by Sam Roberts
While the tenants complained about the vertical speed of elevators inside the building, passersby were more worried about the sideways velocity of the gusts that had regularly buffeted the southwest corner of Madison Square even before the prow of the ship-shaped Flatiron appeared poised to be propelled up Fifth Avenue in a furious paroxysm. Their fears were partially fulfilled within a few months, in February 1903, when a sudden downdraft blew a fourteen-year-old messenger into the middle of Fifth Avenue, where he was fatally struck by a passing automobile. Later that year, a storeowner across Broadway sued for $5,000 after a freakish wind flare shattered his plate-glass storefront.
Long after its completion, crowds congregated on Twenty-Third Street with gusto, not only to gape at the Flatiron’s irregular shape, but to watch the wind-tunnel effect it created in conjunction with the intersection of two major thoroughfares and the six-acre sweep of Madison Square Park in sending the skirts and dresses of women pedestrians billowing and revealing a glimpse of ankle. “Whirling Winds Play Havoc with Women at the Flatiron,” the New York Herald proclaimed in 1903, and a brief, street-level moving picture by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company that year confirms the phenomenon and the suggestion that it helped popularize the idiom “23 skidoo,” or the order by cops to loitering male voyeurs to scram. In 1905, Crescent Films made a short that, as the catalog copy says, “gives one a general idea of what women experience on a windy day around this noted corner.” In his book Celluloid City, James Sanders wrote that the Chrysler Building is everyone’s favorite for Best Supporting Building—second to the Empire State—but the Flatiron was featured as the headquarters of the Daily Bugle where Peter Parker works as a freelance photographer in the Spider-Man film franchise and is a victim of collateral damage by the U.S. Army in the 1998 remake of Godzilla.
In 1902, the company’s directors had formally decided to name what was already being called the Flatiron as the Fuller Building, but the name never stuck. (The Fuller Company occupied the building from opening day until it transplanted its headquarters in 1929 to 41 East Fifty-Seventh Street, which was, and still is, known as the Fuller Building.) Nor did the uncharitable litany of epithets with which many critics originally jeered the Flatiron’s idiosyncratic geometry. The New York Tribune, consumed by its contours, pronounced it a “stingy piece of pie.” The Municipal Art Society insisted it was “unfit to be in the center of the city.” The Municipal Journal & Public Works dismissed it as “New York’s latest freak in the shape of skyscrapers.” The Architectural Record carped that the building’s many windows provided an ideal vista for a prospective tenant, but the oblique exterior walls, which converge in a 6.5-foot-wide vertex, made installing even a bookcase more challenging. “Undoubtedly he has a highly eligible place from which to view processions,” Montgomery Schuyler, the Record’s editor, wrote. “But for the transaction of business?” And the Times, delivering what might be construed, at best, as a backhanded compliment, bleated (with lowercase deprecation), “The Flatiron building is more of a monstrosity than other skyscrapers, because it can be seen from more directions.”
But those reviewers were overruled by the vast majority of hometown fans who embraced the radical profile, latter-day critics who lauded the ingenuity demanded by the site’s irregular footprint, architectural historians who would preserve the Flatiron as an official landmark, and the artists and photographers who would idealize and immortalize the rusticated skyscraper, the first north of Fourteenth Street, as a uniquely New York icon through their own lenses and immediately lionize it, with the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, as the most reproduced postcard reminiscence of New York. Manhattan’s tallest buildings, Rem Koolhaas wrote, are a “brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to develop,” which makes the Flatiron “a model of such sheer multiplication,” or twenty-two times its triangular base.
The impressionist Childe Hassam etched it ethereally on Washington’s Birthday, 1916, flanked by Fifth Avenue buildings bedecked with American flags. J. S. Cartier’s apparitional photograph captured the building after dark, barely distinguishable in the gloom of night except for a mote of illumination from an upper floor. Edward Steichen introduced color to his twilight photographic visions from Madison Square Park in an homage to his mentor, Alfred Stieglitz. H. G. Wells was similarly inspired, and, like Stieglitz, likened the novel view facing downtown to a giant liner ploughing unimpeded through the traffic.
