by Fran Leadon
If southward excursions to Stewart’s were condoned, it was considered social suicide for an unfettered woman to “wander” all the way down to the financial district. Harper’s even provided a cautionary tale concerning one young woman who walked down Broadway all the way to Maiden Lane, only three blocks from the manly citadel of Wall Street. There, as fate would have it, she chanced to run into her fiancé, a territorial infraction so brazen that the embarrassed young swain turned and walked away. (The young woman, naturally offended, immediately returned his letters and a book of poems.)
The shopping district shifted gradually to the north as Broadway’s stores closed or moved, subjected to the “vicissitudes of trade, the inroads of death and other antagonizing influences,” as The Economist put it, but the mercantile world momentarily solidified enough that from the 1860s to the 1890s Broadway’s shopping district was defined as the fourteen blocks between Stewart’s “Iron Palace,” on Broadway between 9th and 10th streets, and Madison Square. They called it “Ladies’ Mile.”
New York’s greatest emporia were lined up one after another along those blocks: There was Stewart’s, of course, which remained financially robust and culturally prestigious until Stewart’s death in 1876. (After his business was slowly but surely run into the ground by a hapless executor, the Iron Palace was taken over first by E. J. Denning & Company and eventually by Wanamaker’s.) Diagonally across Broadway from Stewart’s was F. A. O. Schwarz, a festive “toy bazaar” founded by a German immigrant. Two blocks up was James McCreery & Company, a dry goods house known for the quality of its imported silks. Then came Tiffany’s, Brooks Brothers, Gorham’s (at the time the largest American manufacturer of silverware), B. L. Solomon & Sons (furniture and household goods), W. & J. Sloane (carpets and furniture), Herter Brothers (cabinetmakers and decorators of opulent Fifth Avenue mansions), and, just south of Madison Square, two world-famous department stores: Lord & Taylor and Arnold, Constable.
ARNOLD, CONSTABLE & COMPANY—“Constable’s” in the local shorthand—moved their retail branch from Canal Street to the corner of Broadway and 19th Street in the spring of 1869. New York had never seen anything like the new Constable’s: It spanned 82 feet along Broadway and 172 feet along 19th Street, and although only five stories tall, it had high ceilings and towered over its shorter neighbors. The Tribune called it “a white house in the skies.”
The architect was Griffith Thomas, who was awash in work in the 1850s and ’60s and whose many other projects included the Astor Library and the Le Boutillier Brothers store. Thomas designed the new Constable’s in the by-then-inevitable Italianate style, with a showy Broadway façade of marble and iron and a plainer 19th Street façade of brick. (Within a few years the store was extended along 19th Street to Fifth Avenue, an expansion that did much to open Fifth Avenue to trade. Two more floors and a jaunty mansard roof, edged with a frilly wrought-iron railing, were added, too.)
Customers swept into Constable’s past a cloakroom and cafeteria—employees were given free lunch every day—and up a broad oaken stair to the immense salesroom on the second floor, a vast landscape of dry goods. Counters, 1,200 feet of them, filled the room. Each was staffed with knowledgeable, deferential clerks specializing in silks, muslins, flannels, blankets, linen, merinos, poplins, cashmeres, shawls, scarves, curtains, gloves, piano and table covers, handkerchiefs, embroidered collars, hosiery, towels, and napkins. At the back, out of sight, was a dimly lit “silk room” where customers could check the effect of crepuscular light on evening gowns before they bought them. Constable’s was so vast, and so comprehensively opulent, that it practically defined the Gilded Age and may well have been the era’s epicenter.
There were men’s and boys’ departments, too, but overwhelmingly Constable’s, like the gargantuan new Lord & Taylor store that opened the following year at Broadway and 20th Street, one block to the north, was a place, a refuge even, for women. Certain men, already squeamish at the thought of women out of the house and exercising their independence on Broadway, were intimidated by the sheer size of the biggest of the Ladies’ Mile stores. Women simply disappeared into Stewart’s, McCreery’s, Lord & Taylor, and Constable’s. What exactly, many nervous men wondered, were they doing in there?
