Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  “The city in an uproar, the alarm guns firing, the troops repairing to their posts, and every thing in the [height] of bustle,” Knox wrote to his brother William. Then both the wind and tide turned and most of Howe’s fleet remained on the far side of the Narrows. Later that evening the ships managed to get through the Narrows and Howe was able to land his troops.

  ON JULY 6, THE FIRST COPIES of the Declaration of Independence arrived from Philadelphia. On the evening of July 9, Washington ordered the document read aloud to his troops assembled on the Commons, and afterward a raucous crowd of soldiers and civilians rushed down Broadway to Bowling Green. Ropes were thrown around the gilded statue of George III and, following a series of hopeful cracking noises, king and horse hit the ground with a resounding thud. The leaden statue was hacked up and sent to a forge in Connecticut, where it was melted down into bullets to use against the redcoats.

  THE BRITISH FINALLY took New York on September 15, two weeks after its victory at the Battle of Brooklyn. The Continental Army, having narrowly escaped Brooklyn by recrossing the East River to Manhattan under cover of darkness and a lucky morning fog, retreated to Harlem Heights in upper Manhattan, where Washington commandeered the evacuated loyalist Robert Morris’s grand Georgian mansion, built ten years earlier on a hill just to the east of the Kingsbridge Road. The house faced south, its front portico affording expansive views of Manhattan’s farms and villages and, ten miles to the south, New York City, its skyline then an outline of ship masts and church spires. On September 22, Washington wrote to John Hancock, president of the Second Continental Congress.

  “I have nothing in particular to communicate to Congress respecting the Situation of our Affairs,” Washington began, before revealing a startling development: “On Friday night, about Eleven or Twelve Oclock, a Fire broke out in the City of New York, near the New or St Pauls [sic] Church, as It is said, which continued to burn pretty rapidly till after Sun rise the next morning. I have not been Informed how the Accident happened, nor received any certain account of the damage. Report says many of the Houses between the Broadway and the River were consumed.”

  The fire started just east of the Battery, in or near a sketchy tavern known as the Fighting Cocks at the foot of Whitehall Street—not as far north as St. Paul’s, as Washington initially believed. Fanned by a stiff southerly wind, the fire rapidly ate its way north, consuming everything between Whitehall and Broad streets, the east side of Broadway from Bowling Green almost to Wall Street, and the west side of the street from Morris Street to Trinity Church.

  Joseph Henry, an American soldier who had been captured by the British during the American attack on Quebec, watched the fire from the deck of a British prison ship anchored in the harbor some four miles south of the city. No sooner had Henry seen the fire begin on Whitehall Street than he saw Trinity Church burst into flames. The fire burned so brightly, Henry wrote, that the deck of his ship was lit up “as at noon day.”

  “If we could have divested ourselves of the knowledge that it was the property of our fellow citizens which was consuming, the view might have been esteemed sublime, if not pleasing,” he added.

  British sailors stationed in the harbor were hastily ordered onto boats and hustled into town to join soldiers fighting the fire, which roared north along the Hudson River edge, destroying everything between Broadway and Greenwich Street, but sparing most of the buildings along the west side of Broadway north of Trinity. St. Paul’s Chapel was saved only because a few stalwart citizens climbed onto its roof and extinguished embers as they fell. The Kennedy mansion was also saved.

  The wind died down soon after sunrise the next morning. An improvised firefighting brigade made up of citizens and British soldiers and sailors gradually got the upper hand, and by eleven o’clock had checked the fire’s progress. The flames were extinguished just before reaching King’s College (renamed Columbia College after the war) on Barclay Street. In all, some 493 houses were destroyed—about one-quarter of the entire city. Trinity Church was especially hard hit, losing not only its seventy-eight-year-old church, but also two schools, its library, the rector’s house, and 536 pounds in annual rents from 246 destroyed houses that sat on church property between Broadway and Greenwich Street.

