Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  The Knickerbocker didn’t open until the fall of 1906, but in every way it compared favorably with Willie’s hotel two blocks to the north. The Knickerbocker’s footprint wasn’t as large as the Astor’s, but the building was taller, fifteen stories compared to ten, and its curving mansard roof presented a festive profile of projecting dormer windows and jutting finials. It had 573 rooms, a library, and a Maxfield Parrish mural of Old King Cole in the barroom. Theatrical types gathered there so often they took to calling it the “42nd Street Country Club.”

  Jack went down with the Titanic in 1912. Seven years later, Willie died in England of a heart attack. But their hotels remained, coldly regarding each other across the chasm of Broadway, looming over a landscape that had once been called Eden.

  CHAPTER 22

  TIMES SQUARE TYPES

  THE RIALTO, A “PARADE GROUND WITH ELASTIC BOUNDARIES” as the New York Sun called it, gradually stretched up Broadway from Union Square to Madison Square to Herald Square. As early as the 1880s the Casino Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the Broadway Theatre had opened even farther north, near the southern end of Long Acre Square.

  On October 21, 1882, Rudolph Aronson’s Casino Theatre, a Moorish fantasy in brick and terra-cotta, opened at the southeast corner of Broadway and 39th Street with a performance of the Johann Strauss operetta The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief. The building was far from finished: Stairways didn’t have balustrades, the boxes were missing columns, draperies dragged on the floor, and tools, lumber, and sawdust littered the auditorium. There was no heat. Just before show time the stage was cleared of debris and curtains were hastily thrown up to hide unfinished woodwork. The theater, the New York Sun reported the next day, was “in no fit state for occupancy.” It closed and reopened on December 30, and this time the building was ready.

  The Casino was extraordinary, the theater as dreamscape, with an “arabesque” auditorium with seating for 1,300, a roof supported by columns that spread at the ceiling into sheaf-like capitals that ran into Moorish arches, and a large chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling. The general color scheme was gold, with seats upholstered in dark blue.

  The following summer Aronson opened a two-tiered “summer garden” on the Casino’s roof that included a concert stage and restaurant. For the price of one 50-cent ticket, patrons could watch the main performance in the auditorium and then take elevators to the roof to “promenade, sup, sip wine, flirt, laugh or grow sentimental,” as the New York Tribune reported. The summer garden had sides that could be opened in clement weather, introducing cool evening breezes to the throngs listening to the orchestra.

  When the Casino opened, the mammoth Metropolitan Opera House was nearing completion just across the street, at the northwest corner of Broadway and 40th Street. The Metropolitan Opera Company had been founded two years earlier by a group of wealthy and powerful tycoons who hadn’t been able to lease boxes at Union Square’s staid Academy of Music. Construction of the Metropolitan led to an “operatic war” between the two houses, and the Met’s seventy-nine private boxes were quickly leased, for $1,200 per season, to a group of the city’s most prominent financiers and industrialists.

  Architect Josiah Cleaveland Cady’s Romanesque exterior, in beige brick, looked like an office building, but the interior was like no other theater in America, with a 3,700-seat auditorium, walls in gold and cream, and carpets and chairs upholstered in deep red. The New York Sun called it the “Palace on Broadway.”

  The upstart Met opened on October 22, 1883, the same night the Academy of Music opened its fall season, and newspaper reporters gleefully flocked to both venues to see which house would attract which members of Society. (“Where to go is this year quite as troublesome a question as what to wear,” the Tribune fretted.) On that first night the Brevoorts, Belmonts, Cuttings, Costers, Duers, Griswolds, and Lorillards stayed loyal to the Academy, but plenty of other old-money families, including the Rhinelanders, Ogdens, Suydams, and Remsens, fled to the Met.

  The Met’s opening-night throng included John Jacob Astor III, Cyrus W. Field, Russell Sage, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, William H. Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, William Rockefeller, and Austin Corbin. It was a Gilded Age all-star team, and the tycoons, in full dress, their opera cloaks slung over the balconies, and their wives, in low-necked white dresses, spent much of the five-hour-long opera (Charles Gounod’s Faust) visiting each other’s boxes. “Diamonds glittered in all directions like crystals upon snow,” the Tribune reported, while estimating the crowd’s aggregate wealth at $450 million. (Caroline Astor outdid them all by leasing boxes at both houses and then, still in Newport, not bothering to show at either place.)

