Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  “The scene that burst upon the view in Broadway exceeded anything, perhaps, ever before witnessed in that thoroughfare of wonders,” the New York Herald reported as the 6th Regiment marched down the street. “Every window, door, housetop, awning, was crowded. The street itself was thronged as though the populace were wedged together in one solid living mass . . . The Stars and Stripes waved everywhere, and one banner displayed the works ‘Fort Sumter and its Band of 70 Heroes. No Surrender to Traitors.’ ”

  By week’s end thousands of additional troops from New England and New York had paraded down Broadway on their way to war, each departing regiment escorted by euphoric crowds lining both sides of the street. Broadway stores raced to supply uniforms, boots, cots, camp stools, pots and pans, and field glasses to the thousands of departing troops that marched each day past their window displays. Joseph H. Semmons & Company, opticians, 669½ Broadway, displayed a stock of military glasses, including “out-door double Perspective Glasses” for use on the field of battle. The furriers L. J. & I. Phillips, 64-66 Broadway, guaranteed regiments “an enormous supply” of soldier’s caps “at the shortest notice.” Devlin, Hudson & Company offered “military clothing of all descriptions” from their two Broadway locations (corner of Warren Street and corner of Grand), promising rapid delivery of “large orders,” while Brooks Brothers, at Broadway and Grand Street, across from Devlin’s and Lord & Taylor, sold 12,000 uniforms to the New York volunteers, only to become embroiled in a scandal when many of them fell apart.

  The 7th Regiment passing Broadway’s magnificent St. Nicholas Hotel, April 19, 1861, on its way to the front lines.

  Owing to its longstanding reliance on Southern cotton production, New York was, in many respects, a Southern city. New York hotels, English tourist Isabella Lucy Bird had observed in 1854, were filled with “southerners sighing for their sunny homes, smoking Havana cigars.” Southern businessmen often brought their entire families for extended stays in the city, especially in summer, and hotels and restaurants that catered to them did good business. There was a Planters Hotel at Broadway and Spring Street, a Magnolia Hotel on West Street, and a Magnolia Lunch at Broadway and Chambers Street, while the New York Hotel at Broadway and Great Jones Street remained a hotspot for Southern-sympathizing “Copperheads” throughout the war. Broadway theaters, too, often pandered to Southern audiences: The Seven Sisters, a long-running production featuring bumbling black stereotypes and sniveling abolitionists, played at Laura Keene’s Theater on Broadway even after the war began.

  New York’s alliance with the South vanished with the attack on Fort Sumter and, having suddenly lost access to lucrative Southern markets, the city turned to manufacturing as a way of shoring up its wartime economy—the beginning of the transformation of New York from a way station for goods produced elsewhere to a production center in its own right. B. F. Palmer & Company, manufacturer of artificial limbs, did such brisk business that it opened two Broadway stores catering to “mutilated soldiers.” By 1863, Palmer had 3,000 prosthetic arms and legs in stock and was gearing up to produce 100 additional limbs per month.

  UNION SQUARE HAD surpassed City Hall Park as the city’s main public gathering place, and in the weeks following Fort Sumter became the epicenter of Unionist fervor. On Saturday afternoon, April 20, 1861, Union Square was the setting for an enormous “Great Union Meeting” that drew an immense crowd reported at 100,000—the largest public gathering in the city’s, and possibly the nation’s, history. By three o’clock a sea of people had pressed into the square from all sides and filled Broadway and surrounding streets. Dodworth’s band was there, naturally, as well as a company of fifty schoolboys that marched around the perimeter of the park, cheered on by the crowd. A few foolhardy secessionist hecklers unwisely showed up; they were chased down and beaten.

  Five stages were set up in various spots around the park, and in those premicrophone days, the crowd strained to hear the remarks of dozens of speakers representing a cross-section of the city’s political, industrial, mercantile, and clerical elite. Archbishop John Hughes, too ill to attend, sent a warmly received letter pledging his fealty to the flag, but Major Anderson was the star attraction, and when he made his way laboriously through the crowd and mounted the first stage, on the 14th Street side of the square in front of an enormous 1856 equestrian bronze of George Washington, he was greeted by a deafening tidal wave of adulation. Anderson nodded appreciatively as an American flag that had flown over Fort Sumter, “stained with fire and bearing marks of the battle,” fluttered overhead from Washington’s outstretched arm.