  Washington’s army had plundered much of the town before their retreat, even removing church bells to melt into cannon or, as the accusations later went, to prevent sounding the alarm when the fire broke out. It was never proven conclusively who set the fire, or whether it was an act of nature or design. There were multiple reports of incendiaries found with matchsticks soaked in liquid rosin, and allegations that British soldiers and sailors had thrown suspected American agents into the flames and hung others from lampposts. The British blamed the catastrophe on a nefarious design perpetrated by Washington himself, who attributed the fire to the work of “some good honest fellow” and apparently considered the destruction of New York a fair price to pay for denying the British the use of a functioning city. (“Had I been left to the dictates of my own judgment,” Washington wrote to his cousin Lund Washington, “New York should have been laid in Ashes.”)

  But the British occupied the compromised city throughout the long war and didn’t give it up until November 23, 1783, when Washington rode victorious down Broadway to Fort George to reclaim the city.

  BROADWAY WAS QUICKLY REBUILT after the war, and by 1790 had blossomed into a lively thoroughfare lined with poplars and dominated by the spire of a rebuilt Trinity Church. New York had been designated the national capital the year before, with City Hall appropriated as the capitol building. Chief Justice John Jay, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, Senator Ralph Izard of South Carolina, Senator James Gunn of Georgia, and others in the innermost circle of the federal government moved into townhouses on Broadway in the vicinity of Bowling Green. In 1790, President George Washington himself moved from 3 Cherry Street to the Alexander Macomb mansion at 39-41 Broadway, one block north of Bowling Green. Isaac Sears, a leader of the Sons of Liberty, took over the Kennedy mansion until, disgraced by debt and corruption, he fled to China. (Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson rented a house on Maiden Lane.)

  Fort George had been demolished and Government House, a fine palazzo in the Americanized Federal style (a patriotic rebranding of the Neoclassical Georgian mode), was built in its place. It was intended to serve as the permanent national capitol building, but by the time Government House was finished in 1791, New York had already lost the capital to Philadelphia, and Washington and his cohort had settled their accounts, packed up, and left the city. (“All persons having demands against the Household of the PRESIDENT of the United States, are requested to exhibit their accounts for settlement, at his late Dwelling in Broad-Way, before the 15th of September,” proclaimed one notice in a local newspaper.)

  The capitulation to Philadelphia rankled New Yorkers for years afterward, and in the absence of national-capital status, they were determined that New York should at least triumph over Philadelphia as America’s preeminent commercial metropolis. New York, after all, had a deeper harbor than Philadelphia and more direct access to the open ocean—and it had Broadway, and no street in Philadelphia could compare.

  Though still barely a mile in length, Broadway was already the envy of every other American city. William Winterbotham, visiting from England in 1795, thought Broadway was delightful, the “most convenient and agreeable part of the city,” and noted that the ruins of the Great Fire had been cleared away and replaced with “elegant brick houses” with brick sidewalks in front.

  At the Bowling Green end of Broadway were the well-appointed homes of merchants, lawyers, and physicians, while its upper reaches, north of the Commons, were sparsely settled, consisting of humble frame dwellings and shops where tanners, cartmen, and unskilled laborers lived and worked. In between, north of Wall Street but south of the Commons, was a vibrant mix of stores selling dry goods (textiles), jewelry, and shoes, the shops and dwellings of tradesmen and artisans—carpente
rs, coopers, tinsmiths, cabinetmakers, distillers, saddlers, and makers of soap and candles—and the mansions of wealthy merchants. John Jacob Astor, then amassing a fortune in the fur trade, lived at No. 149, but his next-door neighbor was one John B. Nash Jr., an ironmonger; Nash’s father, a fabricator of tinplate, lived just a few blocks to the south. There were no theaters on Broadway yet, but there were hints of the street’s later cultural exuberance in the famous City Hotel just north of Trinity Church, a circulating library across from the hotel, and the many booksellers who opened shops along that stretch of the street.

