A History of New York in 27 Buildings

by Sam Roberts

  While the Savoy Ballroom a few blocks away accommodated as many as four thousand better-heeled Harlemites who danced to the jazz of Fletcher Henderson’s Rainbow Orchestra, the Apollo, David Levering Lewis wrote, “quickly became a place where the unemployed, hardworking poor, aspiring young people and socially uprooted found emotional uplift or escape—a forum where ordinary Harlemites passed judgment on the talents of people like themselves and where there was even a slim chance that the dream of appearing before the footlights on Amateur Night might be realized.”

  The Apollo introduced its Wednesday Amateur Night contest in 1934. It offered an alluring first prize: a weeklong engagement on the theater’s stage that could catapult an unknown talent to stardom. An incalculable number of gifted contestants were never heard from again, but the judges were prescient in picking the winners. Among the litany of performers who can thank Amateur Night for their careers were the Chantels, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald (who was seventeen when she won twenty-five dollars and a weeklong contract), Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, the Ink Spots, the Isley Brothers, the Jackson 5, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, Stephanie Mills, Thelonious Monk, Leslie Uggams, and Sarah Vaughan.

  The Apollo’s motto was “where stars are born and legends are made.” It was also where dreams were dashed and hearts were broken. (The opening scene of Dreamgirls, the Broadway musical and Academy Award–winning film, takes place, naturally, at the Apollo.) The competition just to get to Amateur Night was fierce. The judges were demanding. The crowd was unforgiving. In his 1952 debut, even James Brown was a flop. Luther Vandross was driven from the stage on four Amateur Nights (his fifth was a hit). “There’s nothing like an audience at the Apollo,” Billie Holiday later wrote (with her coauthor, William Dufty) in Lady Sings the Blues. “They were wide awake early in the morning. They didn’t ask me what my style was, who I was, how I had evolved, where I’d come from, who influenced me, or anything.” Ralph Cooper, who hosted Amateur Night for almost six decades, from its inception until he died, in 1992, said, almost apologetically, “I can’t control the emotions of the audience,” adding: “Once they get up a head of steam, there’s nothing to do but jump for cover. If they have their blood up, Mother Teresa could walk out there, make her plea for starving babies, and still get booed off the stage.” If performers flopped, they were mercilessly shooed off the stage by the tap dancer Howard “Sandman” Sims, the Apollo’s self-proclaimed “exterminator.” If they succeeded, or at least managed to finish performing without being vociferously booed, they might well have chalked it up to the blessing imparted just before they faced the audience, when they reflexively rubbed the Tree of Hope at stage right: the transplanted stump of an elm tree had stood at Seventh Avenue and West 132nd Street during the Harlem Renaissance—back when Ethel Waters and Eubie Blake would touch it for good luck before gigs at the Lafayette Theater and Connie’s Inn nightclub.

  The Apollo was more than an entertainment venue. In 1937, four of the Scottsboro Boys, out on bail after being arrested for raping two white women on a train from Alabama to Memphis, appeared onstage (thanks to the owner, Frank Schiffman) to raise funds for their defense. A decade later, shortly after breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson made his stage debut (by then, he could also register at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, which, when the Apollo opened, had been off-limits to blacks). In the early 1960s, benefits were held there to help pay for the civil rights marches on Washington. But in 1975, the Apollo, which had continued operating under Frank Schiffman’s son, Bobby, closed. Landlords, black and white, were abandoning Harlem’s depressed properties, and the city government itself was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. The Apollo had, in part, become a victim of its own success. Management couldn’t generate sufficient ticket revenue from the theater’s fifteen hundred seats to pay twenty-five thousand dollars a night or more to the celebrity stars whom the Apollo had created. Black entertainers were no longer barred from other venues, and radio and recordings had eroded audiences for live performances uptown. In 1991, the Apollo reopened, now run by a nonprofit foundation. If it would never regain the glory of its heyday, it had, at least, survived and helped revive a Harlem that, compared with itself in the 1970s, is now thriving, even as the centers of black population are shifting to other boroughs and an influx of white residents is slowly integrating the neighborhood in a modern-day version of Philip Payton’s real estate war that, this time, is pricing many African Americans out.

