Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  BY EARLY 1845, Poe was writing lead articles for the Mirror, and on January 29 published a new poem of eighteen emphatic verses. It began:

  Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

  Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

  While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

  As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

  “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this, and nothing more.”

  Just how much the Brennan farm may have influenced “The Raven” isn’t known. (Was the December Poe had just spent at the farm especially “bleak?” Did Poe consider the Brennan house a “home by horror haunted”?) He may have begun writing “The Raven” well before arriving in the city, although Margaret Brennan claimed she saw Poe working on the poem at his desk on the second floor of the Brennan house and heard him recite it to her family. Regardless, “The Raven,” reprinted in the New York Tribune on February 4, 1845, turned Poe into a celebrity.

  By then Poe had already decided to leave the Brennan farm and move back into the city, and with Virginia, Muddy, and Kate in tow, returned to Greenwich Street, taking up residence at No. 154, one block north of the boardinghouse where he and Virginia had stayed upon their arrival in the city the previous spring. Over the next year they moved to a boardinghouse on East Broadway, then to a house on Amity Street (present-day 3rd Street) in Greenwich Village.

  His hermetic, rural existence temporarily at an end, Poe found himself invited to literary parties, where he was introduced as the celebrated author of “The Raven” and, finally, admitted to the inner circle of New York’s artistic scene. He resigned from the Evening Mirror and became a partner in a new literary magazine called the Broadway Journal, published by John Bisco from offices at 153 Broadway. Poe was once more in the thick of urban life, working in a building three blocks north of Wall Street in a hectic row of bookstores, express offices, daguerreotypists’ studios, and hotels.

  The Broadway Journal was nothing if not ambitious, a literary magazine with an impressive list of contributors that included Lowell, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, and Fitz-Greene Halleck. At first things went swimmingly, and the Journal moved to new offices in Clinton Hall, 135 Nassau Street, in the heart of the publishing district. But then subscriptions lagged and the Journal moved back to Broadway, not to the commercially fashionable blocks flanking Wall Street but to 308 Broadway, just north of City Hall Park and on the “shilling side” of the street. It was in those offices that a young journalist, Walt Whitman, visited, and meeting Poe found him cordial but subdued, “perhaps a little jaded.”

  In October, Bisco resigned and Poe became the Journal’s sole owner. But Poe was drinking heavily and by January 1, 1846, had, as the Tribune put it, “disposed of his interest.” The Broadway Journal became yet another of his failed projects.

  By that summer, Poe and family had retreated to a cottage in Fordham, in the present-day Bronx. There, in January of 1847, Virginia died at the age of twenty-four. Poe, destitute and broken, slid steadily downhill. On October 3, 1849, his friend Joseph Evans Snod­grass found him in a tavern in Baltimore, insensible with drink and wearing someone else’s clothes; he died four days later.

  For the next forty years the Brennan farm remained on the Bloomingdale Road while the city grew steadily toward it from the south. In the late 1860s, construction of the Boulevard obliterated Brennan’s Pond, and then the opening of 84th Street left the house stranded on an outcropping high above the street, accessible only by a winding wooden stair. Mary Brennan was listed in city directories as living in the house as late as 1879. Photographs from the period reveal a creaky house behind two towering elms.

  By the mid-1880s the Brennan farm had been cut into building lots, and in 1888 the Brennan house was finally torn down. William Hemstreet, a retired Civil War colonel from Brooklyn, got there in time to rescue a mantelpiece upon which Poe had supposedly scratched his name. (Hemstreet took the mantel home to Brooklyn and in 1908 donated it to Columbia University, where it still resides.)

  THE BRENNAN HOUSE was just one of the many dwellings demolished in the face of the advancing city grid. The Charles Ward Apthorp mansion, called Elmwood and built in 1764 some six present-day blocks to the north of the Brennan farm, was torn down in 1892. Once it had been among Manhattan’s grandest estates, a Georgian villa on a knoll some 800 feet east of the Bloomingdale Road facing the river across sloping meadows dotted with elm, locust, buttonwood, and cherry trees.

