Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  But gawkers kept showing up. They couldn’t get over the novelty of it: A farm! On Broadway! “[Almost] every other week,” the Times reported in 1935, “Signor di Benedetto awakes to find a junked auto toppled into his parsnips from the grassy banks of Broadway.”

  Vincenzo’s ice routes melted with the advent of home refrigeration. By 1940, Patsy was operating a stationery store a few blocks from the farm with help from Vito, who manned the counter; Carlo was making deliveries for an embroidery company; and Vincenzo and Mary had sublet part of their farm to a used-car lot and converted another section into a parking lot, leaving only one-third of the block for farming. Vincenzo was listed on the 1940 Federal Census not as a farmer but as the parking lot’s “watchman” and Mary as the “assistant watchman.” That year the farm sold only about $50 worth of produce.

  Vincenzo Benedetto died in 1943 at fifty-eight. The farm was sold about 1954, and by the following year an immense New York Telephone Company facility had been built on the site. That building is still there today, repurposed as an office complex that includes a branch of Manhattan Mini Storage, Hostos Community College, Everyday Christian Church, a law office, a violin maker’s workshop, and a French grocery store that charges $6.90 for a jar of rhubarb jam.

  JOSEPHINE LEFT HOME when she was still a teenager, and in looking back on her childhood wasn’t nostalgic for the old family farm. “It was just someplace to live; let’s put it that way,” she said. Her upbringing in the midst of the Depression may have been hard, but Josephine could roam among rows of fruit trees and corn, smell the earth, and see expanses of sky, all of which made her childhood much closer to the experiences of New York children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when land was still measured in acres, than to that of twentieth- and twenty-first-century children confined within the strict boundaries of apartments and city blocks.

  “You had freedom,” Josephine remembered. “You didn’t have to listen to your neighbors.”

  CHAPTER 49

  INDIAN TRAIL

  BROADWAY IS AN OLD INDIAN TRAIL—EVERYONE KNOWS that. Or is it? Martha Lamb didn’t mention it in her three-volume History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise, and Progress, published in 1877, nor did Stephen Jenkins in his dense Broadway history The Greatest Street in the World, from 1911. (For her part, Lamb didn’t think Manhattan’s Lenape Indians were worth studying anyway: “It was not an interesting people whom the Dutch found in possession of Manhattan Island,” she wrote. “They have ever been surrounded with darkness and dullness, and we can promise very little entertainment while we call them before us.”)

  The notion that Broadway began as a Lenape path picked up steam in 1922, when Reginald Pelham Bolton, an English-born engineer and self-trained archeologist, published Indian Paths in the Great Metropolis, which described Manhattan’s Lenape traveling over an extensive network of roads beaten into the earth by, as he put it, “the patient art of the wild men.” Bolton, father of Broadway playwright Guy Bolton (Anything Goes, Lady Be Good, Girl Crazy) lived for many years on 158th Street, where neighbors affectionately referred to him as the “No. 1 citizen of Washington Heights.”

  Much of Bolton’s research was centered on the environs of Washington Heights and Inwood, where the relative lack of development made archeological digs possible. As a longtime member of the New-York Historical Society’s “Field Exploration Committee,” Bolton and colleague William L. Calver tramped around upper Manhattan in bowler hats and coats and ties, carrying picks and shovels and rescuing artifacts from construction sites. In Inwood they discovered not only Revolutionary War encampments strewn with bullets and buttons, but also Lenape gravesites, trash piles, and oyster “middens” (heaps of discarded shells).

  Bolton reasoned that the Lenape must have had a system of pathways to get from place to place. He connected known sites of Lenape inhabitation with red lines and before long had uncovered, or rather designed, an entire network of Lenape roads crisscrossing Manhattan. Indian Paths in the Great Metropolis is almost pure conjecture—“probably” appears in the text thirty-three times, along with phrases such as “we can suppose” and “we can imagine”—but upon its publication was hailed as the definitive word on the subject. And it included the revelation that Broadway might have begun as what Bolton called the “ancient trail of the Red Men of Manhattan, known as the Weck-quaes-geek Path.”