  “The Apollo Theater in Harlem is an institution—but nobody in Harlem would think of calling it that,” Langston Hughes wrote in 1956 in the liner notes for A Night at the Apollo. After some B movie faded from the screen, the hidden orchestra would strike up the Apollo’s theme song, “I May Be Wrong, but I Think You’re Wonderful,” Hughes wrote, “and a kind of musical glow spreads, over the house up from the lower floor where a liberal sprinkling of white faces gleam in the darkness to the balcony, and on up to the gallery which is 99½% pure Harlem and whose heart throbs with the music all the time it’s playing.” Amateur Night, he wrote, “can be almost as moving and exciting as a Spanish bull fight”—except that the matador, or performer in this case, is never gored to death but, at worst, shot by Howard Sims with blank cartridges.

  “In the minds of people around the world it is a place of quality and excellence, created and produced and presented by black people,” said Howard Dodson, the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “It sets a standard.” The Apollo, the emcee Ralph Cooper said, is “where everything cool in our culture first got hot.”

  The vertical red neon letters dating from the 1940s that spell out the name against a yellow background protruding from the white, glazed terra-cotta facade celebrate a legacy that embraces vaudeville, swing, bebop, doo-wop, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, soul, and funk in what the Times’s pop music critic Ben Ratliff described a decade ago as “a careful combination of opportunism and nurturing.” Minsky’s Little Apollo is long gone, and the Apollo in Times Square was demolished in 1996. But stars may still be born on West 125th Street, where anonymous singers, musicians, comedians, and other performers dare to dream of becoming legends. Their talent, training, and passion still distinguish them in a community, city, and profession that have radically diverged since the Apollo opened more than a century ago and major renovations began at the start of the twenty-first. “From the 1930s to at least the 1960s the Apollo was a combination town meetinghouse, American Idol and La Scala for black American music,” Ratliff wrote. “It celebrated the democratic impulse and the aristocratic impulse; it was where you could see comedians play the oaf and Duke Ellington play the genius. Since the mid-’70s it hasn’t meant what it once did. It remains one of New York’s very best theaters: great sound, great sightlines. But there are those who remember it almost as a living organism. People didn’t just enter it; it entered them.”

  The Apollo switched from burlesque to become Harlem’s premier showcase for amateurs who rise to unimaginable stardom. (George Samoladas)

  21

  THE CONEY ISLAND BOARDWALK

  The old boardwalk at Cvoney Island, in front of the Half Moon Hotel topped by Henry Hudson’s ship. (Brian Merlis/oldNYCphotos.com)

  “With the advent of night a fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky,” Russian writer and Marxist social-democratic activist Maxim Gorky wrote in 1907 on his fund-raising mission to America for the Bolsheviks. “Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine, sensitive outline on the black background of the sky, shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces, and temples.

  “This,” Gorky wrote, “is Coney Island.”

  Gorky was stunned by the sheer spectacle of the place (though depressed by how willingly working people were mesmerized by tawdry amusements). The sand spit had been a seaside destination since the 1820s, when the Coney Island House was still accessible only by boat or on a toll ro
ad and bridge from Gravesend, while Coney Island Creek still defined it as an island. Theories abound about the derivation of “Coney,” but the most convincing is that Dutch settlers named it after the konijn, or rabbits, that roamed wild there. After the Civil War, hotels, racetracks, restaurants, bathing pavilions, and thrilling rides recast the barren beach into a pleasure destination for New Yorkers and out-of-towners. Like HBO’s fictional Boardwalk Empire, Coney Island for all its varied amusements, was a one-man show. It operated under the heavy thumb and well-greased palm of John McKane, an Irish immigrant who, as a commissioner of common lands and town supervisor and police chief of Gravesend, was, until 1893, when he was convicted of election fraud, the beach resort’s undisputed boss.

