Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  Zabar’s not only survived but expanded, in the 1970s, and now it stretches along two-thirds of the block on the west side of Broadway between 80th and 81st streets. But the C & L, the Tip Toe Inn, and Steinberg’s are all long gone. Today Broadway on the West Side means glittering new stores and shiny condominiums that would have seemed, in the 1950s, like space ships from a distant planet. But occasionally, in that long line of storefronts, there’s a holdout, like Murray’s Sturgeon at Broadway and 89th Street, which recalls the Gilded Ghetto’s heyday. And much of Broadway’s past remains out of view, just below the surface: Near the southeast corner of Broadway and 82nd Street there is a brightly colored new sign for a lingerie store. Hidden beneath the new sign is an old sign that spells out in ten rusty vertical Art-Deco metal letters, like ancient hieroglyphics, STEINBERG’S.

  MILE 8

  106TH STREET TO 122ND STREET

  CHAPTER 31

  ASYLUM

  NORTH OF 86TH STREET, THE HISTORY OF BROADWAY SPLITS into two strands, its story following both the nineteenth-century Boulevard, which grew more indelible with each passing year, and the eighteenth-century Bloomingdale Road, which, superseded, slowly faded away. The 1865 legislation that created the Boulevard required Andrew Haswell Green and the other commissioners of Central Park to follow the Bloomingdale Road only up to 86th Street. North of that line they could open the new avenue anywhere they pleased, and so they decided to plow straight north and abandon the Bloomingdale Road, which gradually fell into disuse.

  But well-traveled highways like the Bloomingdale Road are remarkably difficult to erase, since they tend to double as boundaries for property lines, and the Bloomingdale Road, though officially banished from city maps, didn’t disappear all at once. For decades after the Boulevard opened, the two streets existed simultaneously, not side-by-side but entangled, the meandering Bloomingdale Road crossing and recrossing the Boulevard like a drunk staggering home, veering first to the east and then to the west, coinciding with the Boulevard between 104th and 107th streets and then, as the Boulevard took over the roadbed of Eleventh (West End) Avenue, again crossing over the Boulevard until it came within a stone’s throw of the Hudson River. Then, as if remembering itself, it jogged back inland, crossed the Boulevard at 126th Street, and continued north.

  Today only a few barely discernible fragments of the Bloomingdale Road remain, in the form of short, orphaned streets, alleys, and oddly angled property lines that, when seen from above, form a ghostly image of the old road. By connecting those streets, alleys, and property lines, it is still possible to trace the path of the Bloomingdale Road through what is today Broadway’s eighth mile, and imagine what it must have felt like to follow the road through the district of Bloomingdale and up a plateau of Manhattan schist between present-day 110th and 122nd streets that in the late eighteenth century was variously called Harlem Heights or Vandewater Heights, after a family that owned land there. (It was still called Harlem Heights into the late nineteenth century.) Until 1795, when it was extended to present-day 147th Street to form a V-shaped junction with the Kingsbridge Road (the main road connecting the village of Harlem to upper Manhattan), the Bloomingdale Road came to a dead end in front of Nicholas de Peyster’s barn near present-day 115th Street.

  At that time the Harlem Heights plateau consisted only of woods and fields and a few farmhouses, and in the Revolutionary War was the site of the Battle of Harlem Heights, where Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton and an outnumbered company of Connecticut Rangers valiantly repelled a contingent of redcoats in a buckwheat field near where the Bloomingdale Road ended.

  Harlem Heights offered panoramic views of the Hudson River to the west, New York City to the south, the Harlem Plains and Long Island to the east, and Westchester (the present-day Bronx) to the north. It was an idyllic spot, perfect for taking the country air and recuperating from the stress and turmoil of the city.

  In 1806, New York Hospital established a psychiatric wing at its downtown campus on Broadway between Anthony (present-day Worth) and Duane streets. In 1815 a letter from humanitarian Thomas Eddy inspired the hospital’s board of governors to adopt a course of “moral treatment” for its patients based on the work of William Tuke, a Quaker and founder of the Retreat, a groundbreaking mental hospital in York, England, that had done away with beatings and restraints in favor of a benevolent program of exercise, prayer, and work. Eddy recommended that New York Hospital build a new Retreat-like ward for its mentally ill patients in the countryside north of town, and in 1818 construction of the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane began on 77 acres along the east side of the Bloomingdale Road at the summit of Harlem Heights.