  THE WICKQUASGECKS (or Weckquaskeeks or Weckquaesgweks—there isn’t a definitive spelling) were a tribe of Lenape Indians that lived in present-day Westchester County. Bolton’s “Weck-quaes-geek Path” appears to have been derived from a single reference in Dutch explorer David Pietersz De Vries’s Short Historical and Journal Notes of several Voyages Made in the Four Parts of the World, Namely, Europe, Africa, Asia, and America, an account of his expeditions from 1632 to 1644. Originally published in 1655, it was translated by Henry C. Murphy and reprinted in New York in 1853 under the title Voyages from Holland to America, A.D. 1632–1644.

  De Vries wrote that in 1642 a “harmless” Dutch wheelwright, Claes Cornelissen Swits, was transacting a business deal with a Wickquasgeck Indian when the Indian killed him with an axe, apparently in retaliation for the murder of the Indian’s uncle by a Dutch settler some years before. (Swits’s murder was one of the inciting incidents that led to Kieft’s War, a bloodbath instigated by New Amsterdam’s director-general Willem Kieft against the local Lenape.)

  According to Murphy’s 1853 translation, De Vries described Swits’s murder as taking place in his house near “Densel-bay,” apparently a misspelling of “Deutal,” Old Dutch for a curved, scimitar-like blade that described the shape of a cove along the East River between present-day 46th and 47th streets. (Deutal Bay was corrupted into the English “Turtle Bay” and is still the name of a neighborhood there today, although the bay itself was filled in and forgotten in the early nineteenth century.) Swits’s house, De Vries wrote, was “on the road, over which the Indians from Wickquasgeck passed daily.”

  In 1909, J. Franklin Jameson inserted De Vries’s account into his massive Narratives of New Netherland, but in his version Swits’s house was “on the Wickquasgeck road over which the Indians passed daily.”

  There is a critical difference between Jameson’s version of that sentence and Murphy’s translation of De Vries, who hadn’t named the road in question nor described it as an Indian trail: In Murphy’s translation De Vries simply called it a “road” that “Indians from Wickquasgeck,” meaning Indians from Westchester, used on a daily basis—it could have been any road, including one built by the Dutch. In Jameson’s version the road became the “Wickquasgeck road,” implying a particular kind of road—an Indian path.

  Other historians took up the cause, and soon the “Wickquasgeck road” seemed as real and well traveled as Broadway itself.

  In 1928, the sixth and final volume of architect and historian Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes’s masterful The Iconography of Manhattan Island went to press. A thick, heavy set of books—the term “doorstopper” is not adequate here—brimming with maps and reproductions of rare prints and documents, it offers a meticulous day-by-day chronology of life in the city, and an expansive bibliography. The Iconography remains without question the most ambitious and complete history of the city ever produced. It also furthered the connection between Broadway and the “Wickquasgeck road.”

  The Iconography’s sixth volume included a series of foldout maps depicting, in full-color overlays, the boundaries of Manhattan’s original farms and land grants, accompanied by text chronicling how the land had been measured, partitioned, and conveyed from one generation to the next. Jennie F. Macarthy of Hackensack, New Jersey, who for forty years had worked as a researcher at the Title Guarantee & Trust Company and was an expert at deciphering city records, was the author of that section, and her work was, at least for those obsessed with the arcane trajectories of real-estate titles as they passed from generation to generation, riveting.

  Since lower Broadway and
the upland colonial highways it eventually absorbed—the Bloomingdale Road and parts of the Kingsbridge Road—often functioned as property lines in Manhattan’s early settlement, Macarthy, in addressing its supposed origin, described in detail the supposed path of the “Wickquasgeck road.”