  The Times had dubbed Coney “Sodom by the Sea,” but by the beginning of the twentieth century, amusement parks equipped with mechanical rides were attempting to project a more wholesome facade. Sea Lion Park opened in 1895, followed by George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park in 1897 (inspired by the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition), Luna Park in 1903, and Dreamland Park in 1904—those incandescent magic kingdoms where New York’s middle class came for fun, Gorky notwithstanding. “The only thing about America that interests me is Coney Island,” Sigmund Freud was said to have remarked after he visited in 1909, elaborating in a letter to his wife that it was “Ein Grossartiger Wurstelprater,” or a giant amusement park. Cosmopolitan magazine characterized it as an “orgiastic escape” from the heat and congestion of Manhattan.

  But despite the fact that New York City is surrounded by some 520 miles of coastline, access to the Coney Island beach—which had eroded to a slender strip—was severely limited. Adjacent property owners controlled entry by private alleys, toll roads, stairs, barbed wire, and other obstructions until 1913, when the state supreme court in Brooklyn ruled that the beach was publicly owned and that fences, barriers, and other obstructions had to be removed. In 1921, the legislature transferred the seashore to New York City, which authorized not only a boardwalk that would eventually unite the Brooklyn communities of Coney Island, Sea Gate, Brighton Beach, and Manhattan Beach, but also an ambitious and unprecedented expansion of the beachfront itself.

  The communities flanking Coney Island had been playgrounds for the wealthy, lured by grand hotels, racetracks (the Preakness was originally run there), and championship prizefights. Coney Island itself was already drawing millions of visitors annually by train (primarily the Culver Line of the Prospect Park & Coney Island Railroad) when, in 1920, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company augmented the better-off, established demographic by delivering passengers on subway and elevated lines for a five-cent fare (enshrining the resort as the poor man’s “nickel empire”). The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor concluded that Coney offered the grandest opportunity “to compensate the industrial classes for the monotonies of their toil. Widen their mental and social horizon and increase their capacity for enjoyment.” The subway, coupled with a boardwalk, would create a plebeian promenade and transform the complexion of the beachgoers to mirror that of the early-twentieth-century influx of immigrants. By 1921, even Bruce Bliven, the liberal editor of the New Republic, had been sufficiently transfixed on the “battered souls” who sunbathed there to bluntly report on a profound demographic transformation: a proliferation of black hair as Coney became “one more place from which the native Yankee stock has retreated before the fierce tide of the South European and Oriental.”

  The boardwalk, the subway, and the State Legislature democratized Coney Island from a playground for the rich. (Brian Merlis/oldNYCphoto.com)

  George Tilyou (a Barnumesque entrepreneur who sold vials of Coney Island sand and seawater to visitors) had suggested a boardwalk as early as 1897. Atlantic City, New Jersey, had installed one in 1870 (originally only ten feet wide and a mile long, and dismantled during the winter), and hoteliers in Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach had built private pedestrian boardwalks in the 1890s (by one definition, New York’s first was the elevated walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883).

  A formal groundbreaking for the new boardwalk, attended by Al Smith, who was between terms as governor, and Mayor John F. Hylan, took place on October 1, 1921. When it opened, it stretched between Ocean Parkway and West Thirty-Seventh Street. The plank deck (originally Douglas fir from Washington State) formed a chevron pattern (better for bicycling) with two longitudinal strips for the rolling chairs that had become a signature of the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The walkway, standing about 14 feet above high tide on precast reinforced concrete piles and girders, was 88 feet wide and 9,500 feet long, and consisted of 3.6 million feet of timber. Two years later, the boardwalk was lengthened by another 4,000 feet east, and in 1941 was extended another 1,500 feet to Brighton Fifteenth Street, for a total of about 2.7 miles. (Coney’s is the nation’s second longest; the Atlantic City boardwalk is 60 feet wide and 4 miles long in total.)

  The project’s chief engineer was Philip P. Farley, who had been chief assistant to the city engineer in Atlantic City and also happened to be the nephew of the late Cardinal John Murphy Farley of the New York Roman Catholic Archdiocese. When it opened officially on a foggy May 15, 1923, it was formally named for Edward J. Riegelmann, the Brooklyn borough president and one of its leading champions. “Poor people,” Riegelmann rhapsodized, “will no longer have to stand with their faces pressed against wire fences looking at the ocean.”

