Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  If Central Park was nature as stage set, then Green’s conception of the Boulevard was that of a verdant thread tugged loose from the park and stitched onto the West Side. Green speculated that the Bloomingdale Road’s crookedness, which created oddly shaped building lots along its edges, gave it “peculiar value” in a city governed by the Commissioners’ Plan grid. He was also astute enough to see that the leftover, triangular fragments of land created by the Bloomingdale Road’s diagonal collision with the grid weren’t throwaways but opportunities for creating public places along the lines of Bowling Green, City Hall Park, and Union and Madison squares; all of which had originated not by smoothing out spatial differences but by celebrating them. Where the Bloomingdale Road crossed Ninth and Tenth avenues, Green imagined urbane squares that might afford space “for monumental ornamentation” and would “add much to the variety and magnificence of the drive.” (The two triangular fragments where Broadway crossed Ninth Avenue eventually became Lincoln Square and Dante Square; the wedges of land where Broadway crossed Tenth Avenue became Sherman Square and Verdi Square.)

  Because of its extreme width—150 feet, much wider even than the 100-foot-wide avenues of the Commissioners’ Plan—the Boulevard didn’t so much preserve as obliterate the Bloomingdale Road. Although the extra width allowed for a 30-foot-wide “mall” running up its center, complete with a footpath shaded by elms, the Boulevard was a highway built for speed, a place where fast trotting horses and buggy teams might be given free rein.

  “The law of the street is motion, not rest,” Green declared, an insight that would have seemed perfectly obvious in any place other than traffic-clogged New York.

  What Green was after were the wide boulevards that Georges-Eugène Haussmann, at the behest of Napoleon III, had begun plowing through the dense streets of Paris only a few years earlier, a vast public works project that left many New Yorkers feeling jealous.

  “The boulevards and new avenues [of Paris] altogether are unequalled in extent and magnificence by anything of the kind in the world, and are a subject of pride, not only to Parisians, but to all France,” the New York Sun raved in 1867. “Whether New York or Brooklyn will ever equal or surpass Paris in the elegance of their thoroughfares, depends entirely on the taste and enterprise of the people.”

  Green, not lacking in taste or enterprise, imagined the Boulevard running through a picturesque suburban landscape punctuated by monuments, civic institutions, and the opulent villas of wealthy merchants, bankers, and industrialists. In the 1860s the West Side was something of a blank slate, and it was still possible to project dreams onto its vacant lots, overgrown eighteenth-century country estates, and streets that had been surveyed but never opened.

  The first piece of Green’s project, a “Grand Circle” (today’s Columbus Circle) where Broadway crossed Eighth Avenue at 59th Street, opened in 1867. Construction of the Boulevard began the following year, its crews of laborers drawn heavily from the city’s burgeoning ranks of Irish immigrants. In 1870, Tammany Hall Democrats led by William M. “Boss” Tweed rewrote the city’s charter in the name of “home rule” and forced it through the state legislature. The Central Park Commission was absorbed into the city’s new Parks Department under the direction of Tweed crony Peter B. Sweeny, and Tweed became director of public works. Green, an anti-Tammany Democrat, was temporarily relegated to the sidelines.

  In July of 1871 the New York Times began printing long itemized lists of expenses that the city, under Tammany-backed mayor, A. Oakey Hall, had shelled out for various projects including, most egregiously, the new county courthouse behind City Hall, a seemingly bottomless pit of padded contracts and kickbacks. Tweed had pushed for the widening of Broadway between 34th and 59th streets, supposedly in order to pocket part of the assessments, and there were allegations that the Boulevard, too, was nothing more than a Tammany boondoggle. But work on the Boulevard did proceed under Tweed, even if progress was slow. Ironically, construction of the Boulevard led indirectly to Tweed’s downfall.

  THE CITY’S IRISH CATHOLICS were, in a general sense, supportive of Tammany Hall and tended to support Tammany Democrats in elections; Republicans and anti-Tammany Democrats, meanwhile, viewed the growing political power of Irish Catholics with alarm. In an era of widespread anti-Catholic bigotry, when Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast depicted Irish Catholics as apes, Tweed fashioned himself as a protector of the rights of Irish Catholics to live and work in peace. But Irish Catholics were taking abuse from all sides: The mainstream press didn’t like them; neither did wealthy Republicans or anti-Tammany Democrats. And the sectarian violence between Irish Catholics and Protestants had spread from Ireland to America.

