Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  Broadway’s traffic became such a problem the Metropolitan Police formed a special “Broadway Squad” to untangle vehicles and horses and guide pedestrians safely across the street. The men of the Broadway Squad were renowned for their bravery and pluck, wading fearlessly into heavy traffic, apprehending pickpockets, and heroically stopping runaway horses. And they were at least as well known for their fawning attention to female pedestrians, who they occasionally lifted tenderly from the curb over a puddle or snowdrift and onto a waiting omnibus.

  “They are generally handsome,” Harper’s Weekly wrote approvingly of the squad’s officers, “and they are always polite—to the ladies, especially to those who are young and pretty.”

  The officers weren’t always so gallant, as slow-moving pedestrians found when officers shoved them gruffly from behind. (“Traffic had to be physically enforced in those days,” retired squad captain Bernard Keleher recalled in 1922.) But the squad was comprised of strapping fellows—there was a height requirement of 6 feet—and the tall, manly officers were soon immortalized in songs and poems, taking their place alongside the Broadway Belle in the urban cosmos.

  Tall and handsome fellow!

  With his badge and star,

  Standing by the gutter,

  Watching near and far;

  Watching for the women

  All the bustling day—

  Smiling and gallanting

  The fair across Broadway.

  Now he’s in the gutter,

  Now he’s on the pave,

  Now among the horses—

  Don’t you think him brave?

  Boots outside his trowsers,

  Through the miry clay

  Wades the “star,” gallanting

  The fair across Broadway.

  The Broadway Squad could help untangle the worst of Broadway’s traffic, but couldn’t prevent the omnibuses, carts, wagons, and horses from coagulating in the first place, and the problem of Broadway’s traffic continued unabated.

  A railroad running up and down Broadway, it was long thought, would fix Broadway’s traffic once and for all, and proposals had been put forth as early as 1832, when inventor John Stevens urged an elevated extension of the New York & Harlem Railroad, then under construction, from City Hall down Broadway as far south as Trinity Church. But nothing came of his plan, nor of an ingenious elevated Broadway railroad designed in 1846 by John Randel Jr., the original surveyor of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan.

  In the 1850s, Second, Third, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth avenues all got surface railways, but omnibus companies and Broadway property owners repeatedly foiled attempts by the Common Council to build a railroad on Broadway. In 1852 twenty-one influential Broadway proprietors including A. T. Stewart, who believed a noisy and sooty railroad running past his illustrious Marble Palace would hurt business, banded together to oppose the project. The so-called Committee of Twenty-One even took the novel position that Broadway’s traffic, far from the ongoing civic crisis it was made out to be, was actually the very thing that made Broadway interesting and memorable.

  The manly officers of the Broadway Squad were known for paying special attention to attractive young women.

  “This din, this driving, this omnibus thunder, this squeezing, this jamming, crowding, and at times smashing, is the exhilarating music which charms the multitude and draws its thousands within the whirl,” the committee members declared in a remonstrance submitted to the Common Council. “This is Broadway—this makes Broadway. Take from it these elements, the charm is gone, and it is no longer Broadway.” Crowd it, the remonstrance continued, “and continue to crowd it until, like the mountain stream, it overflows its banks.”

  But the idea that Broadway should have a railroad wouldn’t die, and in 1868 inventor Alfred Ely Beach, publisher of Scientific American, built a subway beneath Broadway—without asking permission and with hardly anyone knowing. The state legislature had granted Beach a charter to build an underground pneumatic mail delivery tube, not a railway, beneath Broadway, but Beach simply increased the diameter of the tube and began building what became the Beach Pneumatic Railway.

  To build a subway underneath New York’s busiest street, and in secret, was, to put it mildly, an audacious plan. Beach rented the basement of Devlin & Company, a well-known clothing store at the corner of Broadway and Warren Street, directly across Broadway from City Hall, and began tunneling at night, his workers removing dirt using horse-drawn wagons equipped with muffled wheels.

  Beach built a subway station with frescoed walls, a fountain, a fish tank, and a grand piano beneath Devlin’s basement. The station gave access to a 300-foot-long brick tube 20 feet below the surface of Broadway, extending one block south to Murray Street. The subway was powered by a single, gigantic fan at the Warren Street end of the tunnel, which blew a single railcar with a capacity of twenty-two passengers south to Murray Street, and then sucked it back in the opposite direction. It was, by all accounts, a brief but thrilling ride.