In the July 1905 edition of Munsey’s magazine, Edgar Saltus, an American writer of Dutch descent, rhapsodized over what he described as “the most extraordinary panorama in the world”—the view of the American metropolis from his focal point atop the Flatiron Building. Ascending from his office to the roof—the highest vantage point north of Fourteenth Street—he contrasted the confining streets of New Amsterdam downtown with the vast potential for sky’s-the-limit pivoted.
Manhattan, at the turn of the twentieth century, had preserved its “colonial squalor” and presented the “hasty hideousness of boom towns,” Saltus declared. It was a still-embryonic city undergoing a gigantic but fragmentary upheaval that would be complete only when “the buildings one and all are so huge that nothing huger is possible.” The resultant urban spectacle would be both “shameful and superb, a congerie of temples for the deification of gold, a city of basilicas for the glory of greed,” he wrote. “In somnolent Nieu Amsterdam, Nicholas was patron saint. These shall be the gods of Manhattan. Yet are not its deities now these divinities, whose worship is haste, whose incense is noise, and whose swarming suppliants you mistake, from those upper floors, for insects?”
From his vista he invoked a similar metaphor to the one Stieglitz and Wells had conjured up for the city’s regeneration and for its physical and visceral trajectory. “Its front is lifted to the future,” Saltus wrote of the Flatiron. “On the past, its back is turned. Of what has gone before it is American in its unconcern.”
The Flatiron was greeted with mixed reviews at best, but has become one of the most photographed and beloved buildings in New York. (George Samoladas)
16
THE LYCEUM THEATER
The opening-night audience at the Lyceum was as infatuated with the theater itself as it was with the performance. It was another Frohman hit. (Courtesy of the Shubert Archive, 1903)
Justin Huntly McCarthy’s The Proud Prince opened in New York on Monday night, November 3, 1903, starring the dashing E. H. Sothern as Robert the Bad, the king of the Two Sicilies. The play itself, which critics had denounced as so prurient that it was nearly banned in Detroit, barely merited a mention in the next morning’s New York Times review. Instead, the Times critic focused on the brand-new theater where the play debuted, the Lyceum, on West Forty-Fifth Street, and the first-night celebrity audience. The enthusiastic crowd applauded the production and the performers, but their primary motivation that night was probably to personally evaluate the latest luminary in the Frohman family’s constellation of spellbinding playhouses.
The Frohmans were once the most prolific producers on Broadway. They were also among the pioneers who heralded the uptown progression of the Theater District. And after more than a century of redevelopment, mergers and acquisitions, and egos that demanded marquee recognition, the Lyceum Theater remains the oldest commercial playhouse in New York City still serving the legitimate stage and among the last to retain its original name.
Originally, New York was not much of a theatrical town. In 1699, Richard Hunter petitioned the governor for a license to perform plays, but in 1709 the Common Council sternly banned “play acting and prize fighting.” The Dutch Reformed Church had not encouraged frippery (as late as 1764, when the Reverend Dr. Archibald Laidlie arrived as the church’s first English-language preacher, he sermonized against the “luxurious abominations which sometimes kept the families awake till nine o’clock at night”). In 1732, a London troupe began performing on the second floor of a building near Maiden Lane and Pearl Street, and b
y the end of the eighteenth century, New York notables were regularly attending performances at several venues, including the John Street Theater. President George Washington, who enjoyed racy (by eighteenth-century standards) comedies, was a regular theatergoer when the nation’s capital was in New York. A German air, “The President’s March,” was typically played when he entered. By the early nineteenth century, theaters like Niblo’s Garden at Broadway near Prince Street, which could seat more than one thousand, were hosting vaudeville, farces, and, later, musical comedy and opera.
In 1849, more drama took place offstage than on during competing productions of Macbeth. Edwin Forrest, an American who had launched his acting career in blackface, was booed when he played the part in London, a reception he blamed on professional jealously by the British tragedian William Charles Macready. Forrest retaliated by hissing a few weeks later when Macready was playing Macbeth in Edinburgh. On May 10, 1849, the rivalry erupted in class warfare in New York. An Anglophobic mob of workingmen, predominantly Irish immigrants and nativists estimated at twenty thousand, stormed the Astor Place Opera House in Manhattan, where Macready was performing. His customary elitist fans included Anglophilic nativists and were known as the “Upper Ten”—the ten thousand or so New Yorkers who composed the wealthiest 1 percent of the population at the time. A riot ensued. Police and the militia were largely blamed for the death of as many as 31 rioters. More than 120 people were injured, exposing a festering cultural divide in the city that would not heal for decades.