  Among Irish Protestants, July 12 was a day of celebration to commemorate William of Orange’s 1690 victory over Catholic forces led by James II at the Battle of the Boyne. At the center of the annual celebration was a parade organized by the Protestant Orange Order, a fraternity established in Ireland in 1795. The Loyal Orange Institution of the United States of America was formed in 1869 and in short order there were thirteen lodges in New York City with some 1,300 members.

  On July 12, 1869, Orangemen parading up the Boulevard met a crew of Irish Catholic laborers working on the road. Insults were hurled back and forth and the two groups traded gunfire near 115th Street. No one was killed, although fifteen were badly wounded. The following year, July 12, 1870, the Orangemen marched up the Boulevard again, and as they passed a group of Irish Catholic laborers swinging pickaxes and shoveling dirt at 69th Street broke into the anti-Catholic anthem “Croppies Lie Down”:

  Water, water,

  Holy water;

  Sprinkle the Catholics, every one;

  We’ll cut them asunder,

  And make them lie under,

  The Protestant boys will carry the gun.

  Enraged, the laborers stopped working and followed the parade to Elm Park, a pleasure garden on the grounds of the old Charles Ward Apthorp estate at Tenth Avenue and 90th Street, where the Orangemen were holding a picnic. Taking up positions behind the garden’s perimeter wall, the laborers attacked the crowd of 2,000 to 3,000 picnickers with pistols and rocks. Women and children fled in panic, Orangemen returned fire, and a full-scale riot erupted. Five people were killed.

  The next year, July 12, 1871, the Orangemen, escorted by police and companies of the New York militia, marched south on Eighth Avenue through a neighborhood with a high concentration of Irish Catholics. Near 27th Street, skittish militiamen opened fire directly into the crowd standing on the sidewalks, killing at least forty-seven and injuring another fifty or so. The victims included women and children. The press, Republicans, and anti-Tammany Democrats blamed the fiasco on Catholics and praised the militia for upholding law and order.

  “[I] have heard only one sentiment expressed to day—”diarist George Templeton Strong wrote, “viz. gratification that the Irish Roughs have had a rough lesson.” Strong called the Irish “ferocious human pigs” and “gorillas.”

  The slaughter in Eighth Avenue—which didn’t even stop the Orangemen, who continued marching past the dead and dying to the parade’s planned terminus at Cooper Union—weakened Tammany Hall’s grip on city politics. A chorus of detractors and reformers led by a newly organized “Committee of Seventy” was already taking back control of the city when, ten days after the parade, the New York Times printed its long lists of dubious Tammany expenditures. As part of the reforms that followed, Green was appointed as the city’s comptroller, Tweed was convicted of embezzlement—he died in jail in 1878—and the Boulevard became, once again, Green’s project.

  But the Boulevard was a legal and topographical quagmire no matter who was in charge: There were complex assessments and awards to property owners along the route and flooding caused by complicated grading—it’s not easy to level one street without forcing water into the streets around it—and through the 1890s the Boulevard resembled nothing so much as an unpaved, linear mud puddle.

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bsp; CHAPTER 25

  “DOWN THERE”

  THE WEST SIDE SHANTYTOWNS OF THE IRISH LABORERS WHO built the Boulevard grew into Skinnersville, one of the largest Irish enclaves in the city. In 1867, Irish-American journalist Charles Dawson Shanly walked through the area and saw goats standing atop rock outcroppings and children in rags.

  Then came row houses and, in the 1880s, four- and five-story tenements. Blacks began moving into the area in the early 1890s, having been displaced from the old Tenderloin and Hell’s Kitchen to the south, and were soon joined by others migrating to the city from the American South and West Indies. White landlords did everything they could to discourage the influx, sometimes doubling the rent they would have charged to a white tenant and refusing to perform basic maintenance. But blacks kept coming, and by 1900 they outnumbered the neighborhood’s Irish ten to one. People began calling the area Nigger Hill, a nickname, Jacob Riis wrote in 1902, that indicated the neighborhood’s racial chasm “with unerring accuracy.”

