Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  THE LONG-AWAITED Interborough Rapid Transit subway system was a project so vast in scope, the Tribune marveled, it was almost impossible to comprehend. The original route, announced in 1895, was supposed to have tunneled beneath lower Broadway up to Union Square, but influential merchants and landowners, afraid that construction would injure business and compromise building foundations, sued. When the courts ruled in their favor, the Rapid Transit Commission revised the subway’s route so that trains would run from City Hall Park to 42st Street by way of Centre and Lafayette streets and Fourth Avenue, thereby avoiding lower Broadway altogether.

  But north of 42nd Street the subway ran under Broadway up the West Side all the way to 145th Street, and the decision to dig the subway there, rather than on the East Side—which was provided only with a branch line running from Broadway and 103rd Street across the northern tip of Central Park and up Lenox Avenue to 145th Street—meant that the West Side was, after all those decades of waiting, almost instantly subsumed into the growing city. “Fifteen minutes to Harlem” became the catchphrase of commuters and real-estate speculators alike, and even though the reality was closer to “forty minutes to Harlem, if some idiot doesn’t hold the doors,” the perception that the subway would change the way West Siders worked and lived was enough to create as drastic and theatrical a building boom as any the city had ever seen.

  The Subway Boom began in earnest as soon as the Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company, with the brilliant William Barclay Parsons as chief engineer and the hard-boiled John B. McDonald as contractor, began digging the line in March of 1900, the long-hoped-for development of the West Side suddenly coming all at once in a torrent of steel, brick, and limestone.

  When the subway opened for service at seven o’clock in the evening of October 27, 1904, huge crowds gathered in front of every station along the way, pressing down the stairs into the netherworld below the street or simply watching, enjoying the strange sight of crowds of people emerging from underground. Church bells rang in celebration and people rode the trains back and forth just for the thrill of it. For the most part it all seemed natural, and many riders that first day didn’t bother making the full round trip back to City Hall but instead got off at their local station and walked home, “as if they had been doing it all their lives,” the New York Times reported.

  The subway system provided the West Side with thirteen stations between 59th and 145th streets, an average of one station every six blocks. Broadway’s seventh mile quickly became an unbroken line of apartment buildings (called “French flats”) and apartment-hotels: There was the Forres, Saxony, Hotel Bretton Hall, Hotel Euclid Hall, Fife Arms, Versailles, St. James Court, Hotel Narragansett, Hotel Bonta, Tuileries, Wollaston, Wilmington, Powellton, William, Arragon, Navarre, La Riviera, Ben-Hur, Linlaugh, Darlington, Magnolia, Kent, Hotel Langham, Friesland, Ruremont, Elizabeth, Westbourne, Lancaster, Trouville, and, the supply of picturesque names apparently exhausted, simply “the Broadway.”

  The Bretton Hall, Narragansett, and Langham apartments were almost as tall as the magnificent Ansonia, then under construction at Broadway and 73rd Street, but most developers could afford to build only up to six or seven stories, and instead of height chose to put their money into lavish interiors. Apartments often came equipped with the latest technology and gadgetry: electric wiring, showers, washing machines, elevators, refrigerators, burglar and fire alarms, and telephones. Suites of six to ten rooms were common, and layouts typically included an entrance hall, parlor, dining room, library, four or five bedrooms, and a kitchen that was often as small as a closet. A tiny servant’s bedroom was typically tucked behind the kitchen and sometimes included its own bathroom, an amenity that helped create a class division within the household and, since the apartments were marketed to the upper class and those aspiring to the upper class, was always mentioned in advertisements. (All those amenities didn’t come cheap, and with the Subway Boom came soaring rents: In 1899, rents in Broadway’s new apartment houses ranged from $100 to $200 a month—$3,000 to $5,000 in today’s dollars—while ten years earlier “elegant” suites of six to ten rooms on Ninth Avenue could be had for as little as $30 to $80 a month.)

