Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

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Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles Page 32

by Fran Leadon


  The Trans-Manhattan Expressway, designed as the link between the George Washington Bridge and the Cross-Bronx Expressway, was depressed into a block-wide trench that cut through Washington Heights. The project looked enticing on maps—the clean lines of the roadways and bridges, the loops and curls of the bridge approaches—but up close, at jackhammer level, it wasn’t about flow and continuity; it was about disruption and displacement.

  In all, the project involved demolition of eighty apartment buildings, a post office, and the Congregation Mount Sinai Anshe Emeth synagogue, and forced the relocation of 1,855 families. When the city’s Board of Estimate met to consider approval of the project, on May 15, 1957, tenants from Washington Heights showed up to denounce the project but received almost no mention from the pro-Moses New York Times.

  Moses could be astonishingly caustic when it came to the social upheavals his projects often caused. He was only interested in the “guts” of projects, he said, the often-tricky construction of bridges, ramps, and approaches: “The rest is battling obstructionists and paper workers, moving people and dirt, paving, planting, veneering and painting the lily, and slicking up the job for the dedication ceremonies, the raising of the flag and the playing of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” he had written in 1945, as if forcing a family out of its home was no different than emptying debris from a dump truck.

  Moses scoffed at the people he called “eagle[s] with vision” and compared himself to a mole methodically burrowing his way beneath the city.

  THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE’S lower deck, which increased the volume of bridge traffic by 75 percent, opened on August 29, 1962, the occasion marked by a reenactment of the 1931 ceremonies that had originally opened the bridge. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and New Jersey governor Richard J. Hughes, playing the parts of their predecessors Franklin D. Roosevelt and Morgan F. Larson, arrived at mid-span in touring cars from 1931. Again there were speeches, and Rockefeller and Hughes unveiled a bust of Othmar Ammann destined for the lobby of the new George Washington Bridge Bus Station, which was under construction and hovered above the Washington Heights end of the bridge like a lunar landing module, its soaring concrete fins right out of The Jetsons.

  Ammann, eighty-three, was in the crowd, but it took a few minutes to find him; he was standing in the back.

  THE BUS TERMINAL, designed by the great Italian structural engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi, pioneer of thin-shell concrete structures, opened on January 17, 1963, along with the Trans-Manhattan Expressway and the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, which connected the expressway over the Harlem River to the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The following year the Bridge Apartments, four thirty-four-story towers of middle-income housing perched on immense columns over the expressway, were completed.

  The whole bridge-bus terminal-expressway-housing project looked futuristic, but the conceptual cracks began to show almost immediately. Even the most meticulously considered bus stations aren’t places so much as transitional nodes, and by the 1970s, after Trailways and other bus companies decided to leave, the Washington Bridge Bus Station had become a grim gateway echoing with the despair of the forlorn and homeless. A recent renovation has helped matters, but the blocks surrounding the station and expressway are nevertheless grim. Those living in the Bridge Apartments, meanwhile, are subjected to noise, fumes, and grit rising out of the expressway below.

  From 178th to 179th Street, Broadway threads its way over the expressway and under the bus station. It is a decidedly dreary block, with none of the grandeur associated with the Great White Way or the West Side’s Boulevard farther to the south. But the road that really matters at that particular spot isn’t Broadway but the roaring expressway underneath it: I-95, that relentless American strand that begins in Maine and ends, 2,000 miles later, in Miami.

  MILE 12

  179TH STREET TO DYCKMAN STREET

  CHAPTER 44

  MR. BILLINGS

  NORTH OF ROBERT MOSES’S EXPRESSWAY, BROADWAY IS ALSO called Route 9. It follows the path of the old Kingsbridge Road through the northern half of Washington Heights, or “Hudson Heights,” as real-estate agents have recently taken to calling it, on its way to Inwood. Broadway between 179th and 187th streets is a decidedly unremarkable stretch of asphalt lined with brick-and-limestone apartment buildings, banks, bodegas, liquor stores, gas stations, pizza-by-the-slice joints, funeral parlors, clinics, 99-cent stores, and, at the northwest corner of 181st Street, the abused shell of the once-magnificent Coliseum Theater.

