Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  The Craft murder was the fourth in the Tenderloin in less than two weeks, following on the heels of the killing of banker Nicholas Fish, scion of a prominent, old New York family and son of former secretary of state, United States senator, and New York governor Hamilton Fish, in a dive on 34th Street. The Craft murder caused yet another shakeup in the 19th Precinct, after it emerged that police had allowed the Empire Garden to operate with impunity, and in 1904 reformer William McAdoo was appointed police commissioner.

  For McAdoo, much of the trouble in the Tenderloin could be traced to the district’s black residents. “One of the most troublesome and dangerous characters with which the police have to deal is the Tenderloin type of negro,” he wrote in 1906. “In the male species this is the over-dressed, flashy-bejewelled loafer, gambler, and, in many instances, general criminal. These fellows are a thorough disgrace to their race and have a very bad effect on decent colored people who come here from the South and other parts of the country.” McAdoo was particularly troubled by Tenderloin barrooms and dance halls that catered to both whites and blacks. “All of these mixed-race places . . . have no redeeming quality, are breeding-places for crime, and present disgusting exhibitions of the degradation of one race and the worst vices of the other.” McAdoo believed the mixing of races “produced violent quarrels.”

  It occurred to McAdoo that electric lights might help clean up the Tenderloin. Taken for a guided tour of the area’s worst blocks, McAdoo noticed that the “vice-fostering gloom” of its side streets was “in sharp contrast to the radiance of Broadway.”

  “You can’t have too much light on crime,” he said, and ordered arc lamps placed in front of any house suspected of disorderly activities. The Evening World heralded the arrival of McAdoo’s “light cure.”

  But, illuminated or not, the Tenderloin was already undergoing a drastic transformation by then, as rents rose and commercial enterprises moved in from the south. “The Tenderloin isn’t what it used to be,” the Evening World lamented in 1903.

  “Things have changed . . . I’m going to get out. I’m done here,” muttered the thuggish Ed Corey, proprietor of the notorious Haymarket dance hall at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 30th Street.

  In 1905 the New York Times announced that the Tenderloin had virtually disappeared, its brothels, gambling hells, and barrooms “broken up and scattered,” pushed farther uptown by the migration into the area of businesses, restaurants, and barrooms frequented by wealthy, white patrons.

  “The midnight throng on Broadway is now made up of respectable and responsible men who have worked hard downtown or elsewhere during the day, and who prowl around Sleeplessland at night in search of relaxation . . . ,” the Times reported. “The modern midnight crowd consists of men with plenty of money to spend, and who are willing to spend it lavishly if they get their money’s worth.”

  It wasn’t that the city had been hit with a wave of virtue—so-called New Tenderloins took root in Hell’s Kitchen, on the West Side between 42nd and 62nd streets, and in parts of Harlem—but the original Tenderloin was rebranded as a culturally palatable, dazzlingly bright funhouse that patrons began calling the “Great White Way.”

  MILE 5

  HERALD SQUARE TO COLUMBUS CIRCLE

  CHAPTER 20

  GREAT WHITE WAY

  WHAT WAS SO GREAT ABOUT THE GREAT WHITE WAY? FOR starters, it had no precedent in America as a public place. In an era of supposed White Greatness—the Great Houdini, Great White Fleet, Great White Hope—the Great White Way was a delirious exaggeration of American culture unspooled along the thirty-six blocks of Broadway between Madison Square and Columbus Circle, a two-mile stretch that included Herald and Times squares. People began calling that part of Broadway the Great White Way around 1900, and by 1910 it seemed like the center of the world.

  The angled crossing of Broadway and Sixth Avenue produced two tiny wedges of land that in 1894 were christened Greeley and Herald squares. Greeley Square, between 32nd and 33rd streets, featured a bronze statue of New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley, slumped in a chair and looking exhausted, and was perpetually in the shadow cast by the Sixth Avenue Elevated tracks overhead and its station at 33rd Street. Herald Square, one block to the north, was flanked on the west side by the Herald Square Theatre and the era’s three great department stores, Gimbel Brothers, Saks, and Macy’s, plus, just behind Saks, the popular Childs restaurant, where coffee cost a nickel and a sandwich cost a dime.