  With so many buildings going up so fast, the prolific architecture firms of Janes & Leo, Neville & Bagge, Emery Roth, and others couldn’t help repeating themselves. Real-estate agents Berry & Trenholm promoted the Magnolia as “a New Departure in Apartment Architecture,” but, really, any differences were minor when compared to the similarities of the Darlington next door, the Ben-Hur and the Linlaugh down the block, and the Kent across the street. Inside and out, the development of Broadway’s seventh mile amounted to an architectural cut-and-paste operation, which is why, since most of those Subway Boom apartments have survived, Broadway’s seventh mile seems so homogenous today.

  The Subway Boom finally convinced the Astors to play their hand, and in 1906, William (“Willie”) Waldorf Astor broke ground on the Apthorp Apartments. Its name an allusion to the vanished Apthorp estate, Willie’s development was the largest apartment house yet built in the city, a square-footage monster that sprawled across an entire block along the west side of Broadway between 78th and 79th streets. The Apthorp’s luxurious suites and duplex apartments were accessed not from the street but from a vast manicured garden in the middle of the block, a plan that was duplicated two years later in the Belnord, an even bigger building that filled a block on the east side of Broadway between 86th and 87th streets.

  New Yorkers quickly adapted to living in apartments—“magnificent human hives,” the Tribune called them—as the Subway Boom continued to resonate on the West Side long after the subway’s opening. In 1900 there were still 189 vacant lots on Broadway between 59th and 110th streets. By 1910 there were only 53, and ten years later there were none, as whatever was left of the West Side’s original terrain—the fields, outcroppings, creeks and ponds, and the Bloomingdale Road itself—disappeared beneath basements, subway tracks, and water mains.

  CHAPTER 30

  HOMETOWN

  IN 1879, EGBERT L. VIELE HAD GAZED WITH ENVY ACROSS Central Park to the East Side. The New York & Harlem Railroad running up Fourth Avenue to the village of Yorkville ensured that the East Side developed at a much faster pace than the West Side. Yorkville in particular grew rapidly outward in all directions from the railway station at 86th Street, attracting Irish, Polish, Hungarian, Greek and, especially, German immigrants with the promise of cheap housing.

  Lenox Hill, a gentle rise of ground along Fifth Avenue between, approximately, 60th and 78th streets, developed more slowly than Yorkville, but by the late 1870s was becoming a wealthy enclave that included the so-called Jewish Grand Dukes, German Jews who had immigrated to America between the 1830s and ’60s and made fortunes in banking. The Grand Dukes not only had money but also large, rapidly expanding families—the investment banking house J. & W. Seligman & Company consisted of eight brothers who produced thirty-six sons—and Viele was keen on attracting their likes to the West Side.

  Viele thought that north of Yorkville the East Side, which around 100th Street begins sloping down to the bottomlands of Harlem, was topographically flawed. Viele imagined that the Seligmans, as well as the Schiffs, Lehmans, Lewisohns, Goldmans, Sachses, Warburgs, and Strauses—“the large and opulent class of our Hebrew fellow-citizens,” as he called them—would get bottled up on Lenox Hill and forsake low-lying Harlem for what Viele described as the “great west side plateau.”

  If the Jewish Grand Dukes didn’t exactly flee the East Side en masse, a few key families did pull up stakes and head west across Central Park. In 1884, Isidor Straus, a wealthy importer of china and with his brother Nathan the eventual owner of Macy’s, moved with his wife Ida and their five children (a sixth child was born two years later) from East 55th Street to a villa on an otherwise vacant block bounded by the Boulevard, West End Avenue, and West 105th and 106th streets. (Isidor and Ida went down with the Titanic in 1912; the following year Straus Park,
the former Bloomingdale Square at the triangular junction of the Boulevard, West End Avenue, and 106th Street, was dedicated in their memory.) Various members of the Goldman and Sachs families moved into brownstones between West 70th and West 80th streets, and other wealthy Jewish families followed, so that by the 1890s Central Park West was called the “Jewish Fifth Avenue.”

  But the Grand Dukes weren’t the only Jewish residents to colonize the West Side. Between 1882 and 1906, anti-Semitic laws and pogroms forced an estimated half-million Jewish immigrants to flee Russia and Eastern Europe for New York and the teeming tenements of the Lower East Side, where some 400,000 people were packed into every square mile. Newly arrived Jewish refugees were geographically, economically, and socially disconnected from the Grand Dukes, although many of the Dukes were instrumental in their immigration and resettlement: Banker Jacob H. Schiff, treasurer of the National Hebrew Relief Fund, urged the United States to keep its doors “wide open” to the refugees. “There is room for all of them,” he declared in 1905.