More easily bridged were the city’s geographic divides, as developers recycled Manhattan real estate. While most financial institutions remained downtown, retail stores slowly edged farther north, nearer to City Hall, then leapt to Ladies’ Mile, and later transplanted themselves to Herald Square and even Fifth Avenue. Hotels, too, later ventured closer to what became midtown, congregating around transportation hubs like Pennsylvania Station, Grand Central Depot, and, especially, its successor, Grand Central Terminal on Forty-Second Street. The Theater District advanced more episodically, leapfrogging from Union Square to Madison Square to Herald Square by the late nineteenth century. The traditional stock company, in which a group of actors hired for the season performed a repertoire of plays, was being challenged by another theatrical business model, in which a single show would go on tour across the country. That so-called combination model, pioneered by the Frohman brothers, could be simplified if a show could be cast, rehearsed, and equipped with costumes, props, scenery, and other accoutrements all in one place. And where better to find all those essentials than in New York?
At the turn of the twentieth century, Longacre Square (named for Long Acre Square in London) was the heart—or, perhaps, some less romantic organ—of the neighborhood known as the Tenderloin (for the prime beef that only corrupt cops could afford) or as Satan’s Circus (for the more than one hundred brothels and an equal smattering of saloons in the quadrangle bounded by Fifth and Eighth Avenues and West Thirty-Seventh and Forty-Seventh Streets. The Casino Theater opened on Broadway and West Thirty-Ninth in 1882, followed a year later by the Metropolitan Opera House on the next block, the Broadway Theater in 1888 on West Forty-First, and the American Theater in 1893 on Eighth Avenue and West Forty-Second. Longacre Square itself was the core of the city’s carriage and harness makers’ outlets (later in the twentieth century, Broadway in the West Fifties would be studded with automobile showrooms). The bustling neighborhood’s defining moment came in 1904, after Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times, decided to replace the Pabst Hotel (which had opened only in 1899) with his newspaper’s headquarters and persuaded Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. not only to build a station for the new subway there, but to rename the square (by New York’s loosely defined geometry) after the Times. Nonetheless, Oscar Hammerstein, not Ochs, anachronistically became known as the “father of Times Square” because he was the first producer to venture north of Forty-Second Street. In 1895, he opened a mammoth entertainment complex called the Olympia, which included his Lyric Theater. Hammerstein shuttered the Olympia only two years later, but by the early 1900s he had sited two more theaters in Longacre Square, the beginning of a building boom in which producers would construct forty-three more within two decades.
Charles and Daniel Frohman and the producer William B. Harris commissioned Henry Beaumont Herts, a Beaux-Arts aficionado who had already prepared the plans for the New Amsterdam and Liberty Theaters and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to design the Lyceum. (Herts also designed a new grandstand for the Polo Grounds in 1912.) New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission hailed the Lyceum as “probably the finest surviving Beaux-Arts theater in the country.” (The Lyceum was the first theater officially landmarked by the city.) It was originally referred to as the “New Lyceum” to distinguish it from the theater of the same name that Daniel Frohman had operated on Fourth Avenue near East Twenty-Third Street, which had been razed and replaced by the headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. To build its successor, construction crews demolished several homes on West Forty-Fifth Street, broke ground on April 1, 1902, and laid the cornerstone the following October (thirteen bricks from the old playhouse were incorporated into the foundation). The theater formally opened thirteen months later. Its monumental gray limestone facade was distinguished by six Corinthian columns and an undulating bronze and glass marquee. “It is running no risk,” the Times reported, “to say that of all the playhouses in New York, either old or now being built, none has so imposing an exterior as the new Lyceum.”