  Then Mayor Fernando Wood got up to speak, prompting both cheers and hisses. In a breathtakingly brazen about-face, Wood came out strongly for the Union, pledging the full support of his administration to the cause, only three months after publicly siding with “our grieved brethren of the slave states” and proposing that New York City secede from both state and country in order to protect its lucrative trade with the South.

  By the time the scheduled speeches were over, it was growing dark, but the crowd, its energy barely dissipated, seemed in no hurry to go home. Spontaneous, unscheduled speakers continued rallying the crowd from the steps and balconies of buildings surrounding the park, and before long thousands were parading joyously up and down the streets. The Sun noted that in the whole crowd its reporters saw not one drunken man or heard one profane word. No doubt they weren’t looking very hard.

  IN 1870, TIFFANY’S DEMOLISHED the James Renwick–designed Church of the Puritans on the west side of Union Square and replaced it with a huge cast-iron store—the “Palace of Jewels.” The following year C. V. S. Roosevelt died and his house at the corner of Broadway and 14th Street was demolished and replaced by the headquarters of the Domestic Sewing Machine Company. The blocks surrounding the formerly tranquil square hummed with commercial activity, with once-grand mansions converted to boardinghouses, stores, and offices rented to chiropodists, coal dealers, dressmakers, milliners, hairdressers, furriers, and cloak manufacturers.

  The “Great Union Meeting” at Union Square, April 20, 1861.

  In 1872 the city hired Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, designers of Central Park, to remake Union Square according to a more up-to-date, picturesque aesthetic. Four years later, Olmsted was put in charge of the culminating pageant of the city’s 1876 “Centennial Celebration,” the most ambitious public demonstration Union Square had seen since the 1861 Great Union Meeting. Coming in the wake of several years of sectarian violence between the city’s Catholics and Protestants, the Centennial Celebration was choreographed to depict New York as a thriving city at peace, where everyone, rich and poor, black and white, Protestant and Catholic, native-born and immigrant, got along famously.

  Just before midnight on July 3, following a torchlight parade up Broadway, its entire length decorated with flags and streamers and illuminated with gas jets, an estimated crowd of 40,000 to 50,000 squeezed into Union Square to await the midnight commencement of the Fourth of July and the nation’s Centennial. Olmsted had made Union Square as festive as possible, adding red, white, and blue gaslight globes and hanging Japanese lanterns in the trees. The numerous brass bands that had marched in the parade were somehow combined into one group, forming an ungainly orchestra of 600 instruments that managed to play together, more or less, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail the Atlantis,” and Beethoven’s “The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God,” accompanied by a chorus of 600 singers.

  At the stroke of midnight, fireworks rocketed skyward from each corner of the park. Hats were thrown in the air and pistols fired (at least nine people were accidentally shot), church chimes pealed, and the immense crowd roared as Dodworth’s band began “Hail, Columbia.”

  “There were men, women, and children of all nationalities in that enormous audience,” the Sun reported. “Cosmopolitan New York, with her population gathered from all quarters of the globe, seemed to have emptied itself into this blazing square, with the one thoug
ht and purpose of celebrating the brotherhood that binds all races into one. The Irishman stood beside the Yankee and the Knickerbocker, and the German was shoulder to shoulder with the Frenchman, and the negro’s right to be glad was not denied, and so all cheered and threw up their hats together.”

  People remained in Union Square all night, even as dawn broke and church bells struck the morning hours.

  Amid the sea of changes that had enveloped Union Square, Samuel B. Ruggles still lived in his original row house facing the eastern edge of the park. (His son-in-law George Templeton Strong had died the previous summer.) On July 4, Ruggles, then seventy-six years old, joined a group of luminaries onstage at the Academy of Music for a patriotic program of speeches and songs. Poet William Cullen Bryant, eighty-one, contributed a special “Centennial Ode.”