  The opening of the Met was the death knell for the Academy, which gradually faded, doomed by its smaller size and a location that was rapidly becoming undesirable. Within three years it had changed management and stopped staging opera. (It survived as a vaudeville house and meeting hall and was finally demolished in 1926.)

  Five years after the Met opened, and nine days before the Blizzard of 1888, the Broadway Theatre, its large auditorium decorated with Persian touches, opened just across 41st Street from the Met with a performance of Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca, as the Rialto continued to stretch ever closer to Long Acre Square. But there were no theaters in Long Acre Square itself until 1895, when Oscar Hammerstein, grandfather of the great composer Oscar Hammerstein II, built the Olympia Theatre on Broadway between 44th and 45th streets.

  Hammerstein envisioned the Olympia as a one-stop amusement mecca, with three theaters and a glass-enclosed roof garden (where the first version of the Ziegfeld Follies played to overflow crowds a few years later), plus a billiard hall and bowling alley. Hammerstein went bankrupt and lost the Olympia only three years after it opened, then made a dramatic recovery, and was solvent enough by 1899 to build the Victoria Theatre at the northwest corner of Broadway and 42nd Street and the smaller Theatre Republic behind it.

  But it wasn’t until the opening of the subway in 1904 that Long Acre Square, as Times Square, became the Rialto’s epicenter. The building boom that produced the Times Building and the Knickerbocker and Astor hotels also brought theaters, so many that they no longer fit neatly on Broadway and began to colonize side streets. In 1903 alone the New Amsterdam, Lyric, Hudson, Comedy, and Lyceum theaters were built within a block or less of Times Square between 42nd and 45th streets; the next few years brought the Liberty, Lew M. Fields, Astor, Maxine Elliott, and Gaiety theaters.

  “Is New-York to become ‘the city of theatres’?” the Tribune fretted. “[The] number of theatres in Manhattan which are rising . . . is assuming truly alarming proportions.”

  But Times Square’s theaters, though often grand and sometimes unbelievably seductive, with murals and inlaid cherubs and Art Nouveau swirls, were just the backdrops for a legion of characters whose foibles largely defined Broadway in the golden era leading up to World War I. They drank together beneath the Old King Cole mural at the Knickerbocker, dined together at Rector’s, Maxim’s, and Shanley’s, joined the Friars, Players, and Lambs clubs, went to prizefights at Madison Square Garden, and sued each other often and dramatically. It was an era when eccentrics were not only tolerated but were often at the head of their class.

  There was the coldly calculating, vindictive producer Abraham Lincoln Erlanger—“Dishonest Abe” they called him—who, with Marc Klaw, led the monopolistic Theatrical Syndicate, a consortium of six managers that owned theaters in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, New Orleans, and other cities. The Syndicate formed in 1896 and by the early 1900s was so powerful that Klaw and Erlanger were able to largely dictate the schedules and terms of theater bookings across the country, at a time when the real money was in road productions of Broadway plays.

  The Syndicate’s main rivals were the brothers Lee, Sam, and Jacob Shubert, whom Erlanger called the “scum of the earth.” Klaw and Erlanger didn’t care for Oscar Hammerstein either, and 42nd Street became a k
ind of theatrical Maginot Line, with Klaw and Erlanger’s New Amsterdam and Liberty theaters lined up on the south side of the street opposite the Shuberts’ Lyric Theatre and Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre and Theatre Republic. Erlanger got so touchy about the 42nd Street divide he once chastised George M. Cohan for standing on the “wrong” side of the street.

  In 1902, Hammerstein leased the Theatre Republic to David Belasco, a producer, actor, and writer who altered the Republic’s façade and auditorium to suit his taste—he did much of the demolition work himself, at one point getting knocked unconscious by falling debris—and reopened as the Belasco Theatre. Like the Shuberts and Hammerstein, Belasco refused to buckle to what he described as the Syndicate’s extortionist practices, and he waged a long legal struggle against Klaw and Erlanger.

  Producer David Belasco in 1893.

  “[Erlanger] told me that if I refused his terms he would compel me to go into the streets and blacken my face to earn a living,” Belasco told theater critic William Winter. “I detest the man and his methods.”

