Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  McKim designed the fair’s New York State Building, but his main contribution was the Agricultural Building, a large exhibition hall crammed with everything from livestock and farm equipment to a 22,000-pound “monster cheese” and a map of the United States made entirely of pickles. The vast structure, which had a shallow dome cribbed from the Pantheon and a façade of columns like the Parthenon, stretched along the south edge of the Grand Basin. Bedecked with flags and statuary, the enormous Agricultural Building was only one of fourteen “Great Buildings” arranged along the Grand Basin and interconnected with colonnades, walkways and bridges, which helped turn the Chicago fair into an allegory of the new American imperialism, as if the Great White Fleet had been beached on the shores of Lake Michigan.

  The Great Buildings weren’t nearly as substantial as they appeared from afar. Burnham had to get them built quickly: Congress didn’t award the fair to Chicago until 1890, and by the fall of that year the city still had not settled on a site, which left only two-and-a-half years to design and build the entire fair in time for its planned May 1, 1893, opening. Except for the Palace of Fine Arts (today’s Museum of Science and Industry) the Great Buildings were intended only as temporary pavilions and so were constructed of lathe-and-plaster painted with white stucco. But the illusion was convincing, and the effect on the 27 million people who visited the fair that summer was immediate—Why doesn’t my hometown look like this?—and over the following decade virtually every American city and town from Albany to Zanesville had a new bank, library, museum, or city hall inspired by the White City.

  SETH LOW HAD BEEN among the streaming hordes of men, women, and ice-cream-gobbling children that visited the fair that summer, and only weeks after the fair’s closing on October 30, Columbia hired McKim to design its new campus—a permanent simulation of a temporary World’s Fair.

  The White City had sprawled over 600 acres along Lake Michigan; McKim’s plan for Columbia covered only 19. But his plan did manage to echo the fair’s layout: It was arranged around a main south-to-north axis, which afforded views south to the growing city, flanked by classroom buildings and dominated by a concentric building at the center. In the White City, that center structure had been Hunt’s Administration Building, a fanciful cribbing of Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence; at Columbia it was a library.

  Low paid for the library himself with a $1 million donation made in honor of his father. Although its basic building components were borrowed from Roman antiquity—its towering vaults borrowed from the Baths of Caracalla and its shallow dome copied from the Pantheon—Low Library was first and foremost a souvenir of the White City, with one major difference: Instead of lathe and plaster, McKim built Low Library solidly in limestone, marble, and granite.

  Columbia’s imposing Low Library.

  McKim situated the library atop a plinth on the site’s highest point, and reaching the library from 116th Street required climbing fifty-seven granite steps—incoming students could be forgiven for wondering if their first visit to the library wasn’t some sort of pass-fail test of academic resolve.

  The front entrance was through tall, somber wooden doors behind a massive colonnade of Ionic columns. Inside was a high vestibule and, past two immense Connemara green-marble columns, the library’s main reading room, a theatrically vertical rotunda as tall as a six-story building, with semicircular reading desks radiating from a circular bookcase at the center. Four massive stone piers, each labeled with one of the four points of knowledge—law, medicine, philosophy, theology—supported the rotunda roof. Statues of Roman and Greek philosophers looked down from a balcony, and more bookcases were crammed into the corners: Low Library had room for 600,000 volumes, making it the second-largest library in America at the time after the Library of Congress.

  Sunlight poured in through four huge half-round windows around the sides of the dome. At a time when electric lights were still something of a novelty, McKim proposed concealing eight powerful arc lamps around the balcony and directing their beams at a 7-foot-diameter wooden “moon” painted white and suspended from a ceiling painted a shade of deep blue, like the evening sky. It was a whimsical detail closer in spirit to a fantastical Arthur Rackham illustration than to the grave Baths of Caracalla. But McKim, Mead & White specialized in fantasy—the firm had festooned the Herald Building with mechanical bell ringers, mounted the spire of Madison Square Garden with an Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture of the goddess Diana, and a few years later would paint the ceiling of the Morgan Library with strange arabesque patterns—and McKim’s moon was in keeping with those fairy tale inventions. Royal Cortissoz, who had once worked in McKim’s office, described McKim as “enveloping serious ideas in garments of winning loveliness.”