  As soon as it opened, in February of 1870, a delighted public turned Beach’s experimental subway into an instant tourist attraction. Beach ran the pneumatic car between ten o’clock in the morning and five o’clock in the evening at twenty-five cents a ticket and announced that he was ready to extend his tunnel south to Bowling Green and north to Central Park. But in digging his secret subway Beach had openly defied Tammany Hall and William M. “Boss” Tweed, who preferred handing out railway franchises to cronies. Governor John T. Hoffman, a Tweed ally, twice vetoed bills authorizing construction of Beach’s pneumatic railway. When a new governor, John A. Dix, finally passed the bill, the Panic of 1873 killed Beach’s subway for good. Beach ordered his tunnel walled up, with the train car left inside, and everyone forgot it had ever been there.

  Alfred Ely Beach’s improbable pneumatic subway.

  In 1893, Broadway finally got its railroad, a surface system of railcars pulled by an underground traction cable—the same type of system still used in San Francisco today—and between 1905 and 1918 two subway lines were built under the street. In 1912, workers digging the tunnel for the BMT-Broadway Line were surprised to discover a mysterious brick wall and, breaking through, Beach’s long forgotten subway, its train car sitting silently on the tracks and rusting down.

  Today, Broadway’s first mile is still crowded with cars and trucks, but the traffic is generally orderly and nothing like the perpetual, hopeless tangle of the mid nineteenth century. Omnibuses and horses, and cable cars, too, are long gone. Broadway below 59th Street is now a one-way street, with traffic flowing south. There are stoplights at every cross street, and a subway ride beneath Broadway between Wall and Fulton streets takes all of twenty-five seconds.

  MILE 2

  CITY HALL PARK TO HOUSTON STREET

  CHAPTER 7

  ACROSS THE MEADOWS

  THE HEART OF BROADWAY’S SECOND MILE BISECTS A FORMER industrial precinct that was resuscitated in the 1970s as the SoHo–Cast Iron Historic District. It was in many ways an improbable transformation: Only ten years earlier the area had been so run-down and prone to fires it was called “Hell’s Hundred Acres.” SoHo’s formerly dicey warehouses housed artists and then galleries and now expensive, tourist-jammed retail shops. What makes Broadway’s second mile different from just any shopping mall is its wonderful iron buildings, but those didn’t come until the mid nineteenth century, when the stores of Broadway’s second mile were just part of a lively strip of theaters, hotels, and barrooms. Before that it was a sparsely populated semirural landscape of vacant lots, occasional dwellings, and constant floods.

  Throughout the city’s Dutch and British periods, Broadway was never longer than one mile in length, coming to a dead end at Anthony Rutgers’s country estate a few hundred yards north of the Commons. Broadway didn’t continue farther north because it was hemmed in by an expansive, primordial wetland called Lispenard’s Meadows, which was fed by the freshwater Collect Pond just to the east of the present-day intersection
of Broadway and Leonard Street. Water moved lazily back and forth across the Meadows, a 70-acre marsh flecked with tall grasses and shrubs that effectively cut off lower Manhattan from the rest of the island.

  A sketch from 1800, looking west from Broadway, showing children ice skating on Lispenard’s Meadows.

  Then, in the mid-1770s, the so-called Stone Bridge was built over the Meadows, and Broadway was extended over the bridge all the way up to the “two-mile stone” at the Sandy Hill Road, just east of Greenwich Village. Broadway’s Stone Bridge became a familiar landmark, a place, in winter, for children to meet, tie on skates, and glide over the Meadows’ frozen expanse. And it offered parents a convenient but wildly inaccurate story with which to scare their children into staying close to home: “You must not cross the bridge or the bears will catch you!”

  For two hundred years the Dutch, then the British, and finally the Americans tried in vain to channel the Meadows into a navigable canal, while failing to appreciate that Lispenard’s Meadows was a vitally important catch basin that held and absorbed the Collect’s fresh water, as well as brackish tidal backflow from the Hudson River and runoff from storms and melting snow. From the perspective of landowners and the city’s Common Council, which at the time was going to great lengths to build a new City Hall and develop the land north of the city, Lispenard’s Meadows represented a huge tract of potentially lucrative real estate gone to waste, and so over the years the Meadows were flayed with ditches in the hope that the water might drain into the Hudson.