  Despite its name, much of the enclave actually lay in a ravine, the remains of a creek that had once flowed west from the Bloomingdale Road to the Hudson River. Newspapers called the neighborhood the “declivity,” locals called it the “dip,” and cops referred to it simply as “down there.” That the police, many of them of Irish descent, frequently beat up black bystanders for no apparent reason was a fact of everyday life, but unlike in the Tenderloin or Hell’s Kitchen, blacks in the ravine began fighting back. It became the worst battleground in the city, and in the years following the Spanish-American War acquired yet another nickname: San Juan Hill.

  Around seven in the evening of Friday July 14, 1905, an elderly white peddler of second-hand clothing, who had been menaced by Irish youths in the neighborhood in the past, asked a black customer and acquaintance, Henry W. Williams, to escort him as he made his rounds. At the corner of Tenth Avenue and 63rd Street seventeen-year-old Edward Connelly attacked the peddler; when Williams intervened, he was set upon. A passing patrolman arrested Connelly, but Connelly’s friends pelted the cops with bricks and bottles. Black bystanders then attacked Connelly’s gang, and by the time police reserves arrived on the scene, whites and blacks, both men and women, were fighting in the streets, firing pistols at one another, and hurling projectiles from windows and rooftops.

  It became a full-scale riot that ranged from 57th to 68th streets, with the worst fighting in the ravine along 62nd and 63rd streets. Fleeing blacks tried to take refuge on Tenth Avenue streetcars, only to find the cars hemmed in and unable to move. Conductors and motormen hid under the seats as bricks shattered the car windows. Roosevelt Hospital was inundated with the wounded, most of them blacks. The police didn’t gain control of the streets until after midnight.

  In the tense days and nights that followed, hundreds of police stood guard on street corners. But just after midnight on July 18, four patrolmen were attacked by a group of blacks in front of George Foster’s dance hall, a notorious dive on the first floor of a tenement at 236 West 62nd Street. Another riot erupted, with hundreds of blacks shooting at police and showering them with bricks.

  In the aftermath it was noted that, even though both blacks and whites took part in the riots, police had arrested blacks in disproportionate numbers, just as they had during a 1900 riot in Hell’s Kitchen. Rev. George H. Sims, a community leader and pastor of the Union Baptist Church on 63rd Street, met with Police Commissioner William McAdoo and stressed that the overwhelming majority of San Juan Hill’s black population were hardworking, law-abiding, churchgoing citizens.

  “If the police will only differentiate between the good and bad negroes, and not knock on the head every colored man they see in a riot, we shall be quite satisfied,” Sims told a Tribune reporter. “As it is, there is no safety for any negro in this part of the city at any time.”

  McAdoo launched an investigation into police abuse of blacks and transferred John Cooney, captain of the 26th Precinct, the neighborhood’s police station on 68th Street, out of the district. Still, McAdoo blamed the riots on the “lawless colored element” and his patrolmen tended to agree with him.

  “They are without exception the worst lot of niggers in this town or any other . . . ,” one cop told a Sun reporter after the riots had subsided. “They ought to be sent back to Africa, or to the Philippines, or off the earth.”

  EVENTUALLY THE “Naughty Negroes of San Juan Hill,” as the New York Sun labeled them in 1905, were indeed “sent off the earth” or, at least, displaced. In 1955, San Juan Hill was designated for urban renewal under Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, which allowed private developers to buy blighted properties from the city at steep discounts, with two-thirds of the resale write-down subsidized by the federal government and one-third by the city. The project was largely the vision of Robert Moses, chairman of the mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance Plans, and John D. Rockefeller Jr.

  The Lincoln Square Urban Renewal Project demolished almost all of the neighborhood, displacing 7,000 families in the process, and replaced it with a sixteen-acre campus of housing projects, public high schools, new buildings for Fordham University, and the gleaming Modernist mecca of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, its theaters and concert halls perched above an immense subterranean parking lot.

  The last glimpse of San Juan Hill came in 1961, when its deserted tenements were used as stage sets for the film West Side Story.