  Farley also oversaw a vast expansion of the beach for public recreation before and after visitors reveled in the surf. Workers dredged about 1.5 million cubic yards of sand from fifteen hundred feet offshore, mixed it with water, and pumped it back, extending the beach seaward by about 330 feet—longer than a football field. “Though it was incidental to the construction of the boardwalk,” Farley explained, “the making of the beach turned out to be the most important part of the work.” He added: “This is the first time that an attempt has been made to produce an artificial bathing beach by pumping from the sea to the ocean’s edge and by pushing the high-water mark seaward.” (The Evening Telegram enthused that “New York scientists and engineers have succeeded where King Canute failed to halt the onward march of the tides.”) Later, the addition of a two-foot layer of fine white sand rectified the reddish-brown hue of the beach.

  It was Farley who, as chief engineer to the city’s Board of Estimate, also later foresaw, to no avail, that Robert Moses’s parkway overpasses were planned deliberately too low to accommodate buses leaving the city—where only one-third of the households had cars—for the region’s leafy retreats and beaches. Of the Coney Island beach project, Farley said: “The chief benefit that follows an improvement of this character is to be found in increased health and happiness of the vast crowd of people who are obliged to live in congested parts of a Great City and who have here an extensive playground for their recreation and enjoyment.”

  Although the amusement parks reached their peak early in the twentieth century, later doomed by other diversions and by the sobriety and penny-pinching imposed, respectively, during Prohibition and the Depression, still, the boardwalk, the beach, the restaurants, and the rides immortalized Coney Island as perhaps the world’s best-known tourist attraction—and a metaphor for crowds and recreational chaos. Whether or not the hot dog was actually invented there, Nathan Handwerker surely popularized it by opening up his stand on Surf and Stillwell Avenues in 1915 and charging only five cents for a frankfurter (grilled) compared with a dime for a frankfurter (boiled) at Feltman’s, his former employer down the block. (Supposedly, frozen custard originated there, too, when two ice cream vendors blended egg yolks into the other ingredients to retard melting.) The 150-foot-tall Wonder Wheel was installed in 1920. (In 1983, Deno Vourderis, a Greek immigrant and former pushcart peddler, bought the Wheel for his wife as a long-promised world’s largest wedding ring). The Cyclone roller coaster was constructed in 1927 (“a greater thrill than flying an airplane at top speed,” Charles Lindbergh p
roclaimed), and the 250-foot-tall Parachute Jump was transplanted in 1941 from the New York World’s Fair to Steeplechase Park.

  In 1927, the fourteen-story Half Moon Hotel rose at West Twenty-Ninth Street and the Boardwalk to help Coney Island compete for the Atlantic City tourist trade. The hotel is remembered less for arriving guests than for one who departed—Abe Reles, a Brownsville, Brooklyn, member of gangland’s Murder, Inc. Police were holding him in protective custody in a sixth-floor room in 1941 when he defenestrated—due to either a push from crooked cops or an accident—falling to his death as he was trying to escape, just before he was to testify before a grand jury. (He landed on the roof of the hotel kitchen, not the boardwalk.) Tabloid journalists branded him “the canary who could sing but couldn’t fly.”

  Coney Island still evokes memories of bungalows and bathhouses, of the bawdy midway called the Bowery, and of shooting galleries, Skee-Ball, and “headhunting, dog-eating savages” (actually Philippine natives displayed in primitive circumstances in a propaganda campaign to prove they were unready for self-government). It has been celebrated in lyrics and music by Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, and Woody Guthrie (“Mermaid Avenue”) and in Les Applegate’s 1924 barbershop song (“Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby”) and a 1976 Lou Reed love poem (“Coney Island Baby”). And its past incarnations survive, nostalgically frozen in film, sometimes with the wide latitude of artistic license. (The house beneath the roller coaster in Annie Hall was inspired by the 1895 Kensington Hotel, which, to attract tourists, commissioned the Thunderbolt to be built above it in 1926. In the filim, Alvy Singer’s neurosis is attributed, in part, to the periodic trembling, which contributes to his fear that the universe is expanding to the point of self-destruction, so he stops doing his homework. To which his mother says, “What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding.”)