  The asylum’s centerpiece was a three-story, 200-foot-long stone building completed in 1821 on the line of present-day 117th Street. Other structures, including a chapel, a superintendent’s house, and wings for violent patients, were added over the years until the asylum, surrounded by landscaped grounds of ornamental trees and shrubs thoughtfully placed to “relieve the melancholy mind from its sad musings,” as one guidebook put it in 1846, became the most prominent landmark on the West Side. Any concern that the streets of the Commissioners’ Plan grid might interfere with the asylum’s solitude was alleviated in 1838, when the state legislature passed an act prohibiting 115th through 120th streets from crossing through the grounds.

  Situated 150 feet above the Hudson River, the asylum followed the Retreat model: Men worked the asylum’s farm, women took in needlework, and all patients were allowed to make short trips in a carriage provided for their use and encouraged to play games and read books and newspapers. The asylum was considered a notable medical achievement in a city ravaged by annual epidemics and shockingly high rates of infant mortality. Many city officials had active roles in the institution’s work—ex-mayor Philip Hone was an asylum trustee for twenty-one years and dutifully inspected the asylum’s grounds and wards once a week—and tabulations of patient statistics were printed annually in local newspapers. (Of the 4,182 patients admitted between May of 1821 and January of 1856, 1,911 were considered “cured” and 851 “improved” after their stay, although 471, or 11 percent, died.) The asylum became something of a tourist attraction and a must-see destination for social reformers.

  The bucolic Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane was a model institution.

  “At Bloomingdale,” Margaret Fuller wrote after a visit in 1845, “the shades of character and feeling were nicely kept up, decorum of manners preserved, and the insane showed in every way that they felt no violent separation betwixt them and the rest of the world, and might easily return to it. The eye, though bewildered, seemed lively, and the tongue prompt.”

  The asylum remained a point of pride as long as it was separated from the city by miles of open land. But by the 1870s the Boulevard had been opened through the asylum’s grounds, severing the asylum from the Bloomingdale Road, which ran to the west, and it seemed that in short order the encroaching city would envelop the Harlem Heights plateau. In 1873 construction began on Morningside Park, designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted and situated along the craggy eastern cliff of the plateau between 110th and 123rd streets. Real-estate developers assumed Morningside Park would enhance land values, but even as the park took shape, vacant lots in the vicinity still weren’t selling.

  Lots on the plateau didn’t appreciate because they weren’t accessible by rapid transit: The Ninth Avenue Elevated station at 116th Street was at the bottom of Morningside Park, forcing commuters to walk up a steep flight of stairs to reach the top of the plateau, and the only other station in the area was at 104th Street, too far to the south. But it was far easier to blame the Bloomingdale Asylum than to build a subway, and led by lawyer Dwight H. Olmstead, one-time president of the West Side Association and president of the newly formed Morningside Park Association, a group of Harlem Heights landowners began a relentless campaign to force the asylum to move to a 300-acre farm in White Plains its board of governors had acquired in t
he 1860s. As soon as the asylum was gone, Olmstead predicted, land values in the area would skyrocket.

  In 1879, Olmstead suggested that the Harlem Heights plateau, once cleared of the asylum, would make an ideal site for the upcoming 1883 United States International Exhibition. When nothing came of that idea—the Exhibition was never held—Olmstead argued that since the asylum charged some of its wealthier patients room and board, it no longer qualified as a public charity and therefore should be required to pay property taxes. When the city ruled in the asylum’s favor, Olmstead took his complaints to the state legislature.

  In February of 1888, Olmstead and lawyer Francis M. Bixby, a former state senator and owner of building lots on 119th and 120th streets, filed a grievance on behalf of the Morningside Park Association with the state Senate’s five-member Committee on Taxation. Olmstead and Bixby demanded that the committee revoke the asylum’s tax-exempt status, open 115th through 120th streets through the asylum’s grounds, and force the removal of the asylum to White Plains within two years. In March the committee began weekly hearings, refusing to pause even for the Great Blizzard of 1888, which incapacitated the city that month.