  Lincoln Center didn’t just erase San Juan Hill; it reversed Broadway’s relationship to its own topography. You no longer walk down into San Juan Hill; you walk up into Lincoln Center, travertine stairs leading from Broadway to a plinth with a large fountain at the center. The chief attraction is the Metropolitan Opera House, relocated from its original site at Broadway and 40th Street, which faces Broadway from across a wide plaza. The opera house’s lobby is a multi-level, hollowed-out core behind a soaring façade of glass, and during intermissions its patrons, always dressed to the nines, lean against velvet-covered railings and stare down into the abyss.

  CHAPTER 26

  CHICKENS ON THE ROOF

  THE ANSONIA HOTEL BEGAN CONSTRUCTION IN 1899 ON THE west side of Broadway between 73rd and 74th streets and opened in 1904, the same year the subway began running beneath the street. It wasn’t the only ambitious Parisian-inspired apartment building on Broadway: The Dorilton, an exuberant confection of mansard roofs and gamboling stone cherubs, was built simultaneously at the northeast corner of Broadway and 71st Street and featured all the latest gadgets: long-distance telephones and glass-lined refrigerators in each room, three elevators, and electricity “free at all hours.”

  But from the beginning the Ansonia was a world unto itself and might just be the most wonderful building on all of Broadway, a seventeen-story architectural cliff of nooks and crannies, quoins, brackets, scrolls, consoles, and laughing stone satyrs. French architect Paul E. M. Duboy designed the Ansonia in the Belle Époque mode, with swelling mansard roofs pierced by dormer windows and two poivrières—French for pepper pots—at the corners and castle-like turrets originally mounted with tall, open copper lanterns. The creamy tone of its limestone, brick, and terra-cotta façade allows the building, like the Flatiron Building further to the south, to transform dramatically depending on the light and weather, “black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight,” as Saul Bellow described it in his 1956 novel Seize the Day.

  The Ansonia Hotel was a world unto itself.

  In its heyday the Ansonia was the most deluxe of Broadway’s “apartment hotels,” which combined the comforts of home with the amenities of a swank hotel. Residents received fresh towels and linen every day, plus light bulbs, dishes, and free stationery; could order room service meals or dine in a restaurant featuring evening concerts and a menu of littleneck clams, turtle soup, shad, lamb, duck, and calf’s head; and frolic in the building’s palm court and billiard room. There was a barbershop in the basement, along with a Turkish bath and what was touted as the world’s largest
swimming pool. It was, one postcard proclaimed, the “Most Superbly Equipped House in The World.”

  Five recessed courts, one on Broadway and two each on 73rd and 74th streets, ran in shafts up to the roof, cutting the building into six monumental chunks that emphasized its verticality. Inside, off an ornate ground-floor lobby, a vertiginous marble stair with mahogany handrails climbed straight up the building through its center, culminating in a large skylight at the top. Apartments were organized along two 10-foot-wide corridors that intersected a third corridor 12 feet wide, forming an H-pattern and running like highways through the building.

  The Ansonia was supposedly fireproof. It wasn’t—there were fires—but its walls were an astounding 3 feet thick, closer to the dimensions of a fort than an apartment building. The thick walls soundproofed the apartments, an unintentional byproduct of its fireproofing, and the Ansonia quickly filled with singers, songwriters, voice teachers, and musicians. Metropolitan Opera conductor Arturo Toscanini lived there; Enrico Caruso is supposed to have lived there but didn’t. Babe Ruth, never known for musical talent, moved in shortly after the Boston Red Sox sold him to the New York Yankees in 1919, and in 1927 made the unfortunate decision to take up the saxophone. The Ansonia’s thick walls shielded his neighbors from the racket. (Ruth was often sighted in a bathrobe descending to the basement barbershop for a morning shave.)

  The Ansonia’s one- and two-bedroom apartments rented for as little as $900 per year—about $23,000, or $1,900 a month, in today’s dollars—and so weren’t out of reach of the writers, teachers, and actors who flocked to the neighborhood. But the Ansonia wasn’t marketed as a refuge for the middle class; it was promoted as the height of opulent city living, a palace where a fully furnished, fifteen-room, four-bath apartment went for $6,000 a year in rent—about $12,500 a month in today’s dollars. (Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s palatial apartment had more than enough space for him and his wife Billie Burke, but still not enough to include his mistress Lillian Lorraine, whom Ziegfeld set up in a separate apartment in the same building.)