Brooklyn Eagle reporter George Ellington thought he knew, and the new Constable’s had barely opened when he published The Women of New York. Ellington took its title from Marie Louise Hankins’s Women of New York, published eight years earlier. Hankins’s book was a collection of fictitious character sketches, and while she included an unflattering portrait of a Ladies’ Mile regular trundling joylessly down Broadway by chauffeured carriage to Lord & Taylor, her other characters—widows, spiritualists, boardinghouse keepers, ballerinas, shop girls, philanthropists, and “adventuresses”—were often courageous. Hankins, writing for a young-adult audience, railed against “idleness” and urged women to learn skills and trades and join the workforce. Ellington’s book, meanwhile, was subtitled The Under-World of the Great City and was a 650-page condemnation of a majority of the city’s female population. Ellington thought women of the “faithless and sinning” variety far outnumbered those who were “true and noble” in the city, and didn’t hesitate to lump the stores of Ladies’ Mile in with gambling dens, brothels, and barrooms as the worst sort of municipal temptations.
“The commerce of the world is here embodied in its most delicate and costly forms,” Ellington wrote of Constable’s. “Here is a room where two acres of ladies are shopping; it is a vast wilderness of elaborate pillars and counters for the display of goods. At night the electricity lights up five hundred chandeliers, and the great palace is illuminated. In this building there are employed nearly a thousand clerks, who do nothing but deal out dry goods to the women. A thousand pairs of gloves will be sold in one day; over a million dollars’ worth of goods is disposed of in a week!”
Ellington attributed much of Constable’s immorality to its many smooth-talking clerks, who, if his depiction is to be believed, twirled their mustaches all day long, awaiting their next seduction. It was most often in the gaslit, shadowy silk room, Ellington alleged, where Constable’s retail Lotharios led women astray:
The clerk from behind his moustaches smilingly tells her how well she would look in that ‘moonlight-on-the-lake,’ and asks her to walk into another room, where she can see it by gaslight. This gaslight is a sort of artificial moonlight, you know, and sometimes it produces the same effects. The clerk turns it down or up to produce the different effects, and being ever on the alert, he takes advantage of the first opportunity to steal a kiss. Stolen fruit is always the sweetest. The acquaintance thus commenced ripens into a more intimate one, and at last the fortunate clerk rides out in the lady’s carriage, goes to the theatre with her, and draws all his supply of pocket-money from her well-filled purse. The husband of this susceptible creature may be in Europe, or off on an excursion to California, or yachting.
As long as there were yachting husbands to be jilted, some skittish observers thought it best for women to avoid shopping entirely, lest the devil come calling. “If you need exercise, go out and take a brisk walk around the block,” the American Phrenological Journal advised. “If a sister woman comes and invites you to go [shopping] with her answer her (only in a more courteous form of words), ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ ”
Perhaps a few women were seduced in the soft, amber light of Constable’s silk room, and no doubt many more went there with the most frivolous of intentions. And at the height of the Gilded Age, when the divide between rich and poor had widened into a chasm of unbridgeable proportions, there was something unseemly about the private carriages standing four-deep along Ladies’ Mile, each with a chauffeur waiting patiently and often an extra servant to mind the lap dog, while the destitute begged for food on the street corners. But undoubtedly most of the women who frequented Constable’s and the other stores of Ladies’ Mile went there for reasons of commerce, community, and the endless search for a pl
ace of their own.
CHAPTER 17
THE “MERRY CHAIR WAR”
CONSTABLE’S WAS SITUATED FOUR BLOCKS SOUTH OF THE crossing of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. There, on the north side of 23rd Street, lay a seven-acre park with gracious shade trees, a fountain at the center, lawns full of laughing children at play, and benches where young lovers, poor wretches, and wealthy businessmen alike sat and whiled away the hours.
Like Union Square to the south, Madison Square began as a fork in the road. It was a V-shaped junction where Manhattan’s two principal upland highways, the Bloomingdale Road and the Eastern, or Boston, Post Road, began (or ended, depending on the direction of travel). In 1794 the land was appropriated by the city for use as a potters’ field, a burial ground for the indigent and unclaimed. In 1807 a federal arsenal was added to the site and, a bit later, an orphanage called the House of Refuge. Still later it was used as the grounds for an exciting new local pastime—baseball.