  WHEN COLUMBIA OPENED for classes, on October 4, 1897, only Low Memorial Library and four other buildings were finished, and most of the lots along Broadway were still vacant. But other institutions, including Teachers College and Barnard College—both colleges for women affiliated with Columbia—were already building on adjacent blocks, joining the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which had broken ground in 1892 on Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street, and St. Luke’s Hospital, its original building designed by the great architect Ernest Flagg, which opened on 114th Street in 1896. Grant’s Tomb, a Neoclassical pavilion that could easily have been mistaken for one of the White City’s Great Buildings, was completed in 1897 on Riverside Drive and 122nd Street. Those institutions had been drawn to a neighborhood that since the early 1890s was increasingly referred to as “Morningside Hill” or “Morningside Plateau” instead of Harlem Heights. Since 1895, Low had been calling it “Morningside Heights” and that’s what it became, even though officials from St. John the Divine insisted it should be “Cathedral Heights.”

  More institutions opened on the plateau—the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1903, Woman’s Hospital in 1906, and both the Union Theological Seminary and the Institute of Musical Art in 1910—as the press began referring to Morningside Heights as the “Acropolis.” The New York Tribune called the glittering new buildings of Morningside Heights the ‘‘temples of the white man.”

  CHAPTER 33

  GOD’S SKYSCRAPERS

  IN 1901, SETH LOW RESIGNED AS COLUMBIA’S PRESIDENT IN order to run for mayor of New York—he won, although he ended up serving only a single two-year term—and under the long reign of new president Nicholas Murray Butler, who didn’t retire until 1945, Columbia grew in size and prestige. In 1903, Butler oversaw the acquisition of two additional blocks south of 116th Street, which became the university’s South Field and marked the beginning of Columbia’s often-controversial and ongoing expansion beyond its original campus and into the surrounding neighborhood.

  By the 1920s the original campus north of 116th Street had grown to sixteen buildings, including a twelve-story science facility, with more going up across 116th Street around the perimeter of South Field, which was then an athletic field where Lou Gehrig, then playing for Columbia, occasionally smacked a home run onto Broadway. “Morningside Heights has entered a new era . . . ,” the Times Magazine reported in 1926. “Here is to be found a veritable crossroads of culture and education and religious life; a huge international power station generating and absorbing mental currents.”

  Its enrollment grew steadily year-to-year, and while a few women were admitted to graduate programs and professional schools and allowed, with permission of the instructor, to take some undergraduate courses, Columbia remained a male bastion of aspiring lawyers, historians, journalists, chemists, physicists, geologists, engineers, and architects.

  Beyond Columbia’s gates, Morningside Heights was growing, too: In 1890 there had been only four brick buildings on Broadway between 108th and 125th streets, plus some two-dozen diminutive wood-frame dwellings, barns, sheds, and shanties. Ten years later entire blocks of Broadway bordering Columbia remained vacant. But the coming of the subway in 1904, with stations placed at 110th and 116th streets, changed everything. Only two years
after the subway’s opening, both sides of Broadway’s eighth mile were lined with apartment buildings—including the Regnor, Luxor, and Rexor—and on the entire stretch of the street from 108th to 125th Street only one vacant lot remained.

  That last lot was at the northeast corner of Broadway and 122nd Street, just north of Teachers College, and consisted of an immense outcropping of bedrock thrusting 30 feet above street level. Throughout the Subway Boom the outcropping stood untouched and unused, a curious remnant of the island’s primordial topography. Then, in the fall of 1925, Oscar E. Konkle, a Brooklyn real-estate developer and devout Baptist, decided to build the tallest building in the world there, a “skyscraper church” devoted to missionary work.

