Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  “We trust that the Commissioners, having once entertained this excellent idea, will not abandon it, but will carry it out in the same refined taste in which it has been conceived,” Bennett wrote. “Let them do so, and in a few years New York will be able to point a Parisian to a Champs-Élysées and Boulevards more exquisite than his own.”

  Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, then engaged in the design of Central Park, were brought in as consultants. Olmsted detested the Commissioners’ Plan’s Cartesian uniformity, its intentional lack of hierarchy. “[Some] two thousand blocks were provided, each theoretically 200 feet wide, no more, no less;” Olmsted wrote, “and ever since, if a building site is wanted, whether with a view to a church or a blast furnace, an opera house or a toy shop, there is, of intention, no better a place in one of these blocks than in another.”

  Olmsted was a romantically inclined designer of picturesque scenes. He saw in Washington Heights a chance to counteract the inherently democratic proportions of the Commissioners’ Plan grid, by laying out winding streets that would follow the natural topography of the region’s hills and allow ample space for wealthy landowners to build mansions overlooking the river. Olmsted was himself from a wealthy background, and in an 1860 letter to Elliott of the Washington Heights commission revealed his vision of that enclave as a private sanctuary for the “rich and cultivated,” a place for “pleasure driving,” where residents could enjoy “the frequent recognition of friends of their own class.” Unless its streets were designed as circuitous secluded drives, with villas arranged in discreet clusters, Olmsted warned Elliott, within ten years Washington Heights would be overrun by “brewers & grocers and coal merchants,” and Irish and “Dutch” (German) squatters.

  But then the Civil War intervened and the plan for Washington Heights was put on hold. Olmsted was appointed director of the United States Sanitary Commission and moved to Washington, D.C. Vaux maintained his office at 110 Broadway, briefly forming a partnership with Lewis W. Leeds before reuniting with Frederick Withers, his original partner. In 1863, Olmsted resigned his position at the Sanitary Commission and unwisely took a position in California overseeing the operation of a gold mine in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. When the venture failed, Olmsted suffered a nervous breakdown and sank into a deep depression.

  In April of 1865, as part of the act authorizing construction of the Boulevard, the legislature put Andrew Haswell Green and the Commissioners of Central Park in charge of laying out a system of streets for upper Manhattan. On May 12, 1865, barely a month after the war ended, Vaux wrote to Olmsted urging his return to New York. There was work to do: That spring Vaux had begun designing Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, and wanted to take another stab at upper Manhattan. Vaux imagined Olmsted and himself as city planners on a grand scale.

  “Our right unquestionably is to control matters from Washington Heights to the other end of Brooklyn,” he told Olmsted.

  Olmsted did return to New York to work on Prospect Park and lay the groundwork for his and Vaux’s conquest of the city. In 1866 they proposed a new boulevard extending from Prospect Park to the harbor, then turning north and passing through Brooklyn to Ravenswood, in Queens. From there, they imagined the road carrying across the East River on a bridge to the East Side of Manhattan, where it would connect through Central Park to Green’s planned West Side Boulevard and then proceed north to Washington Heights. Travelers could take in Prospect Park, the ocean, the East and Hudson rivers, Central Park, and Washington Heights all in one day, returning to Prospect Park by a different route, the plan forming a vast, citywide circuit.

  In the end, for better or worse, Vaux and Olmsted’s “grand municipal promenade,” as they called it, wasn’t built, and they remained park designers, not urban planners. But Washington Heights, at least the hilly part to the west of Broadway, did develop into a suburb of detached villas, just as Vaux and Olmsted and Green had envisioned, and the area wasn’t subsumed into the city until well after the subway was completed to the northernmost tip of the island in 1906.

  “This is the most picturesque route to the city from the land side,” journalist Charles Dawson Shanly wrote of Washington Heights in 1868. “It winds past villas that stand on sloping lawns, or, like amateur Rhenish castles, frown from lofty peaks down upon the unresenting river. Evidences of wealth and culture meet the eye everywhere. Gate lodges give an air of European aristocracy to the locality. There is a feudal atmosphere about the place; one can, with due confusion of associations, almost fancy the curfew tolling here at nightfall, from the campanile that crowns yon lofty knoll.”

