Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  In February of 1903, French tourist Julius Cesio was arrested in front of the Flatiron and hauled into the Jefferson Market Courthouse before magistrate John B. Mayo. Cesio made the highly original claim that he hadn’t been watching the women at the Flatiron at all, but rather the spectacle of the men watching the women. Surprisingly, Mayo ruled in Cesio’s favor, telling him it was fine to gawk, so long as he didn’t gawk for too long.

  “Now, two minutes is a reasonable time,” Mayo admonished Cesio, “and you can use your eyes, but at the end of that time you must move on.”

  The Evening World interpreted Mayo’s decision as a groundbreaking precedent: “ ‘Rubbering’ at Flatiron Legal,” screamed their headline. “Magistrate Mayo Holds that You Can’t Prevent a Man from Using His Eyes When Wind Raises a Skirt.” The next morning, legions of leering men showed up at the Flatiron.

  Four years later they were still there: “Women’s skirts flapped over their heads and ankles were to be seen,” John Sloan wrote in his diary in April of 1907.

  As always, the city gradually adapted: Women perfected the “flatiron grip,” an improvised technique that involved pulling their skirts tightly around their legs with one hand while holding onto their hats with the other. As more tall buildings were built around the Flatiron, its wind shears were, to some extent, mitigated. It’s still noticeably windy in front of the Flatiron today, although the gusts are rarely strong enough to lift a skirt. And with everyone’s eyes glued on digital devices, no one would notice anyway.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE “LIGHT CURE”

  BROADWAY’S BRIGHT LIGHTS ARE AN ENDURING, UBIQUITOUS American image that has been disseminated in countless musicals, books, magazines, posters, postcards, movies, and songs. The street is bound irrevocably to its electricity, which has inspired in people who tread Broadway a kind of yearning, the lights hinting at something precious and ineffable, as if the key to America might lie within that electrified path.

  So how incongruous to contemplate that for most of its four-hundred-year history Broadway was a very dark place. Shadows closed in on the thoroughfare at sunset, ushering in an inky, unrelieved blackness that didn’t recede until the sun came up again the next morning. At night, Broadway was lit mainly by the stars overhead, and back when the street was still lined with houses, parents could instruct their children on the positions of constellations and planets by simply walking outside and pointing skyward.

  “About 10 o’clock are now to be seen the Pleiades nearly on the meridian, Aldebaran, Orion, and that splendid fellow which I have gazed and gazed at with enthusiastic admiration, Sirius, about 15° high in the east . . .” Michael Floy Jr., who lived on Broadway between 11th and 12th streets, wrote in his diary in December of 1836. “At 11 o’clock there is a beautiful view of Jupiter and Mars by his side.”

  Meteor showers were perfectly clear in the night sky above the city. During an especially impressive shower in August of 1855, even those who were too busy to ever consider celestial matters paused and craned their necks toward the heavens, watching the show. Children played in the streets beneath starlit skies riddled with careering bats, which they tried to catch by throwing their hats into the air while singing:

  Bat, bat! Come under my hat!

  And I’ll give you a pound of candle fat!

  Streetlights were first installed in November of 1697, when every resident was required to light their windows every night in the “Darke time of ye Moon.” The city began using oil lamps in 1762, and by 1792 spermaceti—oil harvested from sperm whales—had become the fuel of choice for New York’s streetlights. The city’s oil lamps, housed in lanterns atop poles, provided only the faintest glimmer, and they were spaced so far apart—150 feet—that they were not much of an improvement over moonlight. They were so dim, in fact, that to save oil the city’s lamplighters, who went out each evening armed with ladders, oilcans, and rags, painstakingly climbing and refilling each lamppost, didn’t bother lighting the lamps when the moon was full.

  Broadway was lighted above Canal Street for the first time in 1800, when Jacques M. J. Delacroix, proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens, placed whale-oil lamps along the street leading over the Stone Bridge and up to the old Bayard estate, where the gardens were then located, “to light up the dark road to his garden.”