  Oh! checkered train of years, farewell,

  With all thy strifes and hopes and fears;

  But with us let thy memories dwell,

  To warn and lead the coming years.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE RIALTO

  THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC, THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL OPERA HOUSE in the city, had opened at the corner of 14th Street and Irving Place, one block east of Union Square, in 1854. Its 4,600-seat auditorium was an acoustical masterpiece but included only eighteen private boxes, which were reserved for those in New York’s social stratosphere. The Academy specialized in operas by Mozart, Bellini, Rossini, and, especially, Verdi, whose La Traviata, Il Trovatore, and Rigoletto were performed over and over, but also put on concerts by everyone from the great Norwegian violinist Ole Bull to Dodworth’s band.

  The Academy quickly became a secular version of Grace Church, a place to see and be seen, and who attended each season’s opening night and who sat in whose box were reliable subjects of gossip on the society pages of newspapers. Other places of amusement and culture, including Wallack’s Theatre, Irving Hall, Steinway Hall, and Lent’s New York Circus, followed the Academy to Union Square, and by the mid-1860s the intersection of Broadway and 14th Street had become the new center of the city’s theater district.

  On any given evening, patrons could watch the immensely popular Wallacks—father James and son John, both with curly hair, mustaches, and extravagant muttonchops—in The Rivals, The School for Scandal, The Road to Ruin, or Used Up at their theater at Broadway and 13th Street; listen to Charles Dickens read from his latest works at Steinway Hall; or pack into Lent’s Circus, across 14th Street from the Academy, for thrilling exhibitions of “unsurpassed riders, gymnasts, posture masters, & c.”

  In 1860 the New York Times satirically suggested that Broadway’s impenetrable traffic might be alleviated by turning the street into a version of Venice’s Grand Canal, complete with a Rialto Bridge spanning Broadway at 14th Street:

  Why not at once set about dyking the sidewalks of our great thoroughfare, and so convert its roadway into a complete canal? Canals are the order of the day just now in New-York, and we are even bent on taxing our railways to keep them prosperous. A canal stretching from Washington Heights to the Battery would be a magnificent job for the City contractors. It would perfectly attain the end now bunglingly aimed at by so many public-spirited builders of houses and shops, and render the street completely impassable for at least a year, thereby compelling us to open new avenues, to the east and to the west. And, when finished, how admirable its effects alike on the appearance of the metropolis, and upon the health and convenience of the population! We should rival Venice in our picturesque beauty, and New-Orleans in our interesting insalubrity. A noble Rialto might be thrown up at Union-square, and flat-bottomed steamboats, of the Western pattern, running anywhere where it is a “little damp,” would deliver us from the plague of omnibuses forever.

  Broadway was never turned into a canal and no Rialto bridge was ever built across it, but the entertainment district that grew up around Broadway and 14th Street did become known, undoubtedly because of the Times article, as New York’s “Rialto.”

  The emergence of the Rialto coincided with a shift in how theaters were managed, away from the traditional stock company, where performers often worked for years for the same theater manager, to a “combination” system in which performers were hired for one production at a time and then let go. The combination system created a large population of temporarily unemployed performers, and the benches of Union Square and sidewalks, barrooms, and cafés along 14th Street soon filled with loitering actors, songwriters, and agents, and “What news on the Rialto?” a line from The Merchant of Venice, became their standard catch phrase.

  “Hello, Granville,” began one typical conversation between two out-of-work actors. “What are you with next season [meaning, which production company hired you]?”

  “I’m still looking, old chap.”

  Theatrical side-industries flocked to Union Square, too: costumers, music teachers, sheet music publishers, sign painters, show card printers, and scenic artists all moved into nearby offices, while boardinghouses in the neighborhood filled with theatrical types. By the 1870s there were so many piano manufacturers—Sohmer, Arion, Louis Berge, Chickering, Lighte & Ernst, Lindeman, George Steck, Dunham, Steinway—on 14th Street it became known as Piano Row, with at least a dozen others on Broadway and surrounding Union Square. (The Rialto scene foreshadowed the rise of Tin Pan Alley a few years later and a dozen blocks to the north.)

  The Rialto was in its heyday when Tony Pastor arrived on the scene. He was born in New York around 1837, the son of a Greenwich Street barber, and began his career singing at Barnum’s museum. As an eight-year-old, he joined Raymond & Waring’s menagerie, where he appeared in blackface and played tambourine in a minstrel band, and by the 1850s he was working as a clown in Nixon’s Circus and at the Bowery Theatre.