  On March 24, Olmstead and Bixby brought to the stand a string of witnesses to condemn the asylum. “The Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum has damned the whole west side,” Kiliaen van Rensselaer proclaimed. “People regard it with a perfect horror.” John Brewer, who owned lots at Broadway and 108th Street, told the committee that the asylum was depressing property values all the way down to 59th Street, and predicted that its removal would double the value of lots.

  “People won’t live in the neighborhood of a madhouse,” Frederick A. Conkling, brother of former United States senator Roscoe Conkling, declared. “The women and children are afraid.”

  A week later Charles Nichols, the asylum’s superintendent, assured the committee that he would never refuse treatment to an indigent patient, and witnesses, including a surprising number of real-estate agents, lined up to speak on the asylum’s behalf. Agent William Cruikshank testified that the asylum made Harlem Heights more, not less, desirable—“I have a sentimental love for the poor maniacs,” he said—while Peter Meyers, another real-estate agent, testified that the asylum wasn’t in any way preventing development, although, he admitted, he hadn’t spent much time on the Harlem Heights plateau.

  “Do you ever go up there?” Bixby asked him.

  “No,” Meyers replied. “Anyone who would climb up there must be insane.”

  On May 3 the senate committee, voting along party lines—three Republicans in favor, two Democrats against—ruled in the asylum’s favor, rejecting Olmstead’s claim that the asylum wasn’t a charity. The committee found that the asylum wasn’t operated for profit, that in the previous year 80 percent of the asylum’s patients hadn’t been charged a nickel, and further upheld the 1838 legislation prohibiting the opening of streets through the asylum’s grounds.

  But there was apparently a backroom deal in the works: Only two weeks after the ruling, the asylum’s board of governors voted to move to White Plains after all, an about-face that the New York Times alleged was the result of a mysterious “tacit agreement” between the asylum and the legislature. Officially, the asylum had bowed to “public sentiment” but, as the Times reported, the prospect of auctioning off, at market value, the asylum’s 558 lots along the Boulevard was too good to pass up. Once again, the allure of the real-estate market had triumphed over the desire to preserve open land.

  As the asylum prepared to move, the Sun published a belated defense of an institution that had once been the pride of the city: “The lunatics in the asylum . . . are not of the howling, raving kind, but of the quiet, inoffensive variety. Were it not for the innate prejudice that people always have against living near an asylum, the place would be a grand one as it is.”

  With the asylum out of the way, Olmstead predicted, wealthy landowners would build huge mansions on its former grounds, and Harlem Heights would soon develop into a luxurious suburb of detached villas, just as Andrew Haswell Green had envisioned in the 1860s. But it didn’t quite work out that way: Instead, something far more ambitious replaced the asylum at the top of the plateau.

  CHAPTER 32

  ACROPOLIS

  KING’S COLLEGE WAS CHARTERED IN 1754 AND HELD ITS first classes that summer in the vestry room of Trinity Church’s schoolhouse. Two years later the cornerstone of the college’s first building was laid on Church Street, between Barclay and Murray streets and one block west of Broadway, a festive occasion that involved much drinking but, the New-York Gazette assured its readers, was conducted “with the utmost Decency and Propriety.”

  For the next ninety-five years the college remained at the Church Street campus, its male student body translating Ovid, Cicero, and Virgil and studying writing, arithmetic, philosophy, surveying, navigation, geology, botany, and “Husbandry, Commerce, and Government.” The college was officially connected not only to Trinity but also to the Church of England, and students were required to attend morning and evening services. (It would appear that many of the students were extremely active after services, too, as evidenced by Section IV of the college’s “Laws and Orders,” adopted in 1755, which included detailed prohibitions against drunkenness, fornication, frequenting “houses of ill Fame,” vandalism, playing cards, throwing dice, and cockfighting; all occupational hazards of attending college next to the brothels and gambling dens of the adjacent Holy Ground red-light district.)