  When Tenth Avenue was opened in the 1830s, the Apthorp mansion was cut off from the Bloomingdale Road and, stranded in the middle of a block bounded by Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and 90th and 92nd streets, it languished. In 1860 impresario George Conrad converted the house and what remained of its land into the picnic ground Elm Park. When journalist Charles Dawson Shanly visited Elm Park in 1867, he described the decrepit Apthorp mansion as “debased,” a place “where people congregate in the summer time to smoke and drink beer.”

  Nevermore: The Brennan farmhouse in 1879, with the newly opened 84th Street running past it.

  One Sunday afternoon in 1891, one year before the house was demolished, journalist John Flavel Mines, a retired Civil War colonel and ordained Episcopal minister who wrote under the pen name “Felix Oldboy,” rode the Ninth Avenue Elevated railroad up the West Side and back in time, finding himself, after a short walk, in front of the Apthorp mansion. It was a ruin, he wrote, “threatened on all sides by the bewildering touch of improvement.” He stood on the porch, looked toward the river, and imagined himself as a Continental Army soldier leaving a sweetheart at the house and racing off to join Washington’s troops as they retreated up the Bloomingdale Road just ahead of the British in the fall of 1776.

  “[The] air was thick with the shadows that trooped up from the past,” Mines wrote. “There had been nothing romantic in the ride on the elevated train; there was no sentiment in the dilapidated surroundings; and the sunshine was the deadly foe of anything like an apparition. Yet it seemed to me as I stood there as if I had lived another life, in which the old mansion, not then weather-beaten as now, but stately and untarnished, and set in a brilliant garland of shrubs and flowers, had played a prominent part. I could hear close at hand the rustle of silken dresses and the clank of swords—the merry peal of laughter and the jingle of the wine-glass.”

  The Charles Ward Apthorp mansion just prior to its demolition in 1892.

  Edgar Allan Poe had seen it coming: “In some thirty years every noble cliff will be a pier,” Poe had written in 1844, “and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brown-stone.”

  Almost fifty years later, Mines saw that Poe’s raven hadn’t been a harbinger of romantic doom but a real-estate agent knocking on the door, inquiring if the Brennans were ready to sell. “Going! Going! Gone!” Mines lamented. “This has been the croak of the raven of speculation over many an old colonial mansion that was stately even in its decay, but lives now only in memory.”

  CHAPTER 29

  BOOMTOWN

  NORTH OF 78TH STREET, BROADWAY BEGINS TO STRAIGHTEN, and at 86th Street diverges from the path of the Bloomingdale Road and continues north between Tenth and West End avenues as if it were just another strand in the city’s grid. Walking along Broadway’s seventh mile is at times a dislocating experience, since the buildings are so much alike and the scene seems to repeat itself over and over: That grey-brick apartment building with the arched limestone doorway and the dry cleaners on the ground floor—didn’t you just pass that?

  It wasn’t always like this: Through the 1890s, despite warnings from the likes of John Flavel Mines that speculators were running amok, Broadway above 79th Street was still mostly vacant lots. The subway changed everything, and most of the apartments along Broadway’s seventh mile were built in the dramatic building boom that began when the Rapid Transit Subw
ay Construction Company broke ground in 1900. Even for New York, a city defined by flux, what happened to the West Side was an astonishing act of transformation.

  It came about largely because a group of wealthy and influential landowners kept up an insistent promotional drumbeat for decades before the subway finally arrived. Egbert L. Viele, a civil engineer, West Point graduate, and retired Civil War general, was among the many speculators who had bought land on the West Side and then grew impatient waiting for a return on his investment. In 1864, Viele, a rather severe-looking man with a balding pate, brush mustache and deeply set, penetrating eyes, and a group of landowners that included William R. Martin and Samuel B. Ruggles formed the West Side Association and began lobbying the city to make the necessary improvements that would attract homebuyers to the area.

  Egbert L. Viele, tireless promoter of West Side real estate.