  Erlanger was in the habit of suing Belasco for plagiarism. In one instance, Belasco defended himself by bringing the judge and jury to his theater and staging the play he wrote back-to-back with the play Erlanger claimed he stole. Winter watched this strange double bill and condemned Erlanger’s play as “impalliable trash.” The jury agreed.

  Belasco was born in 1853 in San Francisco, and by the time he moved to New York in 1882 had already found success as a playwright and producer on the west coast. In New York he worked as the stage manager at the Madison Square and old Lyceum theaters, and then produced a string of hit plays, including The Girl I Left Behind Me at the Empire Theatre in 1892 and Madame Butterfly at the Herald Square Theatre in 1900. Belasco became a kind of theatrical sage, instantly recognizable for his shock of unruly hair and his improbable wardrobe: Although he was Jewish, Belasco always dressed in a black suit with a clerical collar, like a Catholic priest. Inevitably, people called him the “Bishop of Broadway.”

  Belasco was interested in “actuality” in theater, and went a good bit beyond the pale in establishing a sense of theatrical naturalism. For The Governor’s Lady he built a convincing replica of a Childs restaurant on stage, with a working kitchen where his actors cooked and ate their own meals during the performance. If the script called for a character to make an entrance from an off-stage stair, Belasco built the entire staircase, even though it was out of sight of the audience. In The Girl of the Golden West, a runaway hit in 1905, Belasco simulated a sunset by slowly passing a succession of colored silks in front of a spotlight. In the play’s climactic scene, he had telltale drops of stage blood fall from a loft above the stage onto a handkerchief.

  In 1906, Belasco decided to build a new theater from scratch, according to his own exacting specifications. He found a lot on 44th Street, east of Broadway, hired architect George Keister, and broke ground that December. At the groundbreaking ceremony Belasco placed a copper box filled with souvenirs from his career (playbills, photographs) in a niche in the cornerstone. Blanche Bates, Belasco’s favorite star—she played the lead in The Girl of the Golden West, and like Belasco was from San Francisco—troweled on a layer of mortar. Masons swung a stone cap into place, Belasco’s two daughters broke bottles of champagne on it, and building commenced on one of the most remarkable theaters ever built on Broadway.

  It was called the Stuyvesant Theatre at first to avoid confusion with the Belasco Theatre, which Belasco continued to operate. (In 1910 he renamed the Stuyvesant the Belasco and switched the old theater’s name back to the Republic.) Belasco wanted his new theater to feel like a living room, and the auditorium was on the small side, with seating for 1,000. (By contrast, the New Amsterdam Theatre sat 1,750; the Broadway Theatre, 1,800; the Olympia Theatre, 2,800; the Metropolitan Opera House, 3,700.) Keister employed a California color palette of warm reds, ambers, and oranges, with softly glowing Tiffany lamps hanging from the ceiling and Everett Shinn murals on the walls and over the proscenium.

  It was a mysterious, brooding, portentous performance space. But the strangest and most wonderful thing about Belasco’s new theater wasn’t the auditorium but the private studio and apartment he built on the roof.

  Belasco wrote his plays there, conjuring characters and plots from thin air in a darkened room. Eventually he would emerge, call for a stenographer, and begin reciting dialogue, pacing back and forth. His desk was a rickety old sewing table covered in green baize, piled high with books and cluttered with pencils and figurines, surrounded by rough drafts of scripts scrawled on pieces of paper and pinned to boards. There was a small bedroom, decorated in a Japanese style, where Belasco took naps and reportedly seduced, or tried to seduce, many of his actresses.

  The studio was stuffed with Belasco’s vast collection of antiques, artifacts, mementos, and curios, a warren of seven Gothic Revival–style rooms connected by low, narrow doors (Belasco was 5 feet 3) and filled with glassware, paintings, books, suits of armor, shields, swords, cannon, lances, antlers, vases, statues, paperweights, cameos, necklaces, rosaries, reliquaries, crucifixes, urns, clocks, dueling pistols, snuff boxes, globes, candelabras, flags, tapestries, a mandolin, a bust of Shakespeare, a fireplace inlaid with tiles taken from the Alhambra, a crust of bread from the Siege of Paris, a lock of Napoleon’s hair, and a swallowtail banner from the City Horse Guard of the New York State Militia. There was even a grotto with a gurgling fountain that emptied into a pool of violets, sweet peas, and roses.