  By then 750,000 residents of New York were Jewish—one-half of the total Jewish population of the United States. But even after the subway opened in 1904, few recently arrived Jewish immigrants moved to the West Side; from the Lower East Side the more typical trajectory was to gravitate uptown to Harlem, the Bronx, or the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Brownsville. It wasn’t until after World War I that the Jewish influx of the West Side began in earnest. Harlem had by then become a largely Jewish neighborhood, but after the war blacks, lured by the promise of affordable housing, moved in and Jews moved out. That the Jewish migration from Harlem to the West Side was a product of matter-of-fact racism was abundantly clear to Jewish residents like Dorothy Greenwald: “The reason the Jews ran out of Harlem was because the blacks moved in,” she remembered.

  Greenwald was born in Harlem, in 1917. Her grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, moved their large extended family to the West Side in 1922 in order to be close to the synagogue where he worked as an assistant rabbi and that had relocated from Harlem to West 93rd Street. Dorothy’s mother and uncles (her father had died when she was a toddler) ran a series of tennis courts on the West Side and did well enough to rent apartments of six rooms or more. If racism played a part in their removal from Harlem, so did the promise of the West Side’s abundant new apartment buildings and row houses. With so much housing available, the Greenwalds switched apartments often, always sticking to the West Side between 92nd and 99th streets.

  “[We] were upwardly mobile,” Dorothy remembered. “If [we] could do a little better, [we] got a bigger apartment with a bigger kitchen or something.”

  But the biggest factor in the Jewish migration to the West Side wasn’t racism or large apartments but mass transportation. In 1918 the subway was extended southward under Seventh Avenue to South Ferry, linking the West Side to the Garment District, which had enveloped Broadway between Union, Madison, and Herald squares and then spread west to Eighth Avenue and as far north as 42nd Street. The Garment District grew out of the city’s old dry goods district, and for decades had been steadily pushing north from downtown, closely following the development and expansion of Broadway’s Ladies’ Mile and Sixth Avenue’s Fashion Row. Many of the Garment District’s suppliers, wholesalers, and manufacturers of clothing, furs, hooks, stays, and “notions” (buttons, ribbon, and thread) were Jewish, and the subway made commuting from the Garment District to the West Side considerably easier than traveling from the Garment District to the East Side, Harlem, or Brooklyn. By 1930, an estimated one-third of the West Side’s population between 79th and 110th streets and from Broadway to the Hudson River was Jewish; a percentage that only increased once the Eighth Avenue line of the Independent Subway System began running in 1932.

  Broadway became the centerline of a huge Jewish community, the so-called Gilded Ghetto, that spread south toward Columbus Circle and north toward Columbia University, with its epicenter at Broadway and 86th Street. Many West Side Jewish families were, like the Greenwalds, solidly middle-class, while others struggled and barely scraped by.

  Lee Silver was born in 1921 and grew up in a tenement at 160 West 100th Street, next to his father’s grocery store, which was the “focal point” of a threadbare childhood of cold floors and not enough warm clothes. “[My father] was too lenient for a grocery store,” Silver remembered. “He was the good guy who wouldn’t press a debtor.”

  “We were always, constantly, considering survival. We were teetering on the brink of survival because we didn’t have resources. There wasn’t anybody to give you a present. There wasn’t anybody to give you a sweater. There wasn’t anything but what you saw and what you could understand from what you saw on your own block.”

  Barely thirty years after the Jewish influx had begun, the neighborhood began to change: Between 1930 and 1954 the West Side’s population increased by 160,000, but only 7,500 of those new residents were white. The West Side was nothing if not diverse—there were Jews, Irish, blacks, Greeks, Italians, and, by 1954, over 100,000 Puerto Ricans. All of those disparate ethnic groups didn’t always get along, and the West Side’s long-running turf war between white and Puerto Rican kids was immortalized in the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story.