  In 1865, Pastor took over Hooley’s Theatre, a vaudeville house on the Bowery, changed its name to Pastor’s Opera House, and began offering inoffensive “family theater.” Pastor was going against the grain of an era when vaudeville houses catered to an overwhelmingly male audience that demanded increasingly risqué performances, including the scandalous “Parisian Can-Can.” He encouraged women to attend by banning smoking, drinking, and profanity, by giving away prizes—sewing machines, barrels of flour, and bouquets—and admitting women free on Fridays. It also didn’t hurt that Pastor had a way with a song, performing such favorites as “Down in a Coal Mine” and “Sarah’s Young Man” in evening dress, punctuating each line with casual gestures of a silk top hat he held in his hand, and became something of a heartthrob.

  In 1875, Pastor jumped from the Bowery to Broadway, taking over the lease at the former Buckley’s Hall, just north of Prince Street and opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, and there put on everything—melodramas, farces, minstrel shows, ballet, Gilbert & Sullivan operettas—and amid the hundreds of actors, singers, jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, comedians, magicians, clog dancers, animal trainers, and fire-eaters who tread his boards, Pastor discovered major new talents, including Lillian Russell, Nat Goodwin, May Irwin, and the comedy team of Harrigan & Hart.

  Pastor wore diamond rings and stickpins, had a kind, open face, a wide, cantilevering mustache with waxed tips, and a generous midsection. He was a man-about-town: “[When] the weather’s fine there’s a bouquet for my buttonhole and I make some of the matinee idols look pretty pale when I stroll up Broadway,” he told a Tribune reporter.

  He became so famous that he had a winning thoroughbred racehorse named after him and endorsed the popular liniment St. Jacob’s Oil: “Mr. Pastor . . . would not be without it,” the ads went. Traveling by steamboat from New York to Albany in 1881, Pastor was mobbed and spent the trip banging away at a piano, the center of attention, while Vice President Chester A. Arthur and Senators Roscoe Conkling and Thomas C. Platt, then three of the most powerful and well-known men in America, sat unnoticed and in quiet conversation off to the side.

  Pastor even fielded his own amateur baseball team called, naturally, the “Tony Pastors” and
stocked with theatrical types. It was all in good fun apparently, even when the Tony Pastors unwisely challenged the Mutuals, a crack professional team, and were clobbered 39 to 2.

  In 1881, Pastor took over Bryant’s Minstrel Hall inside the Democratic Party headquarters, Tammany Hall, which was on 14th Street next door to the Academy of Music. There Pastor perfected his so-called “star combination” system, taking advantage of the glut of performers hanging around Union Square, and soon bragged that he had 160 actors, musicians, dancers, and novelty acts in his “Mammoth Star Company.” He was the toast of the town.

  Tony Pastor ruled the Rialto.

  Pastor remained on 14th Street for the rest of his career, even as the theater district moved north to, first, Madison and then Herald and Times squares. Rival vaudeville houses undercut him by offering continuous all-day performances for one 50-cent ticket—half the admission that Pastor charged for one show. For years he refused to make changes to his theater, believing that his public liked it the way it was, but eventually cut his prices and began offering continuous shows himself to keep up with the competition. Finally, a few months before his death in 1908, he was forced to give up his lease.

  By that time Union Square was called the “lower” Rialto, to distinguish it from the glamorous theaters of the “upper” Rialto to the north. Freak shows and dime museums, the lowlife descendants of Barnum’s American Museum, moved in. Huber’s Museum on 14th Street, opposite the Academy of Music—which by then had been converted to a vaudeville house—featured, in the Barnum tradition, both a vaudeville theater and a “curio hall” where audiences could view Krao the Missing Link, Young Sampson the Strong Man, Fedora the Snake Enchantress, the “wonderfully entertaining” Turtle Boy, the “jolly Chinaman” Sing Wah Foo, and the Zarros, sword artists who performed “the neatest, cleanest and most startling decapitation mystery ever witnessed.” Two blocks to the west, at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, James Meade’s Midget Hall featured performances by General Mite, whose specialty was an impression of Tony Pastor.