  CHAPTER 40

  HILLTOPPERS

  AT 169TH STREET, BROADWAY AND ST. NICHOLAS AVENUE cross over each other and switch names, with Broadway angling away from St. Nicholas Avenue and continuing through a densely packed neighborhood with a large Dominican population and dominated by the sprawling complex of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, on the west side of Broadway between 165th and 168th streets. Broadway is the neighborhood’s main street, lined with apartment buildings with cell phone stores, restaurants—La Dinastia, at the corner of Broadway and 171st Street, offers comidas China Griolla—delis, fruit stands, coffee shops, nail spas, bagel joints, and dry cleaners in their ground-floor storefronts. Broadway is also a cultural dividing line between the affluent white neighborhood to the west and the working-class Dominican neighborhood to the east.

  Mitchel Square and Duarte Square (named in honor of Juan Pablo Duarte, one of the founders of the Dominican Republic) mark the spot where Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue converge. Both squares are, like Herald Square and Times Square to the south, not squares at all but narrow, triangular islands amid a sea of traffic. Mitchel Square was originally called Audubon Square but was renamed in 1919 in honor of mayor John Purroy Mitchel, a World War I pilot who died while training to go overseas. Mitchel Square is punctuated by an outcropping of schist that breaks through its surface, a preserved fragment of the neighborhood’s once-rural landscape. If you sit in the park and gaze to the west across Broadway, it’s possible to edit out the hustle and bustle, the thousands of people going in and coming out of Columbia-Presbyterian across the street, and call to mind what the street must have been like around 1900, before the subway came and apartment buildings overran the street; when the Deaf and Dumb Asylum on Fort Washington Avenue, one block west of Broadway, was the only large building in the neighborhood and Broadway consisted mostly of vacant lots. Stare at Columbia-Presbyterian long enough, and it might just dissolve in the mind’s eye, replaced by the wooden grandstand of a baseball field called Hilltop Park.

  THE GROUNDWORK FOR bringing professional baseball to Broadway’s eleventh mile began in 1901, when sportswriter-turned-executive Byron Bancroft “Ban” Johnson declared that his upstart American League would compete on equal footing with the established National League. When the American League’s Baltimore team went bankrupt, saloon and casino owner Frank J. Farrell and former chief of police and one-time Tammany Hall thug William S. Devery, two decidedly sketchy New York characters, bought the team and, in January of 1903, moved it to New York.

  New York already had a team, the National League’s Giants, which played in the Polo Grounds, a strange, oval-shaped ballpark at the base of Coogan’s Bluff on the East River shore between 157th and 159th streets. Giants’ owner John T. Brush tried to block the American League’s intrusion into his market, but Farrell and Devery found a large piece of undeveloped land on the west side of Broadway between 165th and 168th streets, and in only two months, as if by magic, a new ballpark had risen on the site.

  The new field was officially called American League Park but was soon dubbed Hilltop Park, since it enjoyed majestic views of the Hudson River and was only fifteen blocks south of the island’s highest point at Fort Washington. It was large as ballparks went, a vast yard of 9 acres with the diamond near the center of the site and the third-base bleachers stretching along Fort Washington Avenue. The distance from home plate to
the far corner of the outfield, at the southwest corner of Broadway and 168th Street, was almost 600 feet. The outfield fence along Broadway was plastered with advertisements, mostly for whiskey, and punctuated by a ticket office, a simple two-story shed with greater new york baseball club of the american league painted in big block letters on the roof and walls. The whole affair was built entirely of wood and looked a bit like a child’s summer play fort.

  Getting to Hilltop Park wasn’t easy: It was a thirteen-block walk from the Hudson River Railroad station at 152nd Street, even longer from the station at Fort Washington Park, and the only other way to get there was by electric trolley or horse-and-buggy (almost no one had a car yet). But somehow 15,000 fans—the men in derbies, the women in big hats and full skirts, the boys in knickers, neckties, and caps, the girls in pinafores—showed up on opening day, April 30, 1903, to see the New York Americans take on the visiting Washington Senators.

  The grandstand roof wasn’t finished and there was no grass in the outfield. There was a large pond behind first base—any balls hit into the water were ground-rule doubles—and because a clubhouse hadn’t been built yet, players had to change at their hotels. But the atmosphere was festive: Vendors circulated through the crowd hawking sandwiches and lemonade and, the New York Tribune reported, there were “enough diamonds in the shirt fronts of the politicians to start a fair sized jewelry store.” Fans blew horns and whistles and waved small American flags as the 69th Regiment Band escorted the players onto the field “to the tune of a patriotic song.” Ban Johnson, who, it must be said, resembled a torpedo with a face painted on, threw out the ceremonial first ball.

  Fans lining up at Hilltop Park’s ticket windows, ca. 1912.

  In the tradition of the day, New York batted first. After Lefty Davis grounded out to Washington shortstop Rabbit Robinson to start the game, Wee Willie Keeler came up to bat. Keeler, an ex-Giant and the source of that immortal piece of advice “hit ’em where they ain’t,” was the team’s star, a 5-foot-4, 140-pound ball of energy with a prominent nose and large, protruding ears. Batting from the left side, Keeler promptly cracked a pitch into left field and alertly moved up to second base when Senators leftfielder Jimmy Ryan bobbled the ball. Jimmy Williams hit a double, scoring Keeler with Hilltop Park’s very first run, and the Americans went on to win 6 to 2.

  “Lefty,” “Wee Willie,” “Rabbit”: It was the golden era of great baseball nicknames. The Senators had not only Rabbit Robinson but also a pitcher named Highball Wilson and a first baseman named Boileryard Clarke. Detroit had Kid Elberfeld, Sport McAllister, and Doc Gessler; Chicago had Ducky Holmes, Cozy Dolan, Pep Clark, and Patsy Flaherty; Philadelphia had Chief Bender (an American Indian), Rube Waddell, Socks Seybold, and Topsy Hartsel; St. Louis had Pinky Swander.

  Teams—the St. Louis Browns, Boston Beaneaters, Brooklyn Superbas (or Trolley Dodgers), Philadelphia Phillies (or Quakers)—had great nicknames too, and at first sportswriters called New York’s new team the Invaders, since they had infiltrated the Giants’ turf and raided the Giants’ roster for players, or the Highlanders, a possible reference not only to the high elevation of the new ballpark but also to the Scottish Highlanders who were among the invading forces of the British Army in the Battle of Fort Washington in 1776. Over the twelve years the team played at Hilltop Park, there was never a consensus about what they should be called, and sportswriters also referred to them as the Hilltoppers, Hilltops, Hillmen, Hillers, and even the Harlemites.

  The name that eventually stuck was first suggested by an anonymous fan from Paterson, New Jersey, in a letter to the editors of the New York Sun dated May 4, 1903, barely a week into the team’s inaugural home stand. “If the new baseball team is to have a name that is in keeping with the ‘Giants,’ ” the fan wrote, “does it not seem reasonable that if they are ‘New York Americans’ they might be called the ‘Yankees’ or ‘Yanks’?”

  THE TEAM GOT a boost in 1906, when the subway was extended from 157th to 221st Street, with the 168th Street station located right outside the outfield fence. The station made it much easier for fans to reach the ballpark, and on opening day, April 14, 1906, when Cy Young and the Boston Americans came to town, attendance was well over 20,000.

  With the subway came the requisite boom in construction of apartment buildings, and soon the residents of the Alfred, Wilton, Carrollton, Courtwood, Medford, Hamlet Court, Richmond Court, Charleston Court, Princess Court, Balmoral Court, Rosbert Hall, and Carolyn Court could peak down on the Yankees from their living rooms. With new apartments came all the things that people require of a neighborhood: theaters, schools, stores, and churches. Only two years after opening, Hilltop Park was in the middle of a thriving neighborhood of skyrocketing land prices.

  The Yankees were disappointing: In nine seasons at Hilltop Park they never finished higher than second place, while the Giants, led by fiery manager John McGraw, took National League pennants in 1904, 1905, 1911, 1912, and 1913. But in the end it wasn’t the mediocre team but the escalating value of its playing field that forced the team to abandon Broadway.

  In 1912 the Yankees moved into the Polo Grounds, where for the next decade they played second fiddle to the Giants. In 1915, Farrell and Devery sold the team to brewer Jacob Ruppert and the unforgettably named Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, and the rest—the fateful purchase of Babe Ruth from the Red Sox in 1919, the building of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in 1923, and the twenty World Series championships between 1923 and 1962—is well-trod history.