  Belasco knew precisely what was in his collection, where it came from, and where everything was, and hated it when some well-meaning person tried to clean up. When he died, in 1931, his studio was cleaned out and his collection put up for auction. The hammer fell for an entire week. Today, people swear Belasco’s ghost still haunts his theater.

  BELASCO WAS UNFORGETTABLE, but the strangest Broadway character of all might have been a self-described song-and-dance man who handed out spare change to struggling actors; dressed up in goofy costumes for charity baseball games; divorced his first wife and married one of his chorus girls; drank, heavily at times; had an explosive temper; talked out of the side of his mouth, his hat pulled low over his brow; and called everyone, even the feared Erlanger, “kid.” A few old pals from vaudeville days could get away with calling him Georgie. Everyone else called him Mr. Cohan.

  George M. Cohan combined in one performer the over-the-top patriotism of Tony Pastor, the Irish slapstick of Harrigan & Hart, the subtle, understated acting of Nat Goodwin, and the promotional genius of P. T. Barnum. He was a small whip of a man, 5 feet 6 inches tall and 135 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair that began to turn silver at an early age and a jaw that jutted defiantly forward, turning his smile into a smirk. He formed a lucrative partnership with Sam H. Harris in 1904 and together they conquered Broadway, producing eighteen musicals before splitting up in 1919.

  George M. Cohan in 1916.

  Cohan was by all accounts an astonishing dancer—the Evening World once described his legs moving in such a blur they seemed “kaleidoscopic”—and he could do more than dance: He was also a producer, director, singer, and actor, and such a prolific writer that in his spare time he dashed off sketches and songs as favors for friends. He wrote in epic, last-minute, all-night, coffee-fueled sessions, and was in such a perpetual hurry he frequently had shows in rehearsal before he had even begun considering what might happen in the second act.

  He wasn’t a groundbreaking technician like Belasco, or a theatrical revolutionary in the manner of George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Henrik Ibsen, or Clifford Odets. But the breakneck speed of Cohan’s shows was fresh and exciting and perfectly in tune with an era of blinking electric billboards, all-night dance parties, and automobiles that coughed up and down Broadway in ever increasing numbers. His actors belted their lines in rapid fire, not waiting for applause, and hurled themselves on and off the stage. “Speed! Speed!” Cohan instructed his company, “and lots of it; t
hat’s my idea of the thing. Perpetual motion.”

  Cohan’s productions usually featured dozens of bracing, emphatic, jackhammer anthems (“Over There! Over There! Send the word, send the word, over there!”) that thrilled audiences with their relentless American swagger. He insisted that his dressing room be decorated floor-to-ceiling with American flags—admirers told him he had put the red and the blue into the Great White Way.

  COHAN WAS BORN in an Irish neighborhood in Providence in 1878, the child of traveling, penniless vaudeville performers, and at age seven was already part of the family show. He became a star with Little Johnny Jones, which opened November 7, 1904, at Klaw and Erlanger’s Liberty Theatre. The show bombed, but after some fine-tuning on the road, it returned to Broadway the following spring and became a hit. Cohan wrote and directed and played the lead, a feisty character called “the Jockey” based on the real-life jockey Tod Sloan.

  The play itself has faded into obscurity, but several of the songs from Little Johnny Jones have proven to be indestructible, especially the plaintive ditty Cohan sang at the end of the second act, as the Jockey watches a steamer sail from the docks of Southhampton, bound for America.

  Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square,

  Tell all the gang at Forty-Second Street, that I will soon be there;

  Whisper of how I’m yearning to mingle with the old time throng;

  Give my regards to old Broadway and say that I’ll be there ere long.

  By 1905, “Give My Regards to Broadway” was “whistled everywhere” and its sheet music sat on virtually every piano in every parlor in America. Songs about Broadway were all the rage then (“The Indians Along Broadway,” “I’m the Only Star That Twinkles on Broadway,” “I’d Rather Be on Old Broadway with You,” “That Broadway Glide,” “It’s Getting Dark on Old Broadway,” “A Large Front Room on Broadway,” “Dear Old Broadway,” “I Wish I Was Back on Broadway,” “King of the Great White Way”), but only “Give My Regards to Broadway,” with that tenderly nostalgic phrase “yearning to mingle,” revealed Broadway for what it really was: a rootless community of strangers.