Inside, two grand staircases led to the mezzanine lobby, which was lined with marble quarried in Maryland that a promotional brochure boasted “exactly approximates the marble of Athens, of which the Parthenon was constructed” (the original Lyceum was the Athenian garden where Aristotle taught philosophy). The walls featured murals by James Wall Finn of Sarah Siddons, the Welsh-born tragedienne famed for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth, and the actor, playwright, and producer David Garrick, whose enigmatic smile invoked his adage that “tragedy is easy enough, but comedy is serious business.” The two balconies were innovatively cantilevered (the first time the technique was used in the city) so no view was obstructed from any one of the nine hundred seats in the autumnally hued Neo-Baroque auditorium. Crowning the proscenium arch over the stage was a massive sculptural ensemble consisting of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and the iconic images of Music and Drama.
A seasonal ventilation system delivered air that passed over either compartments containing blocks of ice or steam coils. A sprinkler system, perfected only a decade earlier, provided protection from fire. A seven-story tower at the rear of the theater housed extra dressing rooms, workshops to build scenery, and space to fabricate and store costumes. Daniel Frohman also lived in the Lyceum, in what he called his penthouse apartment leading out to the roof—an architectural innovation at the time. It featured a reproduction of David Garrick’s oak-clad Chippendale library and a small door in the dining room that offered a sweeping view of the stage below (when he caught his wife, Margaret Illington—who later married Major Edward Bowes, the Amateur Hour radio host—overacting, he supposedly signaled her with a white handkerchief). His combined office and banquet hall was furnished with a Napoleonic throne purchased for the production of The Pride of Jennico starring James K. Hackett, two wooden benches from the old Lyceum, two chandeliers from private boxes, a clock gifted by the actress Billie Burke, and a silver-handled ivory paper cutter given to him by Lillie Langtry. “After a time, a room takes on something of the personality of the people who have spent happy hours in it,” Frohman wrote years later in his memoir. “Thus, the spider, Time, has spun his web of memory across the rafters of my studio until through the years he was woven a tapestry.”
The opening-night audience included Henry Havemeyer, the sugar-refining family scion and art collector, and Abraham Hummel, the wily lawyer who would later be disbarred and jailed for suborning perjury. Among the other celebrants were th
e painter Frederic Remington and theatrical personalities Ethel Barrymore, David Belasco, William Gillette, and Bram Stoker. Gillette (who became famous for portraying Sherlock Holmes) would star in the first new production at the Lyceum, the American debut of James M. Barrie’s comedy The Admirable Crichton. Under Frohman, the Lyceum would also feature Charles Klein’s The Lion and the Mouse, a thinly veiled salvo against John D. Rockefeller; Elsie de Wolfe and Lionel Barrymore in The Other Girl; Ethel Barrymore as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; Leslie Howard in Berkeley Square; and John (then Jules) Garfield in Having a Wonderful Time. In 1912, the four-reel, feature-length French silent film Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt, had its prestigious American premiere at the Lyceum.
Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Film Company, with which Frohman presciently became associated, was itself visionary enough to exhibit Queen Elizabeth in the United States. In his autobiography, Daniel recalled that the principals in Famous Players regularly convened after dinner in his studio over the Lyceum “to discuss, like a small family” potential movie plots. He would gather together Mary Pickford, “our adored star,” the director Hugh Ford, the cinematographer and director Edwin Porter and, of course, Zukor himself. “Mr. Zukor has always been a man of shrewd, far-seeing vision,” Frohman recalled. “Many of the things we wanted to do, he opposed, and held us in check by saying, ‘We are not quite ready for that.’ ”
Daniel Frohman (who credited himself with loaning Zukor fifty thousand dollars that spared Famous Players from bankruptcy) and his brothers, Charles and Gustave, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Germany, were in the vanguard of theatrical creativity if not always of great taste. While Daniel once insisted that “you cannot fill American galleries by offering indecent plays,” the critic John Ranken Towse once chided him for “his inherent distrust of the capacity of the public to appreciate the values of dramatic art in its best forms, and in seeking the ‘popular’ he sometimes fell below the level of his own standards.” Daniel had given up early on acting himself. Instead, he got hired as an office boy for Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune, a promoter for P. T. Barnum, and a press agent for the Georgia Minstrels, who were considered the first successful troupe authentically composed of blacks.