Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  IN THE 1830S AND ’40S, Broadway underwent a radical transformation, as commercial concerns made inroads into its first mile. Mansions were pulled down or converted to boardinghouses and offices, and John Jacob Astor built the palatial Astor House hotel on Broadway one block north of St. Paul’s Chapel. But the Broadway Belles didn’t go away; if anything, their numbers increased and their dress became more ostentatious.

  “Heaven save the ladies, how they dress!” Charles Dickens exclaimed in 1842. “We have seen more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have elsewhere, in as many days. What various parasols! what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings!”

  Dickens, visiting New York for the first time, was gazing down at Broadway from his window at the Carlton House hotel on the corner of Broadway and Leonard Street. The city tried to put its best foot forward for Dickens’s much-anticipated visit, staging an elaborate “Boz Ball” in his honor and inviting him to dinner parties, but the city couldn’t hide its warts, and there was much to see on Broadway besides the latest fashions. Despite its reputation as America’s most fashionable thoroughfare, Broadway featured scenes of desperation that rivaled anything in Dickens’s own writing.

  The vicissitudes of the city’s economy—the disastrous Panic of 1837, the recession of 1840, and the “mini-panic” of 1841—hadn’t slowed the steady influx of new residents, and by 1840 New York City’s population had reached 312,710, almost four times larger than Baltimore, then the second-largest American city. (Philadelphia, fading as a serious rival to New York, had slipped to third place.) As the city expanded, and as the divide between rich and poor grew ever wider, alarming numbers of indigent men and women gathered each day on Broadway. The same month as Dickens’s visit, the New York Aurora described a crowd of two hundred indigent women, both black and white, plus a few men, “ragged cripples mostly,” waiting at the entrance of the city’s almshouse in City Hall Park for handouts of food and firewood.

  “Twice a week they come—on Tuesday from one side of the town, on Saturday from the other,” the Aurora reported. “They are scenes for a Dickens, and all men and women looked pale, woe-be-gone and desolate . . . What a contrast was this to . . . the brilliant groups that were passing up and down the sunny side of dear Broadway!”

  That the destitute gathered in such numbers on Broadway, the undisputed epicenter of the city’s wealth and power, was not lost on essayist Lydia Maria Child, who had moved to the city from rural Massachusetts the year before Dickens’s visit. Slavery had been illegal in New York since 1827, but New York’s prosperity was still in large part based on the exportation of Southern cotton and therefore on slave labor.

  “There, amid the splendour of Broadway, sits the blind negro beggar, with horny hand and tattered garments, while opposite to him stands the stately mansion of the slave trader, still plying his bloody trade,” Child observed in 1841. Broadway, too, was an increasingly dangerous place, especially after dark, when the street was crowded with con artists, pickpockets, prostitutes, and gangs. “It’s a pity we’ve no street but Broadway that’s fit to walk in of an ev’ng,” George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary in the fall of 1840. “The street is always crowded, & whores & blackguards make up about two thirds of the throng.”

  And Broadway was still extraordinarily filthy. Street cleaning was sporadic at best, and piles of garbage and horse manure were routinely left to fester at the curb. When the wind kicked up, the street virtually disappeared in blinding dust storms; when it rained it became a sea of mud. Hogs still rooted along Broadway, just as they had in Dutch times. Soon after his arrival, Dickens went for a tour of the city and was startled when two “portly sows,” followed by a “select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen-hogs,” followed along behind his carriage.

  “These are the city scavengers, these pigs,” Dickens wrote in American Notes for General Circulation, an unsparing account of his trip published later that year. “Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty, brown backs, like the lids of old horse-hair trunks; spotted with unwholesome black blotches. They have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of them could be persuaded to sit for his profile, nobody would recognize it for a pig’s likeness. They are never attended upon, or fed, or driven, or caught, but are thrown upon their own resources in early life, and become preternaturally knowing in consequence.”