  The Common Council first considered gas lighting in 1813, but the transition was a gradual one, and until the 1840s, gaslight was a novelty, used in only a few theaters and residences. As late as 1849 only 4,519 of the city’s 11,239 streetlights, and only a few sections of Broadway, were lit with gas.

  Gaslight was dim, flickered incessantly, and was responsible for several devastating theater fires, but it was one of the wonders of the age, and throughout the tenebrous gaslight era Broadway was widely considered a place of constant light, a playground of night-birds, an all-night bazaar where there was little difference between night and day.

  “When all the rest of the city is asleep, Broadway is awake,” William Henry Rideing wrote in Harper’s in 1877, describing the street as a “vista between . . . two bead-like strings of lamps” where figures appeared at ungodly hours, “plodding along on various missions of crime, industry, pleasure, or charity.”

  ELECTRICITY CAME to Broadway in 1880, when the Brush Electric Light Company opened offices at 860 Broadway, one block north of Union Square. Charles Francis Brush, thirty-one, who wore the era’s requisite handlebar mustache and an optimistic, steadfast expression, was an engineer and inventor of enormous intelligence, with a Barnum-like flare for theatrical self-promotion. Among Brush’s patents were a more efficient electrical generator and an improved electric-arc lamp.

  The “arc” in question was a current of electricity that jumped between two vertical burning pencil-shaped carbon rods, producing light that was intensely white in color. To this mechanism Brush added an ingenious device: As the lower carbon rod burned, the upper one moved slowly downward, maintaining the necessary spacing. Arc lamps flickered and were extremely hot, which limited their use in private homes. But they worked well in larger buildings and outdoors, and Brush used them successfully in theaters, stores, and factories, plus along Montreal’s waterfront and in Monument Park in his native Cleveland. In Wabash, Indiana, Brush mounted four gigantic arc lamps on the courthouse roof and lit up the entire town, “backyards and all.”

  At the same moment, Thomas Edison was busy in Menlo Park, New Jersey, testing his own system for wiring cities with incandescent lamps. The competition between Brush and Edison, and between Brush and the United States Illuminating Company, which had developed its own version of the arc lamp, was as intense as the electric light they were producing. And in the fall of 1880, it seemed that Brush had the upper hand.

  “While Edison has been busy with many funny things, the Brush Electric Light Company have [sic] been making preparations to put their lamps throughout New York,” the New York Sun reported in October of 1880. “[Edison’s] experiments at Menlo Park may soon be beaten by actual lamps in Madison square.”

  Brush built a power station at 133 West 25th Street, one and a half blocks west of Broadway and Madison Square, and installed three generators, their flywheels and drive-belts crisscrossing diagonally from floor to ceiling, that were powered by one Corliss steam engine. One week before Christmas, 1880, Brush’s engineers placed twenty-two lamps, each mounted on a 20-foot cast-iron pole, twice the height of the existing gaslight poles, on alternating sides of Broadway between 14th and 34th streets, one lamp per block. After brief, mysterious tests on Saturday and Sunday, December 18 and 19, that had pedestrians doing double takes, company officials and newspaper reporters gathered in the powerhouse on the evening of December 20 to watch Brush light up the street.

  Brush was counting on an outpouring of public support to sway members of the city’s Common Council, many of whom were at that moment traveling to Menlo Park to attend a demonstration of Edison’s incandescent lights. For maximum effect, Brush planned to test seve
nteen of the twenty-two lights situated along Broadway between Union Square and Madison Square, the street’s busiest blocks and encompassing theaters, hotels, and the emporia of Ladies’ Mile. The street was crowded with holiday shoppers going in and out of Lord & Taylor, Constable’s, Brentano’s bookstore, Delmonico’s restaurant, and Tiffany’s. By placing his lamps in the heart of the city, Brush was hoping for a repeat performance of his dramatic demonstration in Wabash, when men and women had fallen to their knees and wept when his lights were switched on. But this was no small town in the Midwest: It was Broadway, the big stage, and no one was sure how the public would react.