  Martin is credited with dreaming up the idea for Riverside Park; Viele was an expert in drainage. (In 1856, Viele had prepared the survey that Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted used in designing Central Park, and during the Civil War he drafted the extraordinary “Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York,” a map so detailed and accurate that city officials, engineers, and surveyors still use it today.) Viele, Martin, and the other members of the West Side Association pressured the city to install gas lines, water mains, sewers, and a system to carry off ground water through subterranean stone culverts. They pushed for completion of Riverside Drive (originally Riverside Avenue), started calling the West Side the more urbane-sounding “West End,” and in 1880 convinced the city to change the name of Eleventh Avenue from 72nd to 106th Street to West End Avenue. Viele built a fine house for himself at Riverside Drive and 88th Street, and in a pamphlet urging residents to move to the West Side improbably compared the district to London, Paris, Berlin, Naples, Rome, and Vienna.

  That was a stretch, a bit of speculator’s stagecraft, since Riverside Drive and West End Avenue weren’t much more than unpaved mud puddles, and the Boulevard was, as even Viele acknowledged, “in wretched condition.” The West Side then was a denuded wasteland of shantytowns, bedrock outcroppings dotted with stray goats, and vacant lots filled with stagnant water. Buildings, the New York Sun reported, were “desultory and scattered.” There was no post office on the entire West Side, and houses were so far apart the mail was still carried by a lone rider on horseback.

  The West Side’s obvious disadvantage was its lack of rapid transit, which made living there impractical to anyone working south of Union Square. What passed for public transportation on the West Side were horse-drawn streetcars moving slowly up the Boulevard and Eighth Avenue, and with no way to shuttle commuters quickly back and forth from downtown offices, the West Side was, from a real-estate standpoint, a bust.

  When rapid transit finally came to the West Side, it came not to the Boulevard but to Ninth Avenue, two blocks to the east and a world away. In 1879, the New York Elevated Railroad Company, with Cyrus W. Field installed as its industrious director, extended its tracks north along Ninth Avenue from 53rd to 145th Street, building festive stations, each one like a little Swiss chalet, at 59th, 72nd, 81st, 93rd, and 104th streets. At first, nothing changed—Viele claimed that for the first two months the “El” was in operation, he was the only commuter disembarking at 93rd Street—but in that first year the number of passengers skyrocketed from 9 million to 46 million. The following year Edward Clark and Isaac Merritt Singer, wealthy co-founders of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, broke ground on the majestic Dakota apartments on Eighth Avenue (Central Park West) and 72nd Street.

  The Dakota was completed in 1884 and for a while stood alone amid vacant fields, as if waiting for the city to catch up to it, but Clark also built rows of houses on cross streets near the 72nd Street El station, and other developers built tenements around the 93rd Street station. Slowly but surely, banks and insurance companies took notice and began investing in West Side real estate—the Mutual Life Insurance Company lent to builders at less than 4 percent interest—and by 1889, Ninth Avenue was in the midst of a full-fledged boom.

  Viele and other landowners were confident that development would soon spread west to the Boulevard, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive. “They were mistaken,” real-estate broker George S. Lespinasse commented. While Ninth Avenue and side streets between Eighth and Tenth avenues hummed with activity, blocks to the west remained empty. In 1889 a vacant lot on the Boulevard typically cost about $4,500; not much more than what they cost when the street was first laid out in the 1860s.

  Part of the problem with the Boulevard was that cautious landowners, including the conservative Astors, still owned many of the lots along the street and were wealthy enough to pay property taxes year after year, holding out until prices were more attractive. As vacant lots between Eighth and Tenth avenues and south of 110th Street doubled in value between 1884 and 1889, prices west of Tenth Avenue stagnated. The Boulevard continued to languish through the 1890s, even as Ninth Avenue became the West Side’s undisputed main street.

  In 1890, in an effort to enhance the West Side’s image, Ninth Avenue between 59th and 127th streets was renamed the more historic-sounding Columbus Avenue (and Tenth Avenue from 59th Street to Fort George Avenue was renamed Amsterdam Avenue). But Ninth, or Columbus, Avenue was already booming: By 1890 only 27 percent of the lots on Ninth Avenue between 59th and 110th streets were vacant, compared with 68 percent on the Boulevard. Above 84th Street, where 81 percent of the Boulevard’s lots were vacant, the difference was even more glaring. Between 59th and 110th streets, 34 percent of the Boulevard’s blocks didn’t include a single building.

