Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  In 1803, Wortman lost the farm when Astor and the various other holders of his mortgages foreclosed. Seized by the courts, the farm wound up in the hands of Astor and William Cutting for the consideration of only $25,000—$14,000 less than Wortman had paid for the farm only two years earlier. Cutting quickly, and unwisely as it would turn out, sold most of his share back to Astor, relinquishing for $4,346 a substantial swath of what would become Times Square.

  The Astor real-estate empire—it was often simply called “the Estate” and everyone knew what that meant—accrued through the steady application of an almost fail-safe strategy: Astor and his son William Backhouse Astor bought up vacant lots, and entire farms when they could, and then signed tenants to leases of twenty years or more. The tenants paid all property taxes plus an annual rent, and any improvements (buildings) they added became the Astors’ property when the leases expired. The Astors themselves rarely built anything and took few risks, preferring to sit back and watch their land gradually but steadily appreciate in value.

  At the time of John Jacob Astor’s death in 1848, the Estate was worth $20 million, then reached $100 million by the time William Backhouse Astor died in 1876. At that point the Estate was divided between William’s two sons, John Jacob III and William Backhouse Jr.

  It wasn’t until that third generation that the Astors really began acting the part of the richest family in America, cavorting on yachts, going to the races, and hosting fancy-dress balls in Newport. The first John Jacob Astor had been rough around the edges—paddling canoes, sleeping on the ground, and beating, baling, and loading his own furs onto ships—and had never cared much for “Polite Society.” But his granddaughter-in-law Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, wife of William Backhouse Jr., positively lived for Society, and from the 1870s to the 1890s considered herself the “Mrs. Astor,” custodian of the fabled “Four Hundred,” the jewel-encrusted descendants of New York’s old Knickerbocker clans.

  Upon the deaths of John Jacob III, in 1890, and William Backhouse Jr., two years later, the Estate was split between John Jacob III’s son William Waldorf Astor, who inherited $150 million—almost $4 billion in today’s currency—and William Backhouse Jr.’s son John Jacob Astor IV, who had to settle for only $65 million.

  In photographs, William Waldorf, “Willie” to his friends and horses, often wore a quizzical expression, with hints of amusement around the edges, as if he were reminding himself of an off-color joke. In contrast, his younger cousin John Jacob IV, “Jack” to some and (inevitable, really) “Jack Ass” to others, appeared a bit bored in photos, drowsy, despairing even, as if submitting to the lens was an hour of yachting lost forever. Both Willie and Jack were tall and skinny, with angular scarecrow physiques.

  Cousins William Waldorf Astor (left) and John Jacob Astor IV (right).

  They were not close. One very public feud, mocked in the press but taken very seriously by the participants, erupted in 1890 and centered on the question of who, Jack’s mother Caroline or Willie’s wife Mary, should be considered the Mrs. Astor and therefore the de facto head of Society. Willie’s political career had already gone sour—he had twice lost elections for Congress—and his treatment by the press, never cordial to begin with, worsened. When newspapers began speculating on how much ransom kidnappers might get for Willie’s son Waldorf, Willie, fed up, disavowed the United States entirely and moved his family lock, stock, and barrel to England.

  Willie left the day-to-day operations of his portion of the Estate in the capable hands of a custodian, Charles A. Peabody Jr., and settled into Cliveden, a gigantic country house in Buckinghamshire. Jack remained in New York, the two branches of the family working out of a modest office with two separate entrances on 26th Street, near Broadway. Both Willie and Jack departed from the traditionally conservative Astor investment strategy, recognizing that a modern world of skyscrapers, railroads, steamships, and telephones called for a more aggressive approach to land development. After a century of their family playing it close to the chest, Willie and Jack began building with a vengeance.

  In 1893, Willie ordered his parents’ old mansion at Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street torn down and replaced with the gargantuan Waldorf Hotel, a project that greatly displeased his aunt Caroline, who lived next door at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, as the hotel cut off all her southern light and overshadowed her garden. Jack responded by moving his mother farther up Fifth Avenue, tearing down her house, and building the even bigger Astoria Hotel, which opened in 1897, next to the Waldorf. An agreement between Willie and Jack combined the two hotels into the famous Waldorf-Astoria, a palace of a hotel with 1,000 rooms, a ballroom that could seat 1,500 for dinner, and, most crucially, corridors that could, at a moment’s notice, be blocked off in the event Willie and Jack got into a spat.