  AT 5:27, THREE MINUTES ahead of schedule, Brush Company treasurer and secretary A. A. Hayes Jr. gave the signal to fire up the steam engine, and current began to flow through 10,000 feet of wire to the lamps along the street. Beginning with pinpoints of light, the lamps began to glow all at once, growing in intensity until they burned with what the New York Times called a “white, steady glare.”

  Startled pedestrians turned from Broadway’s shop windows and “exclamations of admiration and approval were heard on all sides.” Crowds of shoppers and theatergoers stood transfixed, shading their eyes from the glare and taking in the strange transformation of the city around them. Everything was suddenly crisper, clearer: Horses, streetcars, building façades, and telegraph wires were picked out in finely grained detail. Signs could be read clearly from great distances.

  “The great white outlines of the marble stores, the mazes of wires overhead, the throng of moving vehicles, were all brought out with an accuracy and exactness that left little to be desired in the matter of strength,” the Times reported. Newspapers agreed that it was the color of Brush’s lights, their white intensity, that made them compelling. Next to the Brush lamps, the Sun reported, the old gaslights suddenly seemed “sickly yellow.”

  The demonstration was a clear and overwhelming success, and gratified Brush Company officials returned to their headquarters at Broadway and 18th Street for a celebration. From their office windows they looked down on Broadway, uncorked bottles of champagne, and spent the rest of the evening watching their lights blazing away. Eventually, everyone went home, and Brush’s lights burned on Broadway all night.

  MORE TESTS FOLLOWED, and the following spring the Brush Company was awarded a city contract, for an annual fee of $7,400, to install arc lamps along Broadway from 14th to 34th street and along both 14th and 34th streets between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. In Union and Madison squares, Brush mounted lights on 150-foot-tall towers, illuminating the parks with harsh light that filtered through the branches of trees, bathing everything in an unearthly green tint. Suddenly, there was nowhere to hide. An 1882 illustration in Harper’s Weekly showed a well-dressed gentleman crossing Broadway to Madison Square, his shadow crisply outlined behind him, staggering into the light like St. Paul at the moment of conversion.

  The Brush Electric Light Company’s powerful arc lamps flooded Madison Square with light.

  Reformers noticed something else: Brush’s lights illuminated every crevice of Broadway, every pickpocket and prostitute, every barroom and gambling hell. Within a month of Brush’s demonstration the Tribune happily reported that doorways on Broadway were no longer “infested by drowsy tramps,” and electric lights were seen as possible mechanisms for cleansing those marginal districts of the city that seemed beyond hope.

  Broadway’s west side had long concealed a red-light district that began with the eighteenth-century Holy Ground and over time moved north with the street as it developed, growing in size as it went. From Church Street in the 1820s to Greene and Mercer streets in the 1850s, Broadway’s illicit shadow had metastasized by the 1880s into a vast swath that overlapped Ladies’ Mile and the theater district and spanned both sides of the street. It was called the Tenderloin and was two and three-quarters of a mile long and one mile wide—more than half the size of Central Park—and encompassed everything from 14th to 42nd streets between Fourth and Seventh avenues and blurred into Hell’s Kitchen, another notoriously sketchy area just to the west.

  Most of the Tenderloin was within the boundaries of the Metropolitan Police Department’s infamous 19th Precinct, where corrupt cops, protected by the Tammany Hall machine, shook down brothels, gambling hells, and illegal barrooms. The district’s nickname came, at least according to local legend, from police officer Alexander S. Williams. A former shipbuilder who as a patrolman was nicknamed “Clubber” for his tendency to use his fists when making arrests—it was widely reported that he had once thrown two thugs through a plate-glass window—Williams was transferred to the 19th Precinct in 1876 and appointed captain. Shortly after he took over, the story goes, Williams was striding down Broadway when a friend overtook him and asked how he liked his new post.

  “Great!” Williams supposedly answered, “I’ve come from a rump precinct to the Tenderloin.”

  Williams remained at his post until 1887, and during his tenure the Tenderloin’s crime and corruption grew to epidemic proportions, with the most sordid blocks located just north of Madison Square. In 1881, property owners on 27th and 28th streets complained to the city’s three-member Police Commission that their neighborhood was “infested with thieves and vagabonds” and described a nocturnal hellhole where men and women were regularly assaulted, windows were broken, cries for help went unheeded, and patrolmen went door to door, openly tapping the tills of disreputable businesses. The Tenderloin had descended, the residents wrote, into “pandemonium,” and some people took to calling the district “Satan’s Circus.”