  Broadway’s hogs were an embarrassment, but more alarming, the city had no storm-water or sewer system, and no workable system for providing fresh water for drinking, washing, and bathing. (Wooden water pipes laid under some streets in 1790, and iron pipes laid under Broadway and the Bowery in 1829 and fed from a cistern on 13th Street, were woefully out of date and had never worked well in the first place.) For centuries the city had relied on cisterns, springs, and communal wells for fresh water, but whatever local water sources remained in Manhattan had long since been irrevocably soiled or covered up. No surprise, then, that cholera swept through the city every few years.

  The Croton Aqueduct, which brought fresh water from Westchester County directly into the city, was as ambitious in scope as the Erie Canal, which had opened seventeen years earlier and brought the lucrative markets of the West into New York’s sphere of influence. The Croton River was dammed to form an artificial lake of some 400 acres, and every day 17 million gallons of fresh water flowed, by gravity alone, thirty-three miles through an arched brick, stone, and cast-iron aqueduct into upper Manhattan, emptying into a 32-acre “Detaining or Clarifying Reservoir” at 86th Street, in the middle of what would later become Central Park.

  From there the water flowed downhill to a 4-acre “Distributing Reservoir” at the corner of 40th Street and Fifth Avenue (a site that would later become the New York Public Library), and finally into a complex grid of iron supply pipes laid beneath every street in the city. Most streets had one pipe, and some had two, but Broadway, because of its width and centrality, had three. At Bowling Green, City Hall Park, and Union Square, Croton water erupted in jets from a glorious new novelty: decorative fountains.

  On Friday, October 14, 1842, the waters of the Croton flowed unimpeded beneath the city for the first time, and New Yorkers devoted themselves to a day of celebration, just as they had when the Erie Canal opened in 1825. Business was suspended, even on hectic Wall Street, and everyone, it seemed, pressed into Broadway. Normally reserved citizens lost themselves in sheer joy at the sudden abundance of what had for generations been a scarce and precious commodity.

  “Then the water leaped joyfully and went on its mission of love,” Child wrote. “Concealed, like good deeds, it went all over the city, and baptized it in the name of Purity, Temperance, and Health.”

  The fire department, made up in those days of brave and boisterous volunteer “fire laddies” who dressed in red sweaters and black leather hats and carried themselves with considerable swagger, turned out in full force, and in high spirits, for the Croton celebration. Many of them had taken the temperance pledge, but even the hard drinkers in the department had good reason for rejoicing over the aqueduct’s completion.

  For decades the fire department had been fighting a losing battle against what newspapers tended to call “the devouring element.” The city was simply too big for the beleaguered volunteers to keep up with the increasing number, and alarming scale, of fires that regularly destroyed entire city blocks. It was the calamitous losses of the Great Fire of 1835, which had destroyed much of the financial district between Broadway and the East River, that precipitated construction of the Croton Aqueduct. At least with a ready supply of water, the thinking went, the city stood a chance. But it didn’t turn out quite that way.

  CHAPTER 4

  FIRE AND PROGRESS

  BY THE 1840S, BROADWAY’S FIRST MILE HAD CHANGED irrevocably. The headquarters of shipping, insurance, coal, finance, and railroad companie
s had moved in, along with dry goods “jobbers” (middlemen in the wholesale textile trade), lawyers, brokers, architects, and engineers. As more and more of Broadway’s dwellings were torn down, converted to commercial uses, or turned into boardinghouses for visitors and European immigrants, residents moved uptown to Bond Street, Washington Square, Union Square, and Gramercy Park. But holdouts remained: Lawyer George Templeton Strong, resisting the northward migration of his peers, lived a solitary existence in a small extension built behind his parents’ house at 108 Greenwich Street, one block west of Broadway.

  Strong was twenty-five in the summer of 1845. He was a partner in his father’s Wall Street law firm of Strong, Bidwell & Strong, but was never very active in the practice and rarely appeared in court. He spent much of his spare time at favorite haunts along Broadway’s first mile, going to concerts at the Broadway Tabernacle, lectures at Peale’s Museum, and meetings at the Union Club and Trinity Church, where he was a member of the vestry. In summer, Strong and his pals gorged themselves on strawberry ice cream and concoctions of frozen lemonade and rum within the leafy confines of Contoit’s New-York Garden, a verdant “pleasure garden” on Broadway near Leonard Street.