  THE SEEDS OF Konkle’s notion had been sown almost a century earlier, when the Broadway Tabernacle opened a few blocks north of City Hall Park, on the east side of Broadway between Worth Street and Catherine Lane. Built in 1836 for the fiery abolitionist preacher Charles Grandison Finney, the Tabernacle was sold in 1840 to a group of Congregationalists, who expanded the church’s ministry until the Tabernacle became New York’s foremost cultural center. Every week the Tabernacle hosted lectures, concerts, demonstrations, and meetings, and in the decades leading up to the Civil War became the main gathering place for the antislavery movement; William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and Frederick Douglass were all frequent guests. In 1841, Philip Hone called the Broadway Tabernacle the “omnium gatherum and hold-all of the city.”

  The Tabernacle’s programming was remarkably diverse: Renowned Norwegian violinist Ole Bull performed there, but so did choirs of Five Points orphans and newsboys. In 1854 an ambivalent Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured at the Tabernacle to a packed house. (“I saw the great audience with dismay . . . ,” he wrote in his journal.) “I was most thankful to those who stayed at home.” Demonstrations of mesmerism, telepathy, phrenology, or electricity might be followed the next evening by a meeting of Spiritualists. (In 1857, golden-curled teenage Spiritualist Cora Hatch so captivated her Tabernacle audience that hardened, cynical Tammany Hall operative Isaiah Rynders broke down in tears.)

  In 1857 the Tabernacle sold its old building and built a new church at the intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and 34th Street, then on the outskirts of town. By 1903 the neighborhood around the second Tabernacle had become the heart of Herald Square, and the church cashed in and moved again, this time to the northeast corner of Broadway and 56th Street, in the midst of a commercial district that was about to become the city’s Automobile Row. With each move the Tabernacle made a killing from the sale of its land, and with money to burn, pastor Charles Edward Jefferson, a social reformer in the Charles Henry Parkhurst mold, decided to build a deluxe church that was big enough to include spaces for all of the Tabernacle’s varied cultural and social programs.

  The Tribune called Jefferson “puritanical,” but in the lead-up to World War I he was an outspoken peace advocate, and once the war began, he opened a canteen inside the Tabernacle to serve the city’s swelling ranks of soldiers and sailors. He was both a charismatic preacher and an avid baseball fan, and in his conception of the role of churches in the twentieth century was a liberal and thoroughly modern theologian.

  “The church may be dead,” he declared, “but it is astounding how active the corpse is. It is doing a thousand more things dead than it ever tried to do in the days of its most abundant vitality.”

  Jefferson wanted the new Tabernacle to include not only a spacious auditorium for meetings but also lecture halls, theaters, offices, workshops, lounges, a Sunday school, and a museum. With no room to expand laterally, the only solution was to build vertically, and plans for the new Tabernacle soon grew to ten stories.

  The Tabernacle inspired something of a craze in skyscraper churches: The same year the Tabernacle opened, John D. Rockefeller proposed a twelve-story church for the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland, which, though never built, would have included a gymnasium, library, Sunday school, and banquet halls. In 1908 the First United Evangelical Protestant German Church in Pittsburgh built a fourteen-story church encased by a secular office building, the first attempt by a parish to include commercial space in their plans as a way of making the church financially self-sustaining.

  The strategy of raising funds by including office or residential space in church plans was followed in 1921 by the new Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, on Madison Avenue and other cash-strapped parishes, although the practice was controversial: In 1922 a group of Episcopal Church officials led by William T. Manning, bishop of New York, threatened architect Alfred Granger with excommunication after he proposed a twenty-five-story skyscraper for the Diocese of Chicago’s new cathedral.

  “We should use in church buildings the aids and advantages science has conferred on the living generation,” Granger protested. “It’s not sinful to have an elevator in a church.”

  In 1923, Christian F. Reisner, pastor of the Chelsea Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington Heights, announced plans for a skyscraper church on Broadway between 173rd and 174th streets. Reisner, who saw little evidence of Christianity in New York’s skyline, envisioned the Broadway Temple as an architectural sandwich of the liturgical and commercial: Twin twelve-story apartment buildings wrapping around a 725-foot skyscraper crowned with a lit cross that would be visible for one hundred miles and serve as a beacon for aviators. (Only the two apartment buildings were ever built.)