  And yet the Tenderloin became a tourist attraction, a place “where the gay Bohemians dwell,” as one popular song in 1897 put it. In certain dance halls and dives, whites and blacks mixed freely, while other establishments were strictly whites-only. It was illegal to deny service to blacks, but barroom owners got around the law by charging blacks as much as $1 for a single drink—about $28 in today’s currency. In 1899 two black men who defied the bartender at former prizefighter James J. Corbett’s barroom and ordered drinks anyway, saying they had plenty of money and didn’t care what they cost, were hauled out onto the corner of Broadway and 33rd Street and beaten by 50 or 60 white men while a crowd estimated at 1,000 looked on.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, such public displays of violence, out-of-towners kept venturing to the Tenderloin in search of tantalizing, voyeuristic adventures. Richard Harding Davis, describing the Tenderloin in Scribner’s Magazine in 1891, assured his readers they could visit “the forbidden ground of Broadway” without compromising their virtue.

  “There are some who will tell you that Broadway at this point should be as a howling wilderness to respectable men and women . . . [but it] is not essential that you should know that the smooth-faced, white-haired man who touched your shoulder as he brushed past keeps a gambling-house at Saratoga during the summer months, or that the woman at his side is not his wife,” Davis advised. “They do you no harm, and you are not on Broadway to enlarge your visiting list, but only to enjoy the procession.”

  Reformers tried to stamp out the Tenderloin’s depravity once and for all, but it refused to go away. In 1892 the Reverend Charles Henry Parkhurst, pastor of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, accused Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker, Mayor Hugh J. Grant, and the entire police department of widespread corruption, which, Parkhurst claimed, allowed the Tenderloin’s illegal activities to flourish in the open. Summoned to testify before a grand jury, Parkhurst was unable to substantiate his allegations and as a result was vilified in the press. In response, Parkhurst, in the company of a friend and a hired detective, went undercover and systematically visited gambling hells, brothels, and illegal barrooms in the Tenderloin and along the city’s waterfront, “traversing the avenues of our municipal hell,” as he put it, and gathering sworn affidavits that he then waved from the pulpit.

  Parkhurst’s crusade led to the formation of the Lexow Commission, which interrogated everyone from Grant to �
��Clubber” Williams and issued voluminous reports, but nothing much changed in the Tenderloin. Assaults and shakedowns continued, and in 1904 an estimated 50 percent of prisoners held in the 19th Precinct’s dingy brick jail behind its station house on 30th Street were women arrested on charges of prostitution, confined as many as a dozen at a time in tiny 8-by-4-foot cells. Tourists wandered into the Tenderloin and never came back, and one particularly gruesome murder shocked a supposedly jaded city.

  The victim was businessman James B. Craft of Glen Cove, Long Island, who spent the night of September 26, 1902, drinking heavily in dives along 29th Street. At the Bohemia and the Cairo he unwisely flashed a thick roll of bills, and by the time he reached the Empire Garden, near Broadway, it was four in the morning and he was in the company of three floozies named Grace, Stella, and Mamie—the Tenderloin’s version of the three Fates.

  Things went downhill from there, and when police alerted by the Empire’s bartender arrived, they discovered Craft’s nude, decapitated body beneath a pile of lumber in the barroom’s basement. Poking around in the furnace, they soon retrieved what was left of his charred head. A bloody cleaver and wooden chopping block lay tellingly on the floor. The police arrested one Thomas Tobin, alias “Butch” or “Sewer Rat,” whom they found hiding beneath a table in the barroom, and charged him with the crime. For the next two months newspapers recounted each new gory detail of Craft’s demise, and the murder was even turned into a one-act play, The Empire Garden Tragedy, at the Oriental Music Hall, a Yiddish theater on Grand Street. (Tobin was convicted and sent to the electric chair at Sing Sing.)