  “To the Irish, the Italians were guineas and the Jews were kikes, and they were antagonistic and aggressive,” Silver remembered of his Depression-era childhood, “so the Italians and the Jewish kids would coalesce against the Irish when the Irish would want to come and attack or want to break up a stickball game or want to break up a ring-a-levio game.”

  And other changes were afoot: After World War II, amid the “white flight” migration to the suburbs, sections of the West Side, especially the blocks surrounding Sherman Square and neighboring Verdi Square (nicknamed “Needle Park” for its role in the drug trade), began a long descent into crime and decay. But enough remained of the West Side’s cultural fabric that residents tend to remember the 1950s as a golden era of Saturday matinees at the Beacon Theatre and afternoon games of stickball, stoopball, and ring-a-levio played on side streets while radio broadcasts of the Yankees and Giants blared from open windows. Gene Yellin recalled childhood hours whiled away at the counter of Harry Shalita’s Alamac Rexall Drugs at the southeast corner of Broadway and 71st Street, just steps away from his house, swilling egg creams and cherry-lime rickeys and studiously watching drag queens congregating outside the Sherman Square Hotel on the opposite side of the street.

  Shalita emigrated from Russia to Philadelphia in 1917 and made his way to Brooklyn, where he married Celia Levine. In 1943 he and Celia moved their growing family to 220 West 71st Street, just a few doors west of Broadway. Shalita took over the Sherman Square Pharmacy, on the ground floor of the Sherman Square Hotel at the southwest corner of Broadway and 71st Street, but within a few years bought the Alamac Rexall Drugs on the other side of the street. For several years he ran both stores, then sold the Sherman Square Pharmacy and devoted himself to the Alamac.

  The Alamac was the quintessential Broadway drugstore: It had the distinctive orange and blue Rexall sign out front and a Formica-topped soda fountain running the full length of the store. Two soda jerks worked behind the counter dishing out a continuous stream of ham-and-cheese, egg-salad, and roast-beef sandwiches, eggs, sodas, egg creams, ice cream, and tall glasses of malted milk. Prescriptions were filled in the back of the store; Shalita made his own pills the old-fashioned way, using a mortar and pestle. He opened the store every morning at seven, didn’t leave until midnight, and only stayed home on Yom Kippur.

  Broadway unfurled north of the Alamac in a seemingly never-ending line of storefronts. “Mainly the West Side then was small shops, little mom-and-pop stores,” Shalita’s daughter Barbara remembered, calling to mind one candy store on Broadway between 75th and 76th streets where ice cream was displayed in big round tubs. “They’d scoop it and put it in a container like the ones you get from Chinese restaurants now, a little paper container,”
she recalled.

  A few blocks north of Barbara’s favorite candy store was Zabar’s grocery, which Louis Zabar, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, founded in 1941. Within a few blocks on either side of Zabar’s were two other long-running West Side institutions, the C & L Restaurant, at Broadway and 75th Street, and the Tip Toe Inn, at Broadway and 86th Street. Aaron Chinitz, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, founded both restaurants in 1919. They featured almost identical menus heavy on mid-century American staples: chicken à la king and chicken-and-mushroom chow mein; crullers, turnovers, cherry cheesecake, sherbet, and blueberry pie; and Jewish fare like Nova Scotia salmon, lake sturgeon, schnitzel, and calf livers, plus a licentious-sounding sandwich called the “Tongue Temptation.” And there were bagels, of course, which were so necessary to Jewish sustenance that by the early 1950s well over a million were consumed in the city in a typical weekend and a series of bakers’ strikes and ensuing “bagel famines” were front-page news.

  Midway between the C & L and the Tip Toe Inn was Steinberg’s Dairy, a perpetually crowded lunchroom near the southeast corner of Broadway and 82nd Street, where locals stuffed themselves with chopped herring, smoked carp, cold fried flounder, baked whitefish, sandwiches piled high with cream cheese, smoked salmon, sardines, and tomatoes, blintzes, kasha varnishkes, latkes, and cold borscht soup. Steinberg’s was decidedly unpretentious, a place where Walter Matthau used to get a rise out of the waiters by ordering in French.