  The following year Chicago’s First Methodist Church opened a skyscraper church in the heart of the Loop. Designed in the Gothic Revival style, the Chicago Temple included a gymnasium, classrooms, meeting halls, and, at the top, an illuminated revolving cross. For the next six years it was the tallest building in Chicago.

  In 1925, John D. Rockefeller Jr. swapped a parcel of land at 117th Street and Morningside Drive for one on the southeast corner of Riverside Drive and 122nd Street, one block west of Broadway, announced he would build a huge new ecumenical complex for his own Park Avenue Baptist Church, and convinced celebrity preacher and liberal theologian Harry Emerson Fosdick to take over as pastor. It was designed in the Gothic Revival mode but was actually a modern, steel skyscraper clad in limestone—more Woolworth Building than Chartres Cathedral—and though the press delighted in calling it the “Rockefeller Church” it was officially named the Riverside Church.

  AS ROCKEFELLER WAS reviewing plans for Riverside Church, Oscar Konkle broke ground for the Christian Missionary Building one block to the east. The building’s plans included a ground-floor church auditorium, a bank for missionaries, and a dining room that could seat 2,000. A swimming pool and gymnasium were planned for the basement, and a 4,500-room hotel would extend from the second to sixty-fourth floor, with twelve roof gardens and a hospital at the very top. When finished, the building would rise sixty-five stories and measure 800 feet from sidewalk to roof, 8 feet taller than the Woolworth Building, then the world’s tallest structure. Konkle estimated the project’s cost at $14 million.

  But before any steel could begin rising into the stratosphere, 65,000 cubic yards of bedrock had to be removed from the site. Blasting began at the corner of Broadway and 122nd Street on February 25, 1926.

  Konkle had tried this once before: In 1913 his six-year-old son Howard had contracted tetanus, and doctors held out little hope for his recovery. Konkle prayed, and when the boy made a miraculous recovery vowed to devote his life to raising funds for missionary work. In 1922 he found a site at the southeast corner of Broadway and 104th Street and hired architects Shreve, Lamb & Blake to design a seventeen-story building that would combine a new church for the Metropolitan Tabernacle, a Baptist congregation, with a hotel and bank for the use of Christian missionaries.

  But for some reason Konkle altered the project, so that when completed it wasn’t a skyscraper church at all but a secular hotel called the Broadway View. The Christian Missionary Building at Broadway and 122nd Street was intended as Konkle’s fulfillment of the promise he
had made twelve years before. Ten percent of the building’s earnings would go toward the founding and maintenance of a medical mission in Africa, he announced, and smoking, drinking, and perhaps even Sunday newspapers would be banned from the premises.

  Blasting continued at Broadway and 122nd Street through March. Contractor Gaetano Clemente, like many of his employees an Italian immigrant, directed the drilling and dynamiting of the rock, and with each detonation the jutting outcropping was whittled down until only one section remained at the edge and the rest of the site had turned into a deep pit. All was going well until just before noon on Tuesday, March 30, when, with no warning, the rock broke free and slid into the excavation, snapping the boom of a steam shovel on its way down and breaking into eight sections as it hit bottom. Five workers standing in the pit below were crushed to death.

  Father Nicholas Fallotica of nearby Corpus Christi Church rushed to the scene and administered last rites as each mangled body was pulled from the debris. Positive identifications could be made on Anthony Ameno, Frank Cioffi, Joseph Como, Carlo Mazzulo, and Louis Toppi only by their clothing and the union cards they carried in their pockets.

  CONSTRUCTION OF THE Christian Missionary Building was suspended in the wake of the accident, and then was further delayed by lawsuits filed against Clemente. In 1928, Konkle’s dream of a modern-day Tower of Babel ended when he sold the property to the Jewish Theological Seminary, which built a new campus on the site. Completed in 1930, the new seminary was five stories of red brick with a squat tower at the corner—nice, but hardly the soaring skyscraper Konkle had vowed to build.