  But because the land between the Collect Pond and the Hudson was flat, the water didn’t behave as the city wished and, instead of flowing into the Hudson, pooled in streets, including Broadway, in vacant lots, and in the basements of new houses. The more the city fiddled with the Meadows, the more of a hydrological disaster the whole misguided project became. In 1807 alone the Common Council spent $13,000—$260,000 in today’s dollars—on dirt, at five cents a cartload, and dumped it into the Collect and the low-lying areas surrounding it, in the process covering over what was then called the Negroes’ Burying Ground, an eighteenth-century graveyard just north of City Hall Park that held the remains of slaves, free blacks, paupers, and Revolutionary War soldiers. (The burial ground wasn’t rediscovered until construction of a federal court building in 1991 turned up broken coffins and human remains.)

  By 1808 the once pristine Collect Pond had turned into what John Randel Jr. described as a “very offensive and irregular mound.” In 1819 the city gave up the idea of a navigable canal and channeled what was left of Lispenard’s Meadows into a subterranean culvert, covered it over, and called it Canal Street.

  MOST OF THE LAND north of Canal Street had been part of the Bayard Family estate, which dated back to Dutch days. The estate had originally been granted to Nicholas Bayard, Peter Stuyvesant’s brother-in-law, in 1638, and was subsequently enlarged by cobbling together eleven whole and partial tracts Bayard gradually acquired from small farmers and freed slaves. Between the 1730s and 1750s, Samuel Bayard, Nicholas Bayard’s heir, built a mansion, plus a slaughterhouse and windmill, near a hill called Bayard’s Mount. When Broadway was extended over Lispenard’s Meadows, it bisected the estate, cutting it into two halves, with the Bayard mansion and Bayard’s Mount just to the east of the new street. (Bayard’s Mount, known during the Revolutionary War as “Bunker’s Hill” in honor of Bunker Hill in Boston, survived into the early nineteenth century, when it was leveled and pushed into the Collect Pond.)

  Beginning as early as the 1780s another Nicholas Bayard, Samuel Bayard’s son, subdivided the family estate into streets and building lots. The opening of Grand, Spring, Hevins (later Broome), Crosby, Clermont (Mercer), Union (Greene), Provoost (Wooster), and Concord (West Broadway) streets would, in time, provide the surrounding urban fabric for Broadway’s second mile. In 1809, Broadway was paved, with sidewalks added on each side, from Canal Street to Art Street (Astor Place). It was beginning to resemble the thriving thoroughfare just to the south—all that was missing were buildings and people.

  By 1812 there were still only forty buildings on Broadway between Canal and Houston streets. These included a few wood-frame houses and shops occupied by tanners, cartmen, carpenters, and laborers in the flood-prone vicinity of Broadway and Canal Street. Blackwell & McFarlan’s Union Air Furnace, a smoky, wood-fired contraption used in the manufacture of cast-iron kettles, skillets, anvils, stoves, ploughs, and weights, sat just behind the houses at the corner of Broadway and Grand Street. The only other prominent landmark on that part of Broadway was Abraham Davis’s tavern at the northeast corner of Broadway and Grand, across the street from the furnace. A few blocks to the north, near Spring and Prince streets, a coterie of prosperous downtown merchants built houses on what was referred to in real-estate circles as the “healthy part of Broadway,” a section of high ground considered safe from flooding and the scourge of yellow fever. But other than those few houses, Broadway’s second mile consisted of vacant lots.

  Much of that vacant land was still owned by members of the Beekman, Bleecker, and Van Rensselaer families, descendants of the original owners of seventeenth-century Dutch land grants. Meanwhile, “merchant princes” of more recent wealth, including John Jacob Astor, were rapidly buying up lots along Broadway’s second mile, guessing, correctly as it turned out, that the city would expand in that direction and their land would skyrocket in value.

  They knew a good thing when they saw it. Even though Broadway’s second mile was sparsely populated, Astor and other real-estate speculators fully expected Broadway to become the leading edge of development north of Canal Street, and in a clear sign that market forces were already at work, lots on Broadway in 1812 were worth three times as much as lots of the same size on Mercer, Crosby, Wooster, and other nearby streets.