The idea of turning the land into a public park dates to the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan and the “Parade” that, had it been built, would have turned all the land bounded by present-day 23rd and 34th streets, from Third to Seventh Avenue, into an open space for the marshaling of troops. Subsequent versions of the Commissioners’ Plan cut the Parade down until there were only a few acres left, and this became Madison Square.
The park appeared in its present rectangular form on city maps as early as 1837. That year a terminal for the New York & Harlem Railroad was built at the corner of Madison Avenue and 26th Street, opposite the park’s northeast corner, hastening the area’s urban development. Madison Square opened as a public park in 1847, and by the 1850s the surrounding blocks had attracted wealthy families driven out of the Union Square area by intrusions of commerce and industry. Theodore Roosevelt was born three blocks south of the park, on 20th Street, in 1858; two of his uncles lived on the same street. Roosevelt’s acquaintance Edith Wharton was born four years later on 23rd Street, just fifty yards away from the point where Broadway’s diagonal path clips off Madison Square’s southwest corner.
Madison Square soon eclipsed Union Square as the most fashionable spot in the city, a genteel oasis where birds trilled and nurses wheeled smartly dressed infants around the park’s crushed-stone paths, singing to them from sheet music bought for a penny from vendors stationed at the park’s main entrance at Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The park was surrounded by brownstone row houses in the inevitable Italianate mode, their monochromatic ranks punctuated by the soaring Gothic Revival spire of Madison Square Presbyterian Church, at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 24th Street, and the opulent Fifth Avenue Hotel opposite the park’s southwest corner.
It was all exceptionally beautiful, a bit of Bloomsbury in New York, although Wharton, whose old-money family circle included Rhinelanders, Joneses, Schermerhorns, and Gallatins, never cared much for the local architecture. She considered brownstone a thoroughly monotonous building material, a layer of “cold chocolate sauce” poured over a city “without great churches or palaces, or any visible memorials of an historic past.”
WHARTON AND ROOSEVELT were still pampered tots when hotels, offices, and stores began infiltrating their families’ quiet brownstone blocks. It was a rapid transformation: By the 1870s, Madison Square had become the north end of Union Square’s Rialto, which had stretched up Broadway like saltwater taffy. Madison Square Garden, Abbey’s Park Theatre, the Madison Square Theatre, the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the San Francisco Minstrels Hall, the Eden Musée (a wax museum), and Wallack’s Theatre all opened between 1873 and 1881 within four blocks or less of the park. The biggest draw was Madison Square Garden, built in 1879 on the site of the old New York & Harlem Railroad terminal at Madison Avenue and 26th Street.
Walking races, prizefights, fairs, bicycle races, and P. T. Barnum’s circus—the “Greatest Show on Earth”—regularly attracted raucous crowds of 10,000 or more to the Garden, turning Madison Square into a place of spectacle. Boisterous civic demonstrations, mass meetings, political rallies, and other gatherings often spilled from the park into the pell-mell intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, a wide-open triangular piazza between 23rd and 24th streets that was perpetually jammed with traffic and pedestrians. In the 1880s and ’90s that intersection became the most vibrant place in the city and, for tourists and locals alike, seemed to present the best Broadway had to offer.
“This is the most interesting spot in the city to the stranger within our gates, and it is, after all, the Broadway that we know and like the best,” Richard Harding Davis wrote in Scribner’s Magazine in 1891. “It is so cosmopolitan, so alive, and so rich in color and movement, and so generous in its array of celebrities.”
Those celebrities included prizefighters, speed walkers, and circus performers from the Garden, actors from adjacent theaters, and politicians who used the Fifth Avenue Hotel as their headquarters. A kind of Barnumesque theatricality ruled the place, and attracted all sorts of thrill-seekers, including, in the spring of 1903, one daredevil named Otto Peterson, who had just announced his intention to carry a man across Niagara Falls while hanging from a wire by his teeth. Peterson, age thirty-two, appeared one afternoon at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, chained himself to a streetcar, and pulled it a dozen feet, attracting a cheering crowd before cops arrested him for disorderly conduct and took him away.