  With so much land and so few homebuyers, architects and builders pulled out all the stops, competing with one another to see who could design the most exuberant, fanciful housing. Clarence F. True, Charles Buek, James A. Frame, and others bought up lots between the Boulevard, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive and built rows of houses with whimsical, projecting façades of red or yellow brick or limestone festooned with quoins, urns, brackets, and swags. The drawing rooms and libraries had decorative floors of inlaid oak, cherry, and yellow pine; the stairs had railings of polished ash and oak. There were built-in fireplaces, porcelain sinks and toilets, and kitchens with the latest gadgetry.

  New houses functioned as advertising billboards for architects, many of whom doubled as real-estate agents who floated low-interest loans to buyers and offered sales on installment plans. It wasn’t simply the joy of invention that made them turn each new house into a showstopper: The West Side in those years was a buyers’ market, and architects were forced to innovate in order to survive. “The demand is constantly for more elaborate buildings,” Buek explained. Architects practicing on the West Side in the 1880s and ’90s put in long hours at their drafting tables.

  IN FEBRUARY OF 1899 the city issued a corrective of sorts when it renamed the Boulevard “Broadway.” Everyone already called it by that name anyway, the editors of the New York Tribune pointed out, since it was obviously an extension of the same street that ran from Bowling Green to 59th Street. Besides, the Tribune added, “Boulevard” sounded too foreign, too French, and was an unpleasant reminder of the corrupt Boss Tweed era. The new name seemed to promise a new age of progress for “upper” Broadway: The street would finally be paved, landowners were told, and rapid transit, for so long a dream of West Side speculators, was finally coming to the street as well.

  In November of 1898 the Third Avenue Railroad Company had begun replacing Broadway’s antiquated horse-car line with electric trolleys. Since the conduits and wiring powering the trolleys were to be placed underground, the project involved ripping up all of Broadway clear up to 110th Street. “Hundreds of men, red-shirted and grimy, are digging trenches which are to form the channel for the new and mighty power by whose influence the torpor of years is to be converted into vigorous and active life,” the Tribune reported in May of 1899. “Great piles of yellow clay a
re heaped on either side and the pick and shovel make music that must be sweet to those who are [financially] interested in the Boulevard.”

  Broadway’s electric trolley under construction, 1900.

  Taking in the scene from his tenement on the west side of Broadway between 91st and 92nd Street, paperhanger Horatio Sweetser wrote to his little grandson Theodore, then five years old and in the throes of a childhood railroad obsession, and urged him to not delay a planned visit to New York from his home in Minneapolis. “They are making an underground trolley in the street in which we live,” Sweetser wrote excitedly, “and if you do not wait too long, they will not have it finished, and you can see how it is done.”

  As it turned out, there was no hurry: By the following November the trolley project wasn’t even close to completion, and newspapers leveled accusations that Broadway’s long-awaited rapid transit system was just another Tammany Hall scam. With the horse cars gone and no trolleys in sight, Broadway had no transit at all that year, and shopkeepers complained about all the business they were losing to stores on Tenth Avenue. Builders hoping that the trolley would create an upswing in the real-estate market could do nothing but wait. The resourceful Charles Buek turned the delay into a sales pitch:

  ATTENTION, BARGAIN HUNTERS.SPLENDID NEW AMERICAN BASEMENT HOUSES FROM 20 TO 30 FEET WIDE, CLOSE BY RIVERSIDE [Drive], MUST POSITIVELY BE SOLD BEFORE JANUARY 1st. PAVING OF THE STREET HAS BEEN DELAYED, TROLLEY LINE ON BROADWAY IS SLOW IN GETTING TO RUN, AND I AM TIRED OF BEING TOLD SO. THIS IS YOUR CHANCE.

  But even with the delay in completion of the trolley, Broadway’s real-estate market was steadily improving: In 1899 a small lot at the northeast corner of Broadway and 77th Street, which had sold in 1864 for $5,950, went for $37,000. Further to the north, a lot on the west side of the street between 112th and 113th streets that had sold for $45,050 in 1886 was resold at auction in 1899 for $147,600. Broadway’s trolley line certainly enhanced the value of West Side real estate, but was almost immediately superseded by a far more ambitious transit system, one that would instantly transform Broadway, the West Side, and the entire city.