  Broadway was full of life, but wasn’t especially beautiful. Foraging hogs, garbage, and good old American dirt remained intractable problems. Broadway wasn’t yet paved, and since drainage was a poorly understood art, the roadbed quickly became a foul stew of mud and horse manure. And aside from Government House, Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway wasn’t architecturally impressive. In 1797, New York surpassed Philadelphia for the first time in the total tonnage of imports and exports moving through its port, but for the next twenty years that advantage remained tenuous. As the nineteenth century dawned, it occurred to politically astute merchants and members of the city’s Common Council that if New York was ever going to vanquish Philadelphia once and for all, it had better look the part.

  “We certainly ought . . . to possess at least one public edifice which shall vie with the many now erected in Philadelphia,” alderman Wynant van Zandt Jr. argued at a meeting of the Common Council in 1803. New York was prosperous and growing—between 1790 and 1800 the population almost doubled, from 33,131 to 60,489—but still lacked grand public buildings and even basic sanitation. Dead cats, the Boston Gazette reported that year, lay in the streets “in every part of the city.”

  In 1803 the Common Council, with Van Zandt in charge of the building committee, began construction of a new City Hall at the center of the Commons, hoping it would improve the city’s image. The Commons, for almost two hundred years the site of political insurgencies and public executions, was benignly reconstituted as “the Park,” a triangular public space lined with gravel walks and shaded by elms and willows. Critics condemned the new City Hall as a “bottomless pit of finance”—it ended up costing half a million dollars—but even before its completion City Hall had helped dispel the long-held notion that New York was nothing more than Philadelphia’s backward cousin. John Lambert, visiting from England in 1807, walked up Broadway and dutifully admired City Hall and its lovely new park, but what really struck him was the vitality of Broadway itself.

  CHAPTER 3

  PROMENADE

  IN A CITY WITHOUT MANY PUBLIC AMUSEMENTS—SINCE ITS opening in 1798 the Park Theatre, on Chatham Street opposite City Hall Park, had been practically the only show in town—social promenading was a favorite pastime, and with its shade trees and brick sidewalks no street was better for walking than Broadway. On weekdays between eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon the city’s “genteel” residents took to the street, John Lambert noted, until Broadway became “as much crowded as the Bond-street in London.” On Sundays chains were fastened across the street on either side of Broadway’s three churches, Grace, Trinity, and St. Paul’s, to prevent traffic from disturbing services. Afterward men and women strolled down Broadway to the Battery to catch the ocean breezes. It was how they kept up with each other, how they did business, and how they fell in love.

  “[Dressed] in their best [young women] would generally walk together keeping [to] the inside of the street going down and the outside going up,” resident John J. Sturtevant remembered. “Somewhere on the line they would see their John Henry or Mary Jane as the case might be; if John Henry had pluck and Mary Jane’s companion was complaisant he would join her and the companions would separate so giving them a good time.”

  “Yes, everyone walked in those days,” journalist John Flavel Mines remembered, “and, as I grew out of boyhood towards manhood, I used to think that the rosebud garden of Broadway on a crisp autumn afternoon was lovely beyond compare.”

  One of the first things tourists did when they arrived in New York was to go for a walk on Broadway. “We walked everywhere, and saw everything,” George Kirwan Carr, a young British second lieutenant, visiting with fellow soldiers in 1832, wrote in his diary. “[We] were much delighted with the ‘flash’ dresses of the Ladies—Pink Satin, bonnets & feathers, and boots to match of the same material, at 10 o’clock in the Morning walking in Broadway!”

  Carr and his mates should not have been surprised that Broadway’s “Ladies” were so well dressed. Broadway’s stores got the first pick of imported dry goods arriving by ship only a few blocks away, and its daily promenade became a parade of the latest Parisian fashions. Broadway “might be taken for a French street, where it was the fashion for very smart ladies to promenade,” English travel writer Frances Trollope observed in 1829. “The dress is entirely French; not an article (except perhaps the cotton stockings) must be English, on pain of being stigmatized as out of the fashion.”