  The centerpiece of Herald Square was the Herald Building, designed by the great architecture firm McKim, Mead & White as a squat palazzo with a whimsical cornice crowned with a bronze goddess Minerva, two muscular bell ringers, and ranks of eagles and owls. Across 36th Street from the Herald Building was the Sheridan Building, where up-and-coming song-and-dance man George M. Cohan wrote plays at a borrowed desk in the Miner Lithographing Company. The Marlborough Hotel was on the west side of Broadway across from the Sheridan Building, followed on the next block by the Hotel Normandie at the southeast corner of Broadway and 38th Street.

  Looking up Broadway from Herald Square in 1903. The Herald Building is on the right, next to the tracks of the Sixth Avenue Elevated railroad. At the far left are two of Broadway’s great department stores, Saks and Macy’s.

  Then came Times Square, where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue between 43rd and 47th streets and, at Broadway and 42nd Street, its newspaper-headquarters centerpiece, the Times Building. Clustered around Times Square were the Cadillac, Claridge, Astor, and Knickerbocker hotels, and the famous restaurants Shanley’s and the deluxe Rector’s, where lobster was prepared sixteen different ways at a dollar apiece. And holding it all together on those two miles of lights and people were the Great White Way’s necklace of theaters—the Metropolitan Opera House; the Savoy, Empire, Casino, Broadway, Herald Square, Victoria, Majestic, Belasco, New Amsterdam, Lyric, Lyceum, Winter Garden, Criterion, Gaiety, Globe, and Circle—while above the fray huge electric billboards blinked on and off with animated kittens, waterfalls, raindrops, and chariots.

  The Great White Way’s closest corollary as an urban spectacle was the Midway Plaisance, the mile-long amusement strip at the center of Chicago’s “White City,” the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Like the Great White Way, the White City’s Midway was a linear, nocturnal streetscape wired with electric lights and festooned with billboards. The Midway even strove for a taste of Tenderloin depravity—the “hootchy-kootchy” (belly dance) had its American debut there.

  While the Midway was obviously fake, designed as a temporary installation, the Great White Way was very real, permanent and indelible, and solidly anchored in New York’s past and future, a World’s Fair that never ended. The Great White Way, or the “Gay White Way,” as it was often called, grew organically, its form resulting more from the gradual but inexorable rise in the value of real estate along Broadway than from any overall, comprehensive design. Much of the Great White Way’s appeal, in fact, came from its very lack of coherence, its stores, offices, theaters, hotels, clubs, and restaurants all thrown together, come what may.

  In 1882, two years after Charles Francis Brush first brought electric streetlights to Broadway, Edison successfully wired the Financial District and began building power stations around the city. (Two years later, in a promotional tour de force, Edison mounted light bulbs on the heads of a contingent of employees and had them drag a steam engine and dynamo up Broadway during a parade for Republican presidential nominee James G. Blaine.)

  Edison employees marching up Broadway.

  Edison’s incandescent bulb emitted a softer glow and lasted longer than Brush’s glaring arc lamps, and it was Edison who built Broadway’s first electric billboard.

  Austin Corbin commissioned the sign in 1892. Corbin, listed in autobiographical directories of the day simply as “Capitalist,” was a Harvard Law School graduate, banker, railroad magnate, and owner of an Arkansas plantation where convicts and Italian immigrants worked under harsh conditions. He wa
s also the developer of Manhattan Beach, a resort on the eastern tip of Coney Island. Between 1877 and 1880, Corbin built two deluxe hotels there, the Oriental and the Manhattan Beach, and saturated newspapers with advertisements. He also owned the New York, Brooklyn, and Manhattan Beach Railroad that carried the guests back and forth from the sweltering city. (Those guests did not include Jews: Corbin, an outspoken anti-Semite, banned them from his resort.)