  Willie’s Hotel Netherland at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, and Jack’s St. Regis Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street soon followed, and then Willie and Jack finally turned their attentions to the old Eden farm.

  The farm had remained strangely underdeveloped, etched in city lore as an allegory of the vicissitudes of fortune and family. If only your grandfather had been there in 1803, the thinking went, and if only he had bought even a few of those lots from John Jacob Astor himself, imagine how differently things would have turned out for you and your family. “You wouldn’t have to work, would you?” ran one bank’s taunting advertisement.

  As late as the 1860s much of the Eden farm was still a blank spot on city maps, terra incognita—a kind of secret garden of real estate encircled by the growing city. When the Astors did lease parcels of the Eden land, it was to unambitious builders of modest houses, churches, schools, breweries, coal yards, and so many horse-related industries—carriage factories, stables, and horse exchanges—that the blocks around Broadway and Seventh Avenue became known as Long Acre Square after London’s Long Acre, a street just to the north of Covent Garden known for its many carriage manufacturers.

  While Willie played lord-of-the-manor in England—he eventually gained a peerage and became “1st Viscount Astor”—Jack puttered at Ferncliff, the family estate in Rhinebeck, or at Beechwood, the family’s cottage in Newport. He went sailing on his immense yacht Nourmahal, which cost $20,000 a year to operate, and in his spare time invented a bicycle brake and an engine that burned peat. In 1894, Jack tried his hand at writing, producing a science-fiction novel in the Jules Verne mode. A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future follows the adventures of a group of intrepid New Yorkers involved in a utopian scheme for straightening the earth’s axis, the idea being that an orthogonal rotation would bring on eternal springtime. The story is set in the year 2000, at which point, Jack predicted, wind power, air travel, intercontinental telephone communication, and color photography will have become realities. Jack’s vision of New York in 2000 was revealing, considering that he owned so much of it: He foresaw an efficient, poverty-free, mechanized city with a park system linked by greenways, diagonal streets and public squares, and futuristic expressways where electric cars zipped along at speeds up to forty miles an hour.

  Jack may have been wide of the mark in some of his predictions—he had New York’s population as 14.5 million in 2000, about 6.5 million too many, and imagined that “twentieth-century stage-coaching” would still include plenty of horses, for “those that prefer them”—but his ideas about transportation were remarkably prescient. His expressways resembled the ones later built by Robert Moses, and Jack correctly predicted that a municipal subway system would revolutionize the city.

  The subway was still a futuristic dream when Jack wrote A Journey in Other Worlds. Twenty years had passed since Alfred Ely Beach abandoned his experimental pneumatic subway beneath lower Broadway, and there had been many proposals but no progress in the meantime. Then, in 1900, construction commenced on the Interborough Rapid Transit system.

  Construction of the IRT, coupled with the rebuilding and expansion of Grand Central Station on 42nd Street, led to a buildin
g boom in Long Acre Square that more closely resembled a frantic land rush. Overnight, real-estate prices in the vicinity of Broadway and 42nd Street rose by 30 to 35 percent, and theaters, offices, stores, restaurants, and hotels began flying up. With Broadway already dug up for subway construction, Long Acre Square became a catastrophe of open pits, debris, steam shovels, and broken water mains.

  Willie and Jack found themselves perfectly positioned to cash in, and Willie engaged the architects Clinton & Russell to design a new hotel on a parcel of the old Eden farm at Broadway and 44th Street. The Hotel Astor was intended as the latest entry in the “Broadway hotel” tradition that over the previous century had produced the Astor House, Metropolitan, St. Nicholas, Fifth Avenue, and Gilsey House hotels, swank clubhouses that catered to a clientele of young sports keen for the fast life and visiting businessmen looking for a bit of amusement on the side.