Broadway’s fourth mile in the 1890s meant endless, streaming crowds of cigar-puffing men in derby hats and dark suits, parasol-toting women in long silk dresses and cantilevering hats, and nannies minding children dressed in sailor suits and pinafores. It was noisy: There was the constant racket of horseshoes on pavement, the resonant, rhythmic rolling of wagon wheels over brick paving blocks, and the peculiar metallic, grating whine of the submerged cables that looped continuously through a conduit just below the street and pulled the cable cars that plied Broadway “up and down, up and down, in a mystic search,” as Stephen Crane observed in 1896. (Cable cars lent a certain Harold Lloyd–like mayhem to Broadway: Conductors careered around the southwest corner of Union Square at such terrifying speeds, frequently running down pedestrians and throwing passengers onto the pavement, that the corner became known as “Dead Man’s Curve.”)
Broadway was colorful, too; a quality not captured in the black and white photographs of the era but depicted in all its brilliance in the vivid brushwork of Robert Henri, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, and other painters who set up studios in the blocks surrounding the crossing of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Broadway’s cable cars were painted bright yellow; office buildings of crimson brick and terra-cotta often had bright green roofs of verdigris copper and American flags flying from masts at the top. And everywhere were brightly painted billboards—not electric, yet—announcing the latest shows and the best deals. And in the middle of it all was the oasis of Madison Square.
It didn’t have Central Park’s endless glades and woods, but Madison Square remained, despite the constant commotion swirling around it, a prized public sanctuary, “the most charming of the smaller parks in the city,” as King’s Handbook put it in 1893. Those who weren’t well off enough to summer in Narragansett or the Adirondacks felt a special sense of pride and ownership in the park. It was, as Davis described it in Scribner’s, the “people’s roof-garden, . . . their summer watering-place, their seashore and mountains.”
But in the wake of the Panic of 1893, large numbers of unemployed men, and a few women, too, began monopolizing the park’s benches and washing in the park’s fountain, prompting complaints and angry letters to newspapers.
“[Only] on the rarest of occasions have I been able to find a bench which was not occupied by at least one dissolute loafer or extremely unkempt person of the tramp class,” one grumpy citizen wrote to the Sun. The Tribune complained that it had become impossible to relax on a park bench without a “greasy, rum soaked tramp leaning against your shoulder.”
By 1897 the city’s economy was recoverin
g, but Madison Square’s “tramps” remained, taking over benches in the morning and often staying until late at night. Theodore Dreiser called the city parks of that era “a port of missing men.”
Then, in the summer of 1901, during a horrendous heat wave that gripped much of the nation, an attempt by the city’s Parks Department to provide more seating in Madison Square turned into a referendum on who exactly owned the city’s public spaces. Were the parks for the rich or the poor? Did they belong to the city or to the people?
BROILING HEAT AND JUNGLE-LIKE humidity descended on New York during the last week of June. Sixteen people died of heat exhaustion on June 29—fifteen more the next day. Groups of boys defied the authorities and jumped into the fountain in City Hall Park for a swim. Thousands slept in the open air on the beach at Coney Island and thousands more in the city’s parks. Charlie Poole, the mild-mannered son of William Poole, the thug who had been famously murdered on Broadway in 1855, stood each day in front of the Jefferson Market Courthouse with a hose, spraying water on each horse that passed him.
On Monday, July 1, a day when temperatures hit 98 degrees and killed sixty-six people, eighteen-year-old City College student Abraham Cohen decided to take a break between classes and amble over to Madison Square. (City College was located at the time at Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street, two blocks east of the park.) When Cohen entered the park, he noticed that the Parks Department had scattered seventy-six inviting armchairs, of the sturdy wooden type usually found on the porches of resort hotels, around the park. The chairs, painted a soothing shade of dark green, had cane backs and seats and straight runners on the bottom, to keep the legs from sinking into the grass. Cohen chose a chair pleasantly situated in the shade and settled in.