  As part of the Manhattan Beach advertising campaign, Corbin hired Edison to install an immense electric sign, consisting of large sheet-metal letters lined with light bulbs, on the blank north wall of the Cumberland, overlooking the busy confluence of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Corbin wanted people to read his billboard whether they wanted to or not, and it worked: The sign flashed incessantly on and off, over and over again, each line in a different color, first one line and then the next, and was impossible to ignore:

  BUY HOMES ON

  LONG ISLAND

  SWEPT BY OCEAN BREEZES

  MANHATTAN BEACH

  ORIENTAL HOTEL

  MANHATTAN HOTEL

  GILMORES BAND

  BROCKS FIREWORKS

  Passersby were mesmerized. Theodore Dreiser noticed Corbin’s sign within days of arriving in the city for the first time in 1894, and was overcome by an insatiable desire to visit Manhattan Beach. He and his brother, songwriter Paul Dresser (who had changed the spelling of his name) went that very weekend, following in the wake of an immense crowd that crossed the East River on the 34th Street ferry, boarded one of Corbin’s suffocating trains at Long Island City, and chuffed over the hills and mudflats of Brooklyn to the beach.

  Dreiser had grown up in Indiana and had never seen the ocean, let alone the festive band concerts (John Philip Sousa was holding sway that afternoon), fireworks displays, and fashionable crowds frolicking on the beach, boardwalk, and verandahs of Corbin’s hotels. He was so wonderstruck by the whole scene he had trouble eating his lunch. Clearly, Corbin was on to something.

  Corbin’s billboard lasted only four years, and after Corbin’s sudden death in 1896—he was thrown from a carriage—the Cumberland’s coveted north wall was taken over by the H. J. Heinz Company, which hired O. J. Gude to design and install an enormous electric sign that featured a giant pickle in flashing green lights.

  Gude was the first undisputed master of what people began calling “sky-signs,” “fire-signs,” or “spectaculars”: oversized, animated displays that loomed over the street and bore into the minds of pedestrians—whether they liked it or not. Gude went on to build iconic sky-signs for Maxwell House Coffee, White Rock mineral water, Heatherbloom petticoats and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. His sprawling factory took up most of a block on the west side of Broadway between 68th and 69th streets, and Gude was largely responsible for turning Broadway into a festival, “brilliantly illuminated with electric lights in all the colors of the rainbow,” as the New York Times put it.

  Not everyone appreciated the new electric landscape. Civic groups, including the Municipal Art Society, the Women’s Municipal League, and the Manhattan Central Improvement Association, banded together to try to curb sky-sign construction. “[Electric signs] have become so numerous, so big, and so blinding that people’s attention has become deadened to them by their continual assault on the optic nerves,” declared J. Horace McFarland of the American Civic Association in 1910, failing to fully appreciate that a continual assault on the optic nerves was precisely what Gude and his colleagues in the sign business had in mind.

  That same year an entrepreneur named Elwood Rice upped the ante when he built a sky-sign on the roof of the eight-story Hotel Normandie at the intersection of Broadway and 38th Street. Rice’s billboard was 72 feet high and 90 feet wide—much bigger than any sky-sign that had yet been built—and, inspired by the long-running Broadway hit Ben-Hur, featured a moving chariot race complete with galloping horses and cracking whips, animated by an ingenious sequencing of 20,000 incandescent bulbs that flashed on and off 2,500 times a minute. The names of corporate sponsors appeared in a space above the chariot race, which replayed every thirty seconds. It was so extraordinary that in the weeks after it was installed thousands of people stood gawking in the street, blocking traffic, their optic nerves delightfully assaulted.

  By then, over twenty blocks on Broadway were lined with electric sky-signs and theater marquees. Black and white photographs and movies of the era couldn’t capture the scene in all its full-color glory, but tourists who saw the Great White Way in person were stunned.

  “This is the best day, but it will be better to-morrow,” Methodist Bishop William A. Quayle, visiting from Oklahoma in 1910, declared after seeing Rice’s billboard. “I was told New York was a bad town. It looks good to me at night, with all the lights, and the chariot race on top of a house, and doesn’t it look good in the day, with its buildings climbing up into the sky!”