  But just beyond 187th Street, Broadway passes Gorman Park, a steep, woody hillside leading up to Wadsworth Terrace just to the east, and begins to shake itself loose from the city. Over its final two miles in Manhattan, before it reaches the Bronx, Broadway is defined not only by the Deal$ discount store, Rita’s Style Beauty Salon, Broadway Automotive, and No. 1 Chinese & Tex-Mex Express, but also by vertiginous hills, grassy slopes, woods, and outcroppings of bedrock.

  Once Broadway crosses Bennett Avenue, the landscape changes entirely: Broadway curls in a wide arc back to the east, of all things, as the entire west side of the street rises abruptly in an Appalachian eminence called Fort Tryon Park.

  ON NOVEMBER 16, 1776, British and Hessian forces overran Fort Tryon, which had been built as an “outwork” of the ill-fated Fort Washington. It was in the midst of that battle that Margaret Corbin, wife of a Continental Army soldier, took over her husband’s cannon after he was killed and blasted away until she was shot through the shoulder and taken out of action. (Corbin, disabled, survived the war and became the first American woman to receive a soldier’s pension.)

  Like Fort Washington, Fort Tryon’s traces lingered long after the war ended, and telltale ridges and swales in the earth could still be detected in the early twentieth century. During the Revolution, the fort’s situation high above the Hudson River was purely strategic; that it was also the most heavenly spot on the island was a secondary concern. Fort Tryon Hill remained untouched, an oasis just ahead of the city’s northward development, until the last dying flickers of the Gilded Age, when it wound up in the hands of a singularly memorable tycoon.

  CORNELIUS KINGSLEY GARRISON BILLINGS was raised in Chicago, the son of Albert Merritt Billings, president of the Peoples Gas Light & Coke Company. After graduating from Racine College in 1879, Cornelius (friends called him “Ben”) joined his father’s business and in 1887 became the company’s president.

  Though its customers were in Illinois, Peoples Gas was really a New York company—all but two of its directors were New Yorkers—and Billings spent much of his time in the city attending to business. Like his father, he loved horses—“Mr. Billings’s connection with the turf is too well known to need any special mention at this late hour,” read one notice in the New York Times society pages—and when the Harlem Speedway, a race course snaking along the Harlem River between 155th and Dyckman streets, opened in the summer of 1898, Billings was there. He began bringing his impressive stable of trotters and pacers to the Speedway for the spring and fall racing seasons, taking on all challengers in timed trials and impromptu “brushes.” Billings’s exploits helped the Speedway become so popular that weekend crowds of 15,000 were common, gambling being the chief attraction, and New York became the center of a national trotting craze.

  In 1901, unable to tear himself away from the Speedway, Billings stepped down as president of Peoples Gas and was installed as chairman of the board, a position that didn’t require residency in Chicago. He and wife Blanche (half-sister of poet Archibald MacLeish), moved to New York, settling into a mansion on Fifth Avenue among the Astors, Belmonts, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Guggenheims, and Fricks. But the Fifth Avenue mansion wasn’t nearly close enough to the Speedway, and so Billings bought, from the estate of recently deceased industrialist Hugh N. Camp, 25 undeveloped hilltop acres next to the remains of Fort Tryon. The property, bisected north-and-south by Fort Washington Avenue, commanded majestic views of the Hudson River to the west and, even bette
r as far as Billings was concerned, the Speedway to the east.

  Billings hired Boston architect Guy Lowell to design a large stable on the east side of Fort Washington Avenue and, on the other side of the street, an octagonal observation tower that doubled as a weekend house. The stable cost $200,000 to build and was 250 feet long by 125 feet wide and two stories high, the roof sweeping up into pointed cupolas. It was divided into two wings, horses on the right, automobiles on the left, and arranged around a courtyard exercise ring. Billings moved in his prized trotters (Lucille, Doctor Book, Ellert, Mabel Onward, Aggie Medium, Jimmie Hague, Major Greer, Franker, and Rightwood) and pacers (Free Bond, Sunland Belle, and Hontas Crooke) and got down to the business of living in style among the halters and horseshit.