  In the summer of 1903, with Willie’s hotel well along in its construction, a wafer-thin skyscraper began rising at the south end of Long Acre Square. The Times Building’s unlikely site was the product of the crossing of Seventh Avenue with Broadway’s older meandering path, a collision that had resulted in an unpromising triangular wedge of land about the same size and shape as the Flatiron block twenty blocks to the south. The building was the pet project of newspaper publisher Adolph S. Ochs.

  He was born in 1858 in Cincinnati to German-Jewish immigrants. After the Civil War the family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where Adolph, the oldest of six children, began working at the age of eleven as an office boy for the Knoxville Chronicle. He bought his first newspaper, the Chattanooga Times, at the age of twenty, and in 1896 took over the struggling New York Times. By the time the IRT began construction, Ochs had dramatically turned around the newspaper’s fortunes—between 1896 and 1902 circulation jumped from 22,000 to 100,000—and decided to move the Times from its longtime Park Row headquarters to Long Acre Square. Ochs hired architects Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz and Andrew C. MacKenzie and asked them to duplicate the success of the Flatiron Building, which was then nearing completion.

  Eidlitz and MacKenzie came close, and for a while the press even referred to the Times Building as a second Flatiron, but they couldn’t quite achieve the vertical majesty of Daniel Burnham’s masterpiece. They borrowed the Flatiron’s materials (limestone, brick, and terra- cotta), structural system (a steel frame with extra bracing), and florid Renaissance Revival details, but tried to do too much in too little space, as architects are prone to do, and where the Flatiron’s silhouette rose gracefully from the ground, the Times Building’s seemed awkwardly stretched. Instead of extruding its triangular site to its full height, Eidlitz and MacKenzie stepped the Times Building back at the sixteenth floor, which made its top seem cramped. It was as if Giotto’s campanile in Florence had been taken apart, shipped to the middle of the Great White Way, and reassembled, but with the pieces in the wrong order.

  The Times Building, center, in 1908. Rector’s restaurant is on the left, next to the Hotel Cadillac. The large building with the illuminated mansard roof is John Jacob Astor’s Knickerbocker Hotel.

  Ochs bragged that his skyscraper was the tallest in the world. It wasn’t, although it came within 16 feet of the mighty Park Row Building. But the Times Building was the first skyscraper in Long Acre Square, and Ochs insisted on measuring its height not from the sidewalk but from the basement. And this made sense, since the really exciting thing about the Times Building wasn’t its Renaissance Revival façade that towered into the sky but what was going on under the street. Ochs was fascinated with technology—he made early use of airplanes for taking photographs and delivering newspapers and in 1908 cosponsored, with the Paris daily Le Matin, an around-the-world automobile race from New York to Paris (by way of Siberia)—and the subway was for Ochs the coming of a futuristic transportation system that would completely remake the city.

  The subway literally supported the Times Building, the two structures sharing steel columns and girders as the subway tunnel swept beneath the building from the southeast. Underground entrances led directly from the subway station to the building—a convenience later replicated with great fanfare in the Woolworth Building, Graybar Building, and, far in the future, World Trade Center—and commuters passed through a subterranean shopping arcade of barbershops, bootblack stands, florists, telegraph offices, drugstores, newsstands, haberdashers, confectioners, and soda water fountains. The station’s most arresting feature was a huge electric sign mounted on the downtown platform, 4 feet high and 12 feet long, that read, simply times. The sign was so bright it shone up through skylights placed in the Broadway sidewalk.

  The newspaper’s enormous printing presses were housed in a sub-basement beneath the station, 55 feet below street level. Ochs rented office space in his tower for up to $12,000 a year, and promised his tenants the “Highest Standard of ‘Sky-Scraping’ Architecture.” But his most audacious move was in convincing the city’s Board of Aldermen to change the name of Long Acre Square to Times Square.

  Rival newspapers, naturally, hated the idea. The Tribune needed only one emphatic word—“DON’T”—to compose a headline condemning the proposal. “Long Acre Square” was a fine name, the Tribune complained, “a good one, intrinsically,” and one “fixed in familiar usage.” Then, clutching at straws, the Tribune argued that “Times Square” was impossible to pronounce: “The new name proposed is awkward because [since] the letter ‘s’ is doubled in the middle of it, it cannot be correctly pronounced without an effort and even then it is not pleasing to the ear.”