  Few people outside Strong’s immediate family knew that he was steadily compiling the most extraordinary diary in the city’s history. Eventually encompassing four thick, bound volumes brimming with caricatures and imaginative sketches of medieval castles and futuristic flying contraptions, Strong’s journal, written in a neat, nearly microscopic hand, documented everyday life in New York City beginning in 1835, when he was a fifteen-year-old Columbia College student, and ending just before his death in 1875.

  Strong complained strenuously in his journal as, one-by-one, his neighbors left downtown and German and Irish immigrants moved in. But the cardinal points of Strong’s everyday life still aligned along a very short but reassuringly stable east-west path connecting his home on Greenwich Street, Trinity Church, and his Wall Street office. Other than summer vacations to Long Island or Saratoga, Strong’s world was neatly inscribed along that line. But that was all about to change.

  STRONG WAS ASLEEP at home in the wee hours of July 19, 1845, when a fire began in a whale-oil warehouse on New Street, a narrow alley running parallel to Broadway, one block east of Bowling Green. The fire quickly spread to a chair factory and then to a warehouse. Volunteer fire brigades arrived, uncoiled their hoses, and began pumping water from curbside hydrants, an important feature of the new Croton water system. As was the custom, several firemen, including Francis Hart Jr. of Engine Company No. 22, climbed onto the roofs of neighboring buildings and began wetting them down. It was a bad fire, but nothing out of the ordinary. No one realized that potassium nitrate—“saltpeter,” an extremely volatile compound then used in the manufacture of fireworks and gunpowder and employed as a food preservative—was stored in the warehouse.

  At half past three in the morning the warehouse exploded, shaking Strong’s house, he wrote in his diary, “like an earthquake” and practically throwing him from his bed. When he looked out his window toward Broadway, he saw a “broad column of intense red flame, that made the moon look pale.”

  Hart, positioned on the roof of a building at the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place when the warehouse exploded, felt the building falling under him. “[The] roof moved around so that a corner of it caught on the opposite side of Exchange Street and was thrown off into that street,” Hart said later. “As far as I could judge the whole roof that I was on moved in one piece, and the walls under it crumbled down beneath it.” Somehow Hart survived, his only injury a twisted ankle.

  The warehouse exploded at least three more times, sending flaming debris scattering over the rooftops and igniting many of the buildings on Broadway and Broad Street. Strong threw on his clothes and ran to Broadway, where a large crowd had already gathered.

  The fire burned south to Bowling Green, destroying houses, offices, and hotels along the way. Soon the entire east side of Broadway between Whitehall Street and Exchange Place—the same stretch of the street that had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1776—was in flames. To the east of Broadway the fire spread all the way to William Street, while occupants of buildings as far away as Water, Front, and Pearl streets hauled goods out onto the street, just as they had during the Great Fire of 1835. Then the wind picked up, and the fire leapt across Broadway and ignited six houses on the street’s west side.

  The fire raged through the night and into the next morning, and everyone panicked, hurling their belongings into the streets and gathering in confused crowds in Bowling Green and on the Battery.

  “Drays, carts and wheelbarrows, hastily loaded with the most incongruous cargoes, are pushing through the dense crowd in every direction,” the Tribune reported in a special edition published at dawn. “Irish women, with a bed in one hand and two or three naked children in the other, run to deposit them on the [side] walk.” Soon the sidewalk in front of Trinity Church was piled with beds, tables, bureaus, chairs, clocks, and kettles. Burning papers floated high into the air over the harbor and landed as far away as Staten Island.

  By ten o’clock in the morning Broadway was a tunnel of fire. The heat was so intense in the middle of the street, the Tribune reported, “not even the daring firemen could venture upon the burning pavement.” The volunteers of Engine Company No. 8 stationed themselves at the corner of Broadway and Morris Street, but could maintain their position only if another company doused them with water. Police prevented crowds from entering Broadway, but Strong persuaded them to let him through. Walking north, he found Broadway a “chaos of ruin and smoke” and eerily deserted except for a few firemen.