  IN THE SPRING of 1903, seventeen mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, temporarily shut down, locking out 17,000 workers; cooks and waiters went on strike in Denver; a trolley conductors’ strike in Waterbury, Connecticut, turned violent; six steelworkers were burned to death in a furnace accident at Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh; the Indiana Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a minimum wage law; and Billings celebrated the completion of his stables at the top of Fort Tryon Hill.

  On Saturday evening, March 28, Billings invited thirty-six members of the Equestrian Club, including ex-mayor Hugh J. Grant, to Fort Tryon Hill to view his palatial new stables. The plan was to have the guests picked up at the Hotel Netherland, on Fifth Avenue, and driven up to the stables in touring cars, where they would be served dinner while seated on wooden hobbyhorses in the stables’ carriage hall, a cavernous space measuring 50 by 90 feet and decorated for the occasion as a forest dell. But when details of the festivities were leaked to the press—“Guests to Ride Wooden Horses,” a headline in the Evening World announced—Billings, to avoid the embarrassment of gawking crowds at his gates, switched the venue at the last minute to Sherry’s, a fashionable restaurant at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street.

  Then came the bait-and-switch: Billings substituted real horses for the wooden variety, renting thirty-six well-behaved mounts from a riding academy and ferrying them up the restaurant’s freight elevator to the banquet room, where they were tethered in a circle. Dinner was served on specially designed tables attached to the saddle pommels; champagne was available by sucking on a tube running into bottles concealed in each saddlebag; servants were dressed as grooms. Billings reportedly spent $50,000 on the soiree—over $1 million in today’s currency. The horses ate too, from feeding troughs “filled with oats,” the Times reported, “so that the animals dined with their riders.”

  ALL WAS WELL with Mr. Billings: Peoples Gas was trading at over $100 a share, which made its stock more valuable than even Union Pacific or U.S. Steel, and Billings, flush with cash, had Lowell expand the observation tower atop Fort Tryon Hill into a full-fledged château. Billings called it “Fort Tryon Hall” in honor of the patriots who fell there in 1776, a rather shallow gesture considering that, to the dismay of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, construction of the mansion destroyed a well-preserved section of the fort.

  C. K. G. Billings’s famous dinner on horseback, 1903.

  Built of brick covered in grey stucco with white trim, Fort Tryon Hall cost $2 million, and while architect and client had in mind the grandeur of the sixteenth-century Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley, the mansion’s style might best have been described as “High Capitalist” or even “Tycoonesque.” The list of architectural crimes perpetrated by Lowell and interior decorator P. W. French at Fort Tryon Hall were long and varied: For starters there was the reckless use of marble, of both the creamy and more expensive green kind; the profusion of wrought-iron bannisters, oak floors, and mahogany wall paneling; the wild animal skins strewn on the floors; the vast oceans of oriental rugs and sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries; the flamboyant Louis XVI–style furniture; and the ancient Chinese vases, antique fans, and rather bland nineteenth-century French and Dutch landscapes that cluttered up the place.

  The house enveloped the observation tower and under Lowell’s sure hand became a festival of turrets, oriels, and mansard roofs. The plan was organized around a central “patio,” a double-height space with a glass roof and a fountain featuring a copy of Andrea del Verrocchio’s sculpture Putto with Dolphin from the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The living room looked out over a lawn on Fort Washington Avenue and featured French walnut wainscoting, a gilded pipe organ and the outstretched skin of a lion, its glass eyes staring into oblivion in front of a sofa. The dining room, paneled in mahogany, and the drawing room, decorated like Versailles, both overlooked the river.

  The Billings estate, looking north.

  Down one hallway was the billiard room, paneled in walnut and lined with shelves displaying Billings’s various trotting trophies. The wall above the fireplace was reserved for portraits of his favorite horses, including the famous Lou Dillon, the first horse to trot a mile in less than two minutes. Bedrooms for Billings, Blanche, and children Pauline and Albert were upstairs. There was a reception room, “Lavender Room,” “Blue Room,” “Rose Room,” and, behind the scenes, quarters for the servants (generally English, Scottish, Austrian, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish immigrants), a kitchen, pantry, servants’ dining room, storerooms, scullery, pastry room, housekeeper’s office, laundry, trunk room, coal cellar, and wood room.

  A separate building to the north of the house included a 75-by-30-foot swimming pool, plus a bowling alley and squash court. Nearby were tennis courts, gardens, greenhouses, and a small farm that provided the house with fresh produce. A mechanical building had two immense boilers that heated the house and pool, plus two 40-horse-power Alberger centrifugal pumps that in case of fire could (supposedly) deliver water to hose outlets on each floor of the house and to hydrants stationed around the grounds.

  Billings soon added a dramatic back entrance to his estate off Riverside Drive, a double switchback that passed through a towering arched gallery right out of a Piranesi etching. Billings’s yacht, the Vanadis, was moored on the river below, excursion-ready. It was all impossibly grand, but on Broadway, far down Fort Tryon’s precipitous eastern slope, life unfolded along a very different path. As Billings settled into his new mansion, a man looked up the hill from the other side of the street and cursed his luck.

  CHAPTER 45

  MR. MOLENAOR

  IN THE SPRING OF 1913 A SEVENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD GENT WITH a chip on his shoulder took up residence in a 13-by-12-foot squatter’s shack on the opposite side of Broadway from Fort Tryon Hill and loudly proclaimed that he owned 17 acres of the Billings estate, plus 7 acres on the east side of the street, including the land beneath the shack, and 47 acres between 120th and 129th streets spanning from Harlem to Manhattanville—all told, some 71 acres of prime Manhattan real estate. He figured the value of the three parcels at somewhere between $300 million and $500 million.

  The shack had low ceilings, a wooden floor and sides, and a canvas roof. It was equipped with a stove, chairs, table, and bunk. A smoky kerosene lamp provided light; neighbors let him draw water from their taps. “I expect to stay here quite some time,” the man announced.

  Martin Montrose Molenaor’s quixotic campaign to reclaim much of upper Manhattan as his own had begun thirty-five years earlier, when on January 30, 1878, he served notices to some two hundred tenants of houses, stores, and churches occupying buildings in the three parcels in question, demanding that they either pay him rent or vacate the premises.

  “You are hereby notified that the heirs of David W. Molenaor are the owners of the premises now occupied by you,” the notice read, “and that you are required to pay the rent of the said premises to the undersigned, or, in default thereof, to surrender the same to him. Martin M. Molenaor.”

  A Catholic priest who received Molenaor’s notice tore it up. But Molenaor was just getting started. A few days later, he made the rounds again, this time painstakingly gluing large for sale signs on all the buildings. Enraged occupa
nts just as quickly removed them. “I was not long in getting that notice off my building,” William H. Higgins, owner of a hotel at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 125th Street, said, “although it had been stuck very fast with good paste.”

  In pressing his claim, Molenaor was taking on a group of extremely wealthy, influential landowners, which included not only Billings and Higgins but also Vincent Astor, James Gordon Bennett, and the Mutual Insurance Company. Observers didn’t give him much of a chance.

  “The Molenaors are poor,” one resident said, “and a lack of funds to carry on actions at law will be a disadvantage to them; while on the occupants’ side there is plenty of money to employ capable lawyers.”

  Sure enough, Molenaor’s adversaries sent what he later recalled as “an army of lawyers” after him, and by 1882 he was bankrupt. He moved to Colorado and took up ranching, then went to Flagstaff, Arizona, where he worked as an architect and builder. By 1913 he and wife Evalina had saved enough money to return east and resume the fight. In New York, Molenaor founded the Molenaor Recovery Company, with an office at 50 Church Street, and he and Evalina, along with son Wilfred, thirty-eight, and daughter Evalina, or Evelyn, forty, moved into the shack below the Billings estate. Evelyn, a nurse, became the family’s breadwinner, while Wilfred, a carpenter, assisted his father by reading up on property law.

 

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