  Albert Ulmann of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society also thought “Long Acre Square” was a “dignified, reputable, euphonious, and long established” name, and complained there had been no public debate over the change. And Ulmann worried that a worrisome precedent had been set.

  “Why should not each of our other daily papers place its name on the people’s lips through the medium of a similar change?” he protested, apparently imagining a city marred not only by Herald and Times squares but also by Tribune, American, Journal, Telegram, Post, World, Sun, and Evening Mail squares. To no avail: The resolution passed, on April 5, 1904, and Long Acre Square became Times Square. For years afterward the Tribune kept using the old name.

  WILLIE’S HOTEL ASTOR opened the following September, with Willie himself on hand for the occasion, having sailed in the steamship Majestic from England. It was his first visit to America in five years, and the press had a field day, painting him as a rich snob who had renounced his country. The Evening World ran a series of unflattering cartoons depicting him as a fussy English lord bobbing up and down on his tippy-toes and uttering banal things like “it makes one dizzy to look at some of the tall buildings.” The Washington Times suggested he wear an asbestos suit to shield him from the firestorm of criticism.

  Willie’s hotel had cost an unheard-of $9 million to build and was both enormous and opulent, a French Renaissance monolith with a façade of brick and limestone and a curved mansard roof of green slate and copper. The lobby was of cream-colored marble accented with gold leaf and decorated with panels depicting the history of New York. There were 600 rooms, a café, ballrooms, reading rooms, and lounges. Dining rooms were decorated in various themes: One was outfitted like the cabin of a yacht, with paintings on the walls meant to simulate a voyage up the Hudson River; another, the “college room,” was lined with school insignia and photographs of athletes. Instead of the usual palm court on the ground floor, there was an orangery with ceilings two stories high, while, in the basement, a grillroom was decorated with American Indian artifacts loaned from the Smithsonian. Willie poked around and, satisfied that a small portion of his money had been wisely spent, sailed for home.

  The IRT opened the following month. Excited riders kicked and shoved their way onto that first train—they haven’t stopped since—and with Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. at the controls, hurtled north from City Hall Park to Grand Central Station. From there
the train headed west under 42nd Street to Times Square and then careened into a hairpin turn beneath the Times Building, men, women, and children lurching from one side of the train to the other, and shot up Broadway all the way to 145th Street.

  With the opening of the IRT, Times Square became the new center of town, the so-called Crossroads of the World. Even the ritual ringing in of the New Year shifted from lower Broadway, where for generations New Yorkers had gathered in front of Trinity Church to wait for the chimes to peal at midnight, to Times Square. With Barnum-like promotional precision, Ochs opened the Times Building on New Year’s Eve, 1904, celebrating the countdown to 1905 with a fireworks display. (In 1907 a “time ball” that descended at midnight from a flagpole atop the tower was added to the festivities, the beginning of the “ball drop” tradition that we all know and avoid today.) Visitors flocked to Ochs’s skyscraper, riding elevators to an observation deck on the roof, where they could see in its entirety the thrilling spectacle of the Great White Way.

  “From there I could see the city as it slept,” Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg told reporters after a midnight ride to the roof, “but I discovered that New York does not sleep. I could see at that hour more lights in New York than are burning all over the world at 10 o’clock in the evening. Wonderful.” He joked around with the elevator operator and asked if they were going to the moon.

  MEANWHILE, JACK ASTOR’S Knickerbocker Hotel, diagonally across Broadway from the Times Building, wasn’t nearly finished. The project had been beset with problems from the very beginning: The architect—the great Bruce Price, whose many commissions included the American Surety Building on lower Broadway, Windsor Station in Montreal, and Osborn Hall at Yale—died of a stomach ailment in Paris in the spring of 1903, at which point the Knickerbocker was little more than a giant hole in the ground. There was a water main break in 1903, too, which flooded the site, and then labor strikes and a lengthy standoff with the hotel’s lessee, James Regan, who demanded significant last-minute changes to the plans.