  The news that New York possessed a nocturnal landscape where people anxiously crowded into department stores, theaters, and restaurants attracted the notice of every merchants association, chamber of commerce, real-estate company, and newspaper in America, and by the teens every town, no matter how small, had to have its own Great White Way. Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh all built their own versions, as might be expected; but so did Pensacola, Topeka, Albuquerque, and even the tiny reservation town of Chickasha, Oklahoma.

  “[Let us] get together and have a Great White Way as soon as possible,” urged the editors of the Daily Register, a four-page newspaper in Richmond, Kentucky, population 5,000. “It is an indication of a prosperous condition, and a progressive spirit.” One real-estate company in tiny Newberry, South Carolina, promised that with “a great white way in the near future, enhanced [real-estate] values are a dead certainty.”

  When El Paso turned its Texas Street into a Great White Way in 1920, El Pasoans heralded the event as the inauguration of a new era. “At the touch of a button to-night Texas Street, from Oregon to Campbell, will be transformed, as tho by magic,” the El Paso Herald proclaimed, “into a great white-way of dazzling brilliance—the best-lit five blocks in El Paso and all Texas—and the city’s show place.”

  In Omaha, the coming of the local Great White Way was described in biblical terms. “For many years Omaha has waged a war against the powers of darkness,” the Omaha Daily Bee reported in 1911. The Omaha Electric Light & Power Company was spoken of in hushed tones; the all-powerful electric god that had turned Omaha’s night into day. The Great White Way, the Bee predicted, would turn Omaha into the “Electric City” of the West. In Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street, the leaders of fictitious Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, believed their new Great White Way would even make their little speck of a town the rival of Minneapolis–St. Paul.

  It was inevitable that such unrealistic expectations led to profound disappointment. Electric lighting could extend business hours and bring in tourists, at least while the novelty lasted, but couldn’t turn a small town into a metropolis. After a period of hoopla when the lights were first switched on, many small towns found that wiring their Main Street was one thing and paying the resulting electrical bills another.

  “Less than a year ago Columbia installed a Great White Way,” the exasperated editor of the University Missourian complained in 1913. “Yet, new as it is, the novelty has worn off and the expense is the one item of which the City Council thinks. The result is that only one of the three globes is ever lighted and the once Great White Way presents, to the stranger, a down-and-out face and to the resident a sickly, pale glance.”

  CHAPTER 21

  EDEN

  AS SMALL-TOWN AMERICANS WENT ABOUT WIRING THEIR downtowns in emulation of Broadway, the original Great White Way added more stores, hotels, and theaters, and with each passing year grew steadily northward past Herald Square. By 1900 it was approaching the awkwardly angled crossing of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. That hourglass-shaped intersection became Times Square, a place so ingrained in Americ
an culture as the epicenter of all things futuristic that it’s shocking to consider that it began as a verdant, rolling farm of some 70 acres stretching westward from Broadway to the edge of the Hudson River. And had it not been for the machinations of two feuding descendants of a German-born fur trader and the dreams of a newspaper publisher whose parents were German immigrants, Times Square as we know it would never have existed.

  The farm that would become Times Square began as a British colonial land grant in 1667. It passed through various estates over the next 130 years until, in 1798, it wound up in the hands of Medcef Eden Jr. Two years later Eden and his brother Joseph were sued for unpaid debts totaling over $53,000, and the courts issued writs of fieri facias, by which the sheriff, James Morris, was empowered to sell off the land in order to pay their creditors. Accordingly, in 1801 the Eden tract was sold to Tunis Wortman. But Wortman, too, ran into financial problems, falling behind in mortgage payments to a group of mortgage holders that included John Jacob Astor.

  Astor had arrived in New York from the village of Walldorf, Germany, in 1784 and began his career selling musical instruments imported from a brother in London. From there Astor got involved in the fur business, trading directly with Indians in the Hudson Valley and Canada. By 1800 he had moved into a mansion at 223 Broadway, opposite City Hall Park, and began financing trading voyages to China and South America. Astor’s American Fur Company set him up for life, but it was his investments in New York real estate that made him the wealthiest man in America. Astor steadily acquired lots around Greenwich Village and here and there along Broadway’s first three miles, but his first really big deal, the one that secured the fortunes of his descendants, was his finagling away of the Eden farm from Tunis Wortman.