  The college was nearly destroyed in the Great Fire of 1776 and was closed for the duration of the Revolutionary War, when the British occupied the city and used the college as a military hospital. After the war “King’s College” didn’t sound right to patriotic ears, and in 1784 it was renamed Columbia College.

  In 1857, Columbia moved uptown into the former Deaf and Dumb Asylum at Madison Avenue and 49th Street. At first, Columbia’s new campus was still several miles removed from the hustle and bustle of the city, but in 1871, Grand Central Depot opened only six blocks to the south, and by the 1880s the neighborhood surrounding Columbia was untenably noisy and crowded. In 1889, Seth Low became Columbia’s new president and began laying the groundwork for the college’s move to Harlem Heights.

  Low, a confident, rather fleshy man with heavy dark eyebrows, large inquisitive eyes, and a thick mustache, had grown up in a brownstone mansion on Pierrepont Place in Brooklyn Heights. His father, Abiel Abbot Low, was a wealthy merchant who had made a fortune in shipping and foreign trade. Seth graduated from Columbia in 1870 and, forsaking the family business for a career in politics, was elected, at the age of thirty, mayor of Brooklyn.

  Low transformed Columbia into a modern university, doing away with compulsory chapel service and fluency in Greek as a requirement for admission, while expanding course offerings and graduate programs. But his most daring maneuver came in 1892, when he engineered Columbia’s purchase, for $2 million—about $52 million in today’s dollars—of the main portion of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum’s grounds, 19 acres bounded by Broadway, Amsterdam (Tenth) Avenue, and 116th and 120th streets. The asylum’s main building was demolished—some of the asylum’s secondary buildings were later pressed into service as classrooms—and Low hired Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White to design the new campus.

  McKim, the cerebral child of well-known abolitionists—McKim’s parents had helped carry John Brown’s body home for burial in 1859—had trained at Harvard and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. McKim’s bon vivant partner Stanford White, a notorious rake who ended up shot to death, in 1906, by Harry Thaw, the husband of White’s one-time mistress Evelyn Nesbit, tended to make the gossip sheets. But McKim was arguably the firm’s real talent, an expressive designer of houses, libraries, office buildings, schools, and railroad stations whom a former employee remembered as drawing equally well with either hand. (William Rutherford Mead was the firm’s nuts-and-bolts partner, the one who made sure McKim and White’s buildings had things li
ke elevators, stairs, closets, and steam plants.)

  Charles Follen McKim.

  The Columbia commission came at a transitional moment for the firm. Since the firm’s founding in 1872, McKim, Mead & White had practically cornered the market for Gilded Age casinos, clubhouses, and mansions. But in the 1880s, with the commissions for the Villard Houses in New York and the Boston Public Library, McKim, Mead & White had begun to gradually turn away from the prevailing, picturesque “Shingle style” that had made the firm’s reputation toward an imposing, Neoclassical aesthetic drawn in equal parts from the monuments of the Renaissance and from ancient Greece and Rome. McKim’s plan for Columbia, and White’s simultaneous plan for New York University’s new Bronx campus, ushered in the firm’s golden era, which culminated, just before McKim’s death in 1909, in the magnificent Penn Station on 33rd Street.

  McKim’s contribution to the firm was an uncompromising sense of permanence. His buildings were fortresses of stone, brick, and steel that possessed what critic Royal Cortissoz called “Roman weight”—they were built to last. So it’s ironic that McKim’s plan for Columbia was based in large part on a temporary structure that stood for less than a year before it was torn down.

  In 1891, Daniel H. Burnham had invited McKim to join an all-star cast of architects in the design of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the so-called White City. Burnham, with substantial input from Frederick Law Olmsted, had planned the White City around two intersecting axes that created dramatic vistas and accentuated a sense of procession and ritual. The major axis was the Grand Basin, an artificial lagoon that began at the fair’s railroad terminal and ended at the lakeshore and was crossed by the secondary axis, a canal that came complete with Venetian gondolas. And that was only part of the fairgrounds: On the periphery were pavilions showcasing foreign cultures and each of the forty-four United States, plus stockyards, islands, and the boisterous Midway Plaisance.