  Beginning about 1817, bricks and mortar arrived on Broadway’s second mile by the cartload, and ranks of tidy brick houses appeared, so that by 1822 there were twice as many houses on Broadway between Canal and Houston Streets as there had been ten years earlier, while the total assessed value of the real estate on that stretch of the street increased from $154,250 in 1812 to a staggering $1,032,658 ten years later.

  A boom in the production of Southern cotton, the establishment of regularly scheduled “packet” ships sailing between New York and Liverpool, and construction of the Erie Canal were the three main factors driving New York’s newfound prosperity. In 1810 the city’s population had been 96,373; by the time the Erie Canal opened in 1825 it had grown to 166,089 and was attracting more and more new residents every day. (New York’s population would reach 242,278 by 1830—small by today’s standards but at the time bigger than Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore combined.)

  By 1825 the 8th Ward, the electoral district that encompassed Broadway’s second mile, had been utterly transformed from a derelict landscape of flooded vacant lots to a densely populated, humming urban neighborhood with thirteen churches, four schools, two markets, an orphanage, a theater and a circus, mills and distilleries, and an average of two families packed into each of the ward’s 2,300 houses.

  As the city flowed northward into Broadway’s second mile, artifacts from its rural past disappeared one by one. In 1798 the old Bayard mansion had been repurposed as the centerpiece of a pleasure garden called Vauxhall. Modeled after Vauxhall Gardens in London, it was a place of winding paths, discreet nooks and alcoves, benches and chairs and tables, and evening concerts, fireworks, and acrobatic demonstrations. But when Vauxhall moved in 1805, the Bayard mansion, stranded just east of Broadway near the intersection of Grand and Crosby streets like a ship that had missed the tide, stood in the way of progress and was finally put out of its misery in 1821.

  CHAPTER 8

  “A GLANCE AT NEW YORK”

  ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 15, 1848, AT THE OLYMPIC Theatre, a small playhouse tucked mid-block on the shilling side of Broadway’s second mile, between Howard and Grand streets, one block north of Canal Street, a st
range, menacing figure with coat slung over his arm, hat cocked insouciantly forward over one eye, and hair plastered down in foppish “soap locks” over his temples, strode to center stage. He took the stump of a cigar out of his mouth, spat on the stage, and defiantly stared down the startled audience. “I ain’t a goin’ to run wid dat mercheen no more!” he yelled.

  It was midway through the first act of the premiere of a new “local drama, in two acts” entitled A Glance at New York in 1848, and for a moment or two there was dead silence. Accustomed to the polished deliveries of English Shakespearean actors, the Olympic’s patrons didn’t know what to think. Then it dawned on the audience that the ruffian in their midst was the popular actor Frank Chanfrau, debuting a new character called “Mose,” and the playhouse erupted into thunderous applause.

  A Glance at New York was a theatrical insurrection and was unveiled against the backdrop of the European revolutions of 1848. There was no mistaking the political and social anarchy than ran through the play: “Fellow citizens, of everywhere in particular, and nowhere in general,” one character shouts at one point, “I appear before you to say what I shall say; and I say, to begin, that I am opposed to all governments: I’m opposed to all laws!”

  But the most revolutionary thing about the play, which was written as a lark by Olympic stagehand Benjamin A. Baker, was that its dialogue reproduced the local slang of its audience: “muss” for fight, “lam” for hit, “high” for funny, “crib” for place. And instead of stage sets of English drawing rooms and Scottish castles, the audience at the Olympic was treated to backdrops of familiar, Broadway-centric haunts: City Hall Park, the Astor House hotel, Barnum’s American Museum, and Vauxhall Gardens (then located on Astor Place between Broadway and the Bowery). The cast included fast-talking thieves, con artists, newsboys, and Five Points “loafers,” while the plot, such as it was, flattered New Yorkers by poking fun at naïve out-of-towners, including a wonderstruck girl from the sticks: “I declare,” she exclaims, “I was never so delighted in my life! Such a never-ending display of silks, jewelry, and shawls as this Broadway boasts of! ’Tis enough to turn my brain!”