  “There is hardly a doubt,” she wrote, but that Cryn Fredericksz, the Dutch West India Company’s surveyor, had found an existing “Indian road” at the southern tip of the island and incorporated it into his plan for New Amsterdam. Macarthy figured that the road ran along the present-day line of Broadway from the Battery to City Hall Park, then branched off at Chatham Street (Park Row) to the Bowery and followed what was later called the Eastern, or Boston, Post Road to Harlem. From there, she guessed the path followed the Kingsbridge Road across the middle of the island and wound its way up to Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

  Macarthy’s version of the Wickquasgeck road only took into account Broadway’s southern- and northernmost sections. What of its middle miles, the section from present-day 23rd to 147th streets that followed the path of the old Bloomingdale Road? Both Macarthy and Bolton believed that it, too, had begun as an Indian trail.

  The Bloomingdale Road was one of several highways in Manhattan opened by “An Act for the Laying out Regulateing [sic] Clearing and preserving Publick Comon [sic] highways thro’out this Colony,” passed on June 19, 1703, by the provincial legislature of the New York colony. The act appointed three commissioners, William Anderson, Clement Elsworth, and Pieter Oblinus, to complete a survey and report, which they turned in four years later, on June 16, 1707. Their report didn’t mention any Indian trails but did include an enticing ambiguity in its description of the Bloomingdale Road’s route: “From the House at the End of New York lane [the Bowery], there is . . . to lye a Road turning to the left hand the Course being Northerly and so by Great Kills [a salt marsh along the Hudson River between present-day 40th and 45th streets] & forward as the said Road now lyes unto Theunis Edis’s & Capt. D’ Key’s thro the said Edis’s land.”

  “As the said Road now lyes” implies that sections of the Bloomingdale Road were already there in 1707, but it’s unclear whether the commissioners were referring to parts of the road that had been built since their survey began in 1703, or whether they meant older sections. Did Anderson, Elsworth, and Oblinus cut an entirely new road up the West Side, or did they reuse an existing highway? And if they did, was that highway so old that it had been there before the Dutch arrived? At that point, the research trail goes cold.

  And what of the Kingsbridge Road? It, too, as Bolton and Macarthy suggested, could have been an Indian path well before it was first surveyed in 1707. Of all the various roads that were cobbled together into modern Broadway, the Kingsbridge Road, straddling as it does the narrow neck of upper Manhattan, seems most likely, for purely topographical reasons, to have once been a Lenape trail. The island gets so skinny there, where else would the Lenape have walked but along a path that must have at least occasionally coincided with the Kingsbridge Road? But there’s no evidence that it was an Indian road, either, other than its proximity to the Lenape habitation sites that Bolton uncovered. As with every road, time brings incremental changes in width, length, and direction, and the route of the Kingsbridge Road changed dramatically around the time of the American Revolution, when a leisurely loop that had brought the road from the middle of the island to the edge of the Harlem River was closed in favor of a more direct straight path to the King’s Bridge over Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

  SINCE BROADWAY’S HISTORY has been one of constant, tumultuous change, it’s reassuring to consider that America’s most famous street might lead not just uptown and downtown but also back in time. Wouldn’t it be nice, wouldn’t it blunt the knife edge of unrelenting progress a bit, if it turned out that not every ancient landmark had been erased in the making of New York? What if an Indian highway was still there, right under the sidewalk? And what if not just any street had been an Indian trail, but Broadway?

  “The white men did not remove it, but built upon it, so that today if the modern pavements were removed remains of the original path could still be found,” the New York Times stated emphatically in 1922, soon after Bolton’s Indian Paths was published. “Broadway an Indian Trail. Present Famous ‘Bright Light’ Pathway Used as Artery of Trade by the Aborigines,” the Pioneer Express of Pembina, North Dakota, declared that same year, as what had been a local theory gradually became a national fact. It wasn’t so much that an Indian trail had become Broadway but that Broadway had become an Indian trail.

  CHAPTER 50

  WHERE DOES THIS ROAD END?

