Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  Adina Bernstein, of Hungarian Jewish descent, moved to Washington Heights as a sixteen-year-old in 1936, and remembered the neighborhood’s Irish youths as especially brutal. “I was walking along Dyckman [Street] with one of the guys from Yeshiva [University],” she told journalist Jeff Kisseloff in 1986. “Two [Irish kids] got on either side of him and shoved him from side to side. ‘The Jew Boy! The Christ Killer!’ It was an ugly time. Kikes, sheenies, whatever. It was a constant problem.”

  Richard Arnstein arrived in Washington Heights in 1938 with $4 in his pocket and without his family, who had been left behind in Stuttgart. He rented an apartment, for $4 a week, at 62 Wadsworth Terrace, one block east of Broadway, and got a job, at $12 a week, as a shipping clerk for a garment wholesaler on Broadway, near Times Square. The wholesaler’s office building included a Horn & Hardart automat on the ground floor, where almost everything from soup to pie to coffee cost just a nickel. This, along with another Horn & Hardart on 181st Street in Washington Heights, kept Arnstein afloat in those difficult first years. “[The automat] was really a blessing,” he recalled.

  Arnstein’s wife, Charlotte, and their two children soon made their way from Stuttgart to Washington Heights, and the family moved into a two-room apartment at 96 Wadsworth Terrace, next door to the first one. The rent was $38 a month. Charlotte liked the neighborhood; the hills reminded her of Stuttgart. “We had a marvelous view—we could see the Cloisters from our window,” she remembered. “We were thrilled.” By 1940, Arnstein had been promoted to salesman and his income had risen to $624 a year—about $10,000 in today’s dollars.

  Robert L. Lehman also arrived in 1938, at the age of eleven, his family having escaped the Nazis by way of Romania. They graduated from a rooming house on 90th Street to an apartment on 140th Street, and then to a six-room apartment on 157th Street near Broadway, where his parents lived rent-free by subletting the extra rooms to other refugees—a common practice in that era. In Germany his father had been a banker and the family middle-class, but in New York both his parents had to find whatever work was available. His father washed dishes and toiled long hours in a fountain-pen factory before being hired as a Fuller Brush man; his mother cleaned houses and then got a job in a hairnet factory.

  At first, Lehman felt utterly alone in New York.

  “My problem was that I didn’t speak English.” he remembered. “[When] I got to school I knew that I was different.” Enrolled in a school with a heavily Irish population, he felt ostracized for his different clothes and interests. “I remember that I had no friends.”

  Lehman didn’t understand baseball or the comic books his classmates read, but quickly learned English and before long was glued to the family radio and addicted to Jack Benny, The Lone Ranger, and The Shadow. He joined the Boy Scouts, went on camping trips, and learned to love New York. “I liked the excitement,” he recalled. “I liked the speed of it, I liked the diversity of it, I went everywhere by myself. I really had a good time growing up there.”

  Lehman remembered Washington Heights as a “self-contained” German-Jewish community where families promenaded up and down Broadway on the weekends. “I could spot a German Jew three blocks away, by the way they walked [and] by the way they dressed,” Lehman recalled. “Men came first, always, with their hands behind their backs. Women came behind, dressed in a suit . . . [that] by the cut you could tell wasn’t from Lord & Taylor. And children [followed] behind.”

  Lehman, who stayed in the neighborhood, eventually becoming a rabbi at the Hebrew Tabernacle Synagogue, remembered Broadway as a solidly German avenue of grocers and butchers, who sold potato salad, sauerkraut, beef salami, and sausage without pork, and Konditoreien, pastry shops where people sat and talked over cake and coffee.

  “This is the way people used to do it [in Germany],” he said. “They would go in the afternoon to this pastry shop and they would buy a piece of cake and they would have coffee and they would sit a couple hours and they would talk and then they’d go about their business. This they did here, too.”

  “There was a great deal of European ambience in Washington Heights in those years,” he remembered. In those days before air-conditioning, people sat and visited on Broadway. “Everything was still intact. There were trees. There was no graffiti. There were no beer bottles. There was nothing of that nature. There were no loud radios.”

  “It was a genteel kind of neighborhood for a long time.”

  CHAPTER 42

  THE BRIDGE

  BETWEEN 178TH AND 179TH STREETS BROADWAY PASSES over Interstate 95 and beside one of the world’s great suspension bridges. The expressway and the bridge’s long approach plow through Washington Heights and the bridge’s central span soars across the Hudson River to New Jersey, a dramatic arc of steel that makes Broadway seem narrow and inconsequential. The bridge so dominates the landscape surrounding Broadway’s eleventh mile it’s worth briefly exploring how it was designed and built.

  The Hudson is wide, narrowing in places but generally about a mile across, and although a series of tunnels were dug beneath the river—the earliest, the twin “Hudson Tubes” connecting lower Manhattan and Jersey City, were completed in 1906—no bridge had ever been built across the river. But there had been many attempts: One of the earliest was in 1807, when John Stevens, the steamboat and locomotive inventor, petitioned the New York legislature to allow him to build floating bridges of his own design across the Hudson and East rivers. The legislature seemed vaguely interested, but when Stevens’s scheme was announced to the public, it was coldly received. The economy of the city and state depended in large measure on the free passage of goods up and down the rivers, and merchants feared Stevens’s bridges would obstruct navigation.

  “The scheme of building on the North [Hudson] River I conceive to be entirely chimerical,” one anonymous “Merchant” complained in a letter to the American Citizen, “and if attempted, it would be proper that the constituted authorities should enquire whether it is not a plan of foreign projection, to aid in injuring the welfare of the city by obstructing the navigation at a certain period.”

  The concern that bridges might obstruct river traffic remained a sticking point for years afterward, even after the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 and did not prove a hindrance to East River shipping. Even railroads, with all their political influence and money, couldn’t bridge the great divide between New Jersey and Manhattan. In 1871 the Pennsylvania Railroad had extended its main line to Jersey City, just across the Hudson from Manhattan, but had to send its passengers across by ferry and its freight by barge, a cumbersome means of transport that was slow on a good day and incapacitated in bad weather. The Penn wanted to extend its line directly into Manhattan, the better to compete with its archrival, the New York Central, which enjoyed a direct link into Manhattan by way of the Bronx. In 1884, the Penn hired engineer Gustav Lindenthal to design a bridge over the Hudson to bring its trains directly into Manhattan, and in 1890 the federal government chartered the North River Bridge Company, with Lindenthal as president and future Penn president Samuel Rea serving on the board of directors.

  Lindenthal proposed a bridge spanning from Hoboken, New Jersey, to 23rd Street in Manhattan, and ground was broken on the Hoboken side, but the Panic of 1893 killed the project. In 1902 the Penn began tunneling beneath the Hudson from Jersey City to 33rd Street in Manhattan, and by 1910 had opened Penn Station. But with the railroad’s freight still brought across the river by barge, Lindenthal and Rea continued to advocate for a Hudson River bridge.

  In 1910, the newly formed Interstate Bridge Commission recommended building a bridge from Washington Heights to Fort Lee in Bergen County, New Jersey, an announcement that set off a mania of speculation on both sides of the river. Real-estate agents accosted passersby with free round-trip tickets for steamboat “excursions” across the Hudson to inspect suburbs like Gilpin Park, a proposed development in Dumont, New Jersey.

  As the Washington Heights–to–Fort Lee bridge began to gain
favor, Lindenthal continued working on his bridge, and in 1920 envisioned spanning the river from Weehawken, New Jersey, to 57th Street in Manhattan. It was much larger than any suspension bridge ever contemplated, its twin 825-foot-high support towers taller even than the Woolworth Building, then the world’s tallest building. Its central span was an unheard-of 3,240 feet, nearly three times as long as the Brooklyn Bridge’s central span. Lindenthal’s bridge was so massive and out-of-scale with everything around it that a proposed skyscraper atop the Manhattan anchorage looked like a toy. Designed to carry sixteen lanes of automobile traffic and transit lines, plus twelve sets of railroad tracks on a lower level, the bridge was virtually a city unto itself, a colossus that the Tribune called “the dream of every New York motorist.”

  For a while it looked like both the Washington Heights-to-Fort Lee and Weehawken-to-57th Street bridges would be built, but as the size and price tag of Lindenthal’s bridge spiraled out of control, ballooning to a preposterous half a billion dollars, Othmar Ammann, Lindenthal’s assistant engineer and protégé, began designing his own bridge—in secret.

  ONE REASON NO ENGINEER had yet succeeded in spanning the Hudson was that the various boards and commissions created by the governments of New York and New Jersey could never agree and follow through on a strategy. The creation, in 1921, of the Port of New York Authority (much later renamed, more equitably, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey), an interstate agency with wide-ranging power to condemn property and float bonds on the open market, changed everything. Ammann, frustrated at Lindenthal’s unwillingness to make his bridge lighter and less expensive, went behind his employer’s back and presented his own bridge to the Port Authority, and in 1925 was appointed chief engineer of the Washington Heights–to–Fort Lee bridge.

  Lindenthal felt betrayed, naturally, but Ammann’s graceful design was both lighter and cheaper than Lindenthal’s behemoth and had none of its clunky gravitas. On September 27, 1927, ground was broken on Ammann’s bridge simultaneously in Washington Heights and Fort Lee, and construction proceeded with few delays. It was the Port Authority’s first start-to-finish project.

  (Undeterred, Lindenthal continued to advocate for the 57th Street bridge, but the War Department held final approval on all bridges constructed over navigable waters, and on May 29, 1929, Secretary of War James William Good, concerned that the new class of ocean liners might not be able to pass under Lindenthal’s bridge, ruled that the height of the center span, 175 feet above water level, was 25 feet too short. Lindenthal was outraged, but the 57th Street bridge was dead.)

  AMMANN’S BRIDGE WASN’T as massive as Lindenthal’s, but it was still much larger than any suspension bridge that had ever been built anywhere in the world. The bridge’s two support towers—one on the New York side that was built on Jeffrey’s Hook, a spit of land below Riverside Drive, and one on the New Jersey side that was built in the river itself—were 635 feet high. The clear span from tower to tower was 3,500 feet, nearly twice as long as the previous record holder, the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River.

  Construction began in August of 1928 and progressed so rapidly, with teams of steelworkers and riveters scrambling about the girders like acrobats, that the towers were finished by the following spring. Cass Gilbert, the renowned architect of the Woolworth Building, designed a concrete-and-stone façade to hide the steel, but in the end the towers were left as they were, each a latticework of steel columns, beams, and braces that seemed as lightweight as airplane struts, even though they weighed 73,000 tons.

  Once the towers were complete, four immense cables, each 36 inches in diameter and made up of 26,474 steel wires, were threaded through saddles at the apex of the towers and hung in great parabolas that supported a roadbed suspended 253 feet above the river. The cables were secured on the New Jersey side by drilling into the cliff face of the Palisades, while on the New York side they were buried in an immense concrete anchorage built against the bluffs of Washington Heights.

  IN JANUARY OF 1931, with the bridge nearing completion, the Port Authority decided the bridge needed an official name. It had generally been referred to as the “Hudson River” or “Fort Lee” bridge, but the Port Authority announced it would be called the George Washington Memorial Bridge, since the bridge’s path between Washington Heights and Fort Lee was the same path Washington had crossed and recrossed by boat in 1776, as the Battle of Washington Heights unfolded. Strangely, the name didn’t go over well—critics claimed it would be constantly confused with the nearby Washington Bridge over the Harlem River—and the Port Authority decided to go back to the drawing board and solicit suggestions from the public.

  Letters flooded into the Authority’s offices: Among the hundreds of suggestions were the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, Ulysses S. Grant Bridge, Pieter Minuit Bridge, Thomas Edison Bridge, Washington Irving Bridge, Woodrow Wilson Bridge, Bridge of Progress, People’s Bridge, Prosperity Bridge (a bit of optimism in the midst of the Depression), and Half Moon Bridge, an idea inspired by the name of Henry Hudson’s ship.

  Some suggestions were underwhelming (the Bergen Bridge, New York Bridge, Public Bridge) or puzzling (the Mothers’ Bridge), and some were downright strange (the Heflin-Hellespont Bridge, which must have been a joke). One person, curiously, suggested the Verrazano Bridge. Women’s clubs in New Jersey agitated for the Palisades Bridge, but groups of school children pleaded Washington’s cause and the Port Authority agreed, sticking with the name it had originally proposed four months earlier and thus avoiding a showdown with a bunch of aggrieved fourth-graders.

  ON OCTOBER 24, 1931, only four years after the project began, the bridge was finished. Ammann had organized the project so efficiently it was completed eight months ahead of schedule and considerably under the expected $60 million budget.

  The bridge was dedicated with a ceremony in the middle of the span, at the point where New York and New Jersey meet. A grandstand was set up for 5,000 spectators, who listened to New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Jersey governor Morgan F. Larson extoll the wonders of Ammann’s bridge. A crowd estimated at 20,000 watched from Washington Heights, while a smaller crowd gathered in Fort Lee. Airplanes flew in formation up and down the Hudson; one, to the delight of the crowds, even flew under the bridge.

  Former New York governor Alfred E. Smith, who had been a driving force behind the bridge’s construction, was in attendance, but Mayor Jimmy Walker skipped the dedication to go to a football game at Yankee Stadium. The loudest applause, the Times reported, was reserved for Ammann.

  When the bridge opened to pedestrians that evening, Fred Ammerman, age fourteen, and Leonard Moiseyeff, eleven, two Bronx kids, were the first across. They went on roller skates.

  Ammann went on to design the Bayonne, Triborough, Whitestone, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, and was a key consultant on the Golden Gate Bridge, but the George Washington was always his favorite. It remains the busiest bridge in the world. Le Corbusier saw it for the first time in 1935, and thought it the most beautiful bridge in the world. “It is blessed,” he wrote in When the Cathedrals Were White. “It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city.”

  CHAPTER 43

  THE CUT

  THE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS TAXPAYERS ASSOCIATION HAD been opposed to construction of the George Washington Bridge from the beginning, fearing that it would displace residents and fill local streets with traffic. In 1925, Port Authority chairman Julian A. Gregory had brushed aside those concerns, claiming that the bridge would allow “access to the great outdoors.”

  Construction of the bridge’s approach necessitated razing four city blocks along a corridor between 178th and 179th streets from Broadway to Riverside Drive. The Port Authority had begun buying up the properties in May of 1927, and by the fall of 1929 about half of the residents had moved out. The twenty-eight demolished buildings on those blocks were mostly new apartment buildings, including the rather opulent ten-story D
onald Court at the southwest corner of Broadway and 179th Street. Two churches with large, active congregations, the Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, and Chelsea Methodist Church, were also torn down. The work displaced 3,000 people, but that was nothing compared to what was coming.

  Ammann had designed the George Washington Bridge so that a second, lower deck with an additional six lanes could be added at some point in the future. By the time work began on the lower deck, in 1957, the alteration had become part of a gargantuan collaboration between the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, led by the indefatigable Robert Moses, and the Port of New York Authority.

  The project was a key point in the two agencies’ ambitious joint “arterial program” of bridges, tunnels, and expressways, announced in 1955, that included not only the George Washington Bridge improvements but also construction of the Verrazano-Narrows and Throgs Neck bridges and the Long Island, Bruckner, Lower Manhattan, Mid-Manhattan, Cross-Harlem, and Trans-Manhattan expressways. The following year, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act, which authorized construction of the Interstate Highway System. By linking the Triborough and Port authorities’ “joint program” to the Interstate system, and by making the George Washington Bridge and its new approach part of Interstate 95, Moses was able to tap into federal funding—and the federal government was slated to pay for 90 percent of the Interstate system.

  The highway act was a windfall, and Moses was ready: He had been planning for the moment since the 1940s, when he mapped out a system of arterial roads that he hoped would facilitate “the free flow of traffic without stoplights, congestion, lost time and frayed tempers.” The Lower Manhattan, Mid-Manhattan, Cross-Harlem, and Trans-Manhattan expressways were each planned to cut east-to-west across Manhattan, but in the end only the short (less than a mile long), twelve-lane Trans-Manhattan Expressway was built.