THE BEND

  WHEN VIEWED FROM THE SIDEWALK OPPOSITE CITY HALL Park, or even from as far south as Trinity Church, Broadway’s third mile is plainly visible in the distance, owing to an intriguing optical illusion: Grace Church, which stands out because of its soaring marble spire, looks as if it’s moved into the middle of Broadway, a bishop sliding diagonally between pawns. Walking north, the illusion isn’t dispelled until within fifty yards or so of the church’s front steps, where it is revealed that it isn’t Grace that has moved, but Broadway, which at 10th Street bends unexpectedly away from the orthogonal streets and avenues around it.