  The “Broadway Belle” draped in Parisian shawls and trimmed in Irish lace became a stock New York character. In 1825, McDonald Clarke, the “Mad Poet of Broadway,” published Afara; or, the Belles of Broadway, a rhapsody of evening on Broadway, when stores closed and the daily promenade came to an end.

  Broadway became a desert—one, two, three,

  Pealed, unnoticed, from the steeple’s throat;

  The sun was wasting his rich rays—ah, me,

  That he should deign to shine on shawl and coat,

  Unvandervoort or Scofield born—and night,

  Stole out upon the scene as well arrayed,

  As if the day had seen that precious sight,

  Fashion’s unbending exquisite parade,

  And wore a clear, blue mantle—star inwrought,

  And looked as if her dress—could not be bought.

  Broadway may have been the city’s most fashionable street, but only its west side, the Trinity side, was considered safe for Society. The cultural divide between Broadway’s two sides had festered until by the early nineteenth century the west side was known as the “dollar side” of the street, while the east side, at least in the blocks north of Wall Street, was denigrated as the low-end “shilling side.”

  Shillings, a holdover from the British currency used in the colonies before the Revolution, remained in circulation in the United States even after the new American currency was introduced in 1792. Shillings were valued differently depending on the state: In Georgia and South Carolina they were worth 21 cents; in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland, only 13½ cents. The so-called York shilling used in New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan was the least valuable of all, worth only 12½ cents, or eight to the dollar. (Shillings remained common in New York until after the Civil War, and were still occasionally seen even into the early twentieth century.)

  The distinction between Broadway’s two sides has most often been attributed to the quality of morning sunlight falling on the dollar side, where crisp morning rays highlighted to greater advantage the merchandise on display in its shop windows, while the shilling side remained in shadow until late morning. But the comparative intensity of morning light doesn’t fully explain why the east side of the street would have been relegated to second-class status. The noon sun, after all, fell equally on both sides of the street, and storefronts along the shilling side received better light in the afternoons than those on the dollar side. The perception that the east side of Broadway was déclassé was undoubtedly a vestige of the class distinction that in the 1600s had set the Trinity side of the street apart from the shoemakers and rope manufacturers on the opposite side.

  The dollar side was a thin façade anyway, as just behind its impressive churches and mansions lay blocks of decrepit buildings, many of them owned and rented by Trinity. Church Street, one block west of Broadway, had been the epicenter of an eighteenth-century red-light district called the Holy Gro
und, a disreputable area of wood-frame dwellings, gambling houses, and brothels that by the early nineteenth century had attracted the largest concentration of blacks in the city and was known locally as Coontown.

  Blacks liked to promenade on Broadway every bit as much as whites did, but had to endure stares and comments as they walked up and down the street. “On one occasion we met in Broadway a young negress in the extreme of fashion,” Trollope wrote, “and accompanied by a black beau, whose toilet was equally studied; eye-glass, guard-chain, nothing was omitted; he walked beside his sable goddess uncovered, and with an air of the most tender devotion.”

  Black parishioners from Zion African M. E. Church, at the south­west corner of Church and Leonard streets, were not warmly received when they adjourned to Broadway following Sunday evening services. One anonymous letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post in 1825 accused Zion’s congregation of rude manners and insobriety, and hinted that they might be forcibly stopped from congregating on Broadway if they didn’t walk a straighter line.

  And God forbid if whites and blacks were ever seen promenading together. “If a white person were to walk arm in arm with a black, in Broadway or any other of the leading streets in New York, he would probably be hooted and pelted by the populace,” English visitor Isaac Candler noted in 1824. “I was once conversing in one of the streets of Paris with a New York citizen, when two genteelly dressed persons, the one a white the other a black walked by us in the way I have mentioned. My acquaintance instantly calling my attention to them, [and] expressed his astonishment and abhorrence at a white man’s so degrading himself.”