  Hilltop Park was long gone and forgotten well before Ruth began launching moonshots in the Bronx. The charmingly ramshackle park was demolished in 1914—with all of that exposed wood, it should have burned down but never did—and the site was subdivided into six square blocks, with three new streets (apparently never opened) mapped through it. The land sat empty until 1925, when ground was broken for the new Columbia-Presbyterian medical complex. Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons was built where Hilltop Park’s outfield had been, Presbyterian Hospital (Sloane Hospital) rose near home plate, and Babies Hospital went up along the Broadway side, close to the spot where crowds used to flock to the ballpark’s ticket-office windows.

  In 1993, the Yankees donated a bronze plaque in the shape of home plate and installed it in the garden between the hospital’s old and new wings. The plaque, which was removed in 2011, was positioned where Hilltop Park’s home plate had been, but when you crouched beside it, raised your arms in a batting stance, and looked east toward Broadway, you saw endless rows of hospital windows where Wee Willie Keeler once saw only acres of open space.

  CHAPTER 41

  THE FOURTH REICH

  IN 1912, THE SAME YEAR THE YANKEES LEFT HILLTOP PARK for the Polo Grounds, theater impresario William Fox built the Audubon Theatre and Ballroom on the east side of Broadway between 165th and 166th streets, just across from the outfield fence. The Audubon had a theater for movies and vaudeville acts and a separate ballroom for meetings and dancing. (Much later, in 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated there, a tragedy which has since lent the Audubon an aura of doom.) At the time of the Audubon’s opening, the irrepressible Fox owned sixteen theaters in Manhattan and Brooklyn and was at the height of his power, but responded melodramatically when asked what the Audubon might mean for his career.

  “Ruination,” he cried. “Utter ruination!”

  “The Audubon is a much larger theatre than the Washington Heights section needs, and I don’t expect to make any money at the start,” he explained. “I’m depending on the future of Washington Heights.”

  FOX WAS RIGHT: Washington Heights had a bright future. Within a decade it had become as full of people and life as any neighborhood in the city, and Broadway was its main drag. By the Depression, Rian James wrote in 1931 in All About New York: An Intimate Guide, Broadway’s eleventh mile was a “long, unending monotone . . . of low, squat, colorless buildings, baby-carriage laden sidewalks, and neighborhood hausfraus.”

  Hausfrau: Wash
ington Heights already had a pronounced German flavor by the time James visited, but after Hitler came to power in 1933, Jewish refugees from Germany flooded into the neighborhood, drawn by plentiful, cheap housing. By 1940 there were so many German immigrants in Washington Heights the “Place of Birth” column of that year’s Federal Census forms repeated “Germany” so often it resembled an abstract pattern, and locals were calling the neighborhood das vierte Reich—the Fourth Reich.

  Most Jewish refugees had left family members behind in Germany; many arrived at Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on their backs; and entry into America, New York, and Washington Heights was, to say the very least, profoundly dislocating. But those who gravitated to Broadway found a vibrant mix of American and German culture. German was spoken in many of Broadway’s stores, and Broadway had theaters—six of them just in the twenty blocks between 160th and 181st streets—where refugees could watch war footage on newsreels and then lose themselves for a while in the latest Cary Grant picture. (These weren’t little neighborhood theaters but huge, opulent dream worlds: Loew’s 175th Street Theatre was perhaps the most intricately designed movie house ever built in the United States, a fantasyland designed by Thomas W. Lamb in a quirky style that journalist David W. Dunlap has characterized as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco.”)

  Jewish refugees from Germany packed into city blocks already overflowing with Russian and Eastern European Jews, blacks, Irish, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Poles, Romanians, French, and Hungarians. Inevitably, there were racial, ethnic, and religious tensions. “Negro-white antagonism [is] sharp,” the New York Times reported in 1945, “and there [is evidence] of growing anti-Semitism.” Administrators at P.S. 169, on Audubon Avenue and 168th Street, a school with a student body represented by forty-two nationalities, took fifth-graders and members of the PTA on field trips to the Jewish Theological Seminary and to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature on 135th Street, hoping the experiences would build mutual understanding.