  By half past ten the fire had reached the roof of a building at the southeast corner of Greenwich and Morris streets, only 300 yards south of the Strong family home and even closer to Trinity Church. But the fire spread no further, and by noon was under control, but not before much of Broadway between Bowling Green and Trinity had been reduced to a field of hissing ruins. About a dozen people were killed.

  That night hundreds of refugees camped on the Battery. Three days later small patches of fire were still burning in at least twenty different spots. The Evening Post likened the scene to a prairie fire.

  The fire had destroyed 217 buildings—34 of them on Broadway. The losses on Broadway included Cornelius Vanderbilt’s office and the Waverley, Bowling Green, and Adelphi hotels. The fire displaced at least 400 residents and businesses, while the total loss was estimated at $5 million to $8 million—$151 million to $242 million in today’s dollars.

  “Bank notes of the denomination of five dollars would not burn as rapidly in a common fireplace as property was consumed by this conflagration,” John Doggett Jr., publisher of Doggett’s Directory, wrote in a special supplement rushed to press shortly after the fire.

  Many New Yorkers felt thoroughly chastened for having believed that the era of the “Great Fires” was over. “[Our] bountiful supply of Croton Water does not afford us an absolute protection against the devouring element,” the Tribune lamented the day after the fire, as if considering the possibility for the first time.

  But the Great Fire of 1845 didn’t prostrate Broadway the way the Great Fire of 1776 had. Progress was already changing Broadway, the fire only hastening an ongoing process of demolition and construction. Even those who had suffered steep losses in the fire practically rejoiced at the chance to rebuild, seeing the fire not so much as a reversal but as an opportunity. Diarist and one-time mayor Philip Hone, then serving as president of American Mutual, one of six fire insurance companies bankrupted by the fire, vowed that the city’s economy wouldn’t miss a beat.

  “Throw down our merchants ever so flat, they roll over once, and spring to their feet again,” Hone wrote in his diary. “Knock the stairs from under them, and they will make a ladder of the fragments, and remount.”

  The Tribune predicted that the city wouldn’t be “crushed nor stunned by” the fire, that
businesses would quickly relocate and reopen. Sure enough, within days of the fire, the Evening Post reported seeing piles of bricks stacked in the streets, ready for rebuilding, while an “abundance of capital [was] lying in wait.”

  The age when Broadway’s first mile was a tree-lined promenade was rapidly fading into the past. It wasn’t a sentimental era, and favorite landmarks were torn down with barely a second thought. Even the old Kennedy mansion at No. 1 Broadway was irreversibly altered in 1849, its roof shorn off and a third story added, and the once-grand house became the Washington Hotel, someone’s scheme for cashing in on its Revolutionary War backstory.

  For even the most long-established families, to continue living on or near Broadway’s first mile seemed increasingly out of step with the times. Three years after the fire, even George Templeton Strong, having married the daughter of a real-estate speculator, built a new house on 21st Street, facing Gramercy Park, and left Greenwich Street behind forever.

  Broadway was a juggernaut by 1845, a bustling commercial thoroughfare. But there was still something homogenous about its architecture. Aside from City Hall, the Astor House hotel, and St. Paul’s Chapel, it lacked civic monuments. That all changed in 1846, with the completion of a majestic new church and a remarkable store.

  IN 1839, FOLLOWING a winter of heavy snowfall, parishioners began noticing worrisome cracks in the walls and ceiling of Trinity Church, a relatively new structure built in 1790 as the replacement for the original church lost in the Great Fire of 1776. Trinity’s vestry hired architect Richard Upjohn, a former cabinetmaker from England, as a consultant, and Upjohn reported that the church was beyond saving. Instead of repairing the old church, Upjohn was allowed to tear it down and design a new church in its place. It was the most important commission of his career.