  LET’S SAY YOU’RE A WICKQUASGECK INDIAN WITH AN URGENT need to leave Manhattan at the end of a long, hard day and get back home to Westchester. You’d find yourself at the edge of a stream where the waters of Spuyten Duyvil Creek—the name is Dutch for “Spitting Devil,” which accurately described the creek’s tumultuous currents—and the Harlem River joined at the northern tip of Manhattan. With no bridge across the creek, the Wickquasgecks were forced to wait for low tide and then wade across at a point called, of all things, the “wading place.”

  In 1693, Frederick Philipse built the first version of King’s Bridge across the stream, connecting Manhattan to Westchester by way of the Kingsbridge Road. The bridge was rebuilt in 1713 a bit to the west of the original, destroyed several times during the Revolution, and again rebuilt after the war. Well into the nineteenth century the community that grew up around the bridge maintained a rustic quality—at least at first glance.

  “The inhabitants near this bridge appear to be unsophisticated and primitive in their ways, but they are only superficially so,” journalist Charles Dawson Shanly reported in the Atlantic Monthly in 1868. “They dredge their own oysters, which lends an air of self-support and independence to the place; but then they charge New York prices for them, which shows that with them rural simplicity is but skin-deep.”

  The only craft that could navigate the shallow waters of the Spuyten Duyvil were canoes and skiffs, and for decades various plans had been put forth to replace the creek with a canal capable of admitting larger ships. The Erie Canal’s opening in 1825 had inspired formation of the Harlem Canal Company, but that venture failed after only a few excavations had been made. But the idea of a canal across Manhattan wouldn’t die: The year before the Erie Canal opened, Governor DeWitt Clinton had predicted that New York City would become the “granary of the world,” and by the 1870s the city was exporting well over 100 million bushels of flour, corn, and other grains every year. Much of that grain was exported to Great Britain, which in the 1870s bought between 60 million and 70 million bushels of corn annually from the United States. A canal across upper Manhattan would expedite the exportation of grain and other products by creating a direct link from the Hudson River to Long Island Sound.

  In 1875, the New York legislature turned the canal project over to the federal government, and in 1878, Congress authorized the first appropriations. But lawsuits brought by landowners, and the slow drip of congressional funding, delayed the project. The first scoopfuls of mud weren’t dredged until 1888.

  When work began, it was fully expected that the United States Ship Canal, or the Harlem River Ship Canal as everyone called it, would transform upper Manhattan into the center of shipping for the entire eastern seaboard, causing the commercial center of the city to shift to the north and transforming 125th Street into the most important thoroughfare in the city, the “Broadway of Harlem.”

  The project had three components: Removing rocks at the mouth of the Harlem River where it joined the East River; widening and dredging the Harlem River itself; and cutting a channel through Manhattan’s neck. The cut was, by far, the most difficult proposition.

  The first option was to go through Sherman’s Creek and Dyckman Street straight across to the Hudson; the second to go through Sherman’s Creek but bend north along the base of Inwood Hill to Spuyten Duyvil Creek; the third to dredge and widen the existin
g horseshoe curve of the Harlem River and Spuyten Duyvil Creek; and the fourth, the route engineers ultimately picked, to cut straight across Manhattan’s neck for three-quarters of a mile, bypassing the S-curve of the Spuyten Duyvil and severing Marble Hill, a knoll at the tip of the island long known for its marble quarries, from the rest of the island.

  The carving of the channel proceeded in two parts: One team of laborers, many of them Italian immigrants, made a cut from the Harlem River west to Broadway while a second team cut from Broadway to Spuyten Duyvil Creek. By 1890, passengers on New York Central trains traveling along the east side of the Harlem River were treated to a sight the New York Sun likened to the cellar of a titan’s palace, a huge chasm of “astonishing breadth and depth” that had completely severed Manhattan’s tip. Broadway was temporarily propped up on the wedge of rock that remained between the two excavations and was ultimately carried over the canal on an elegant new steel bridge.

  When the canal finally opened, on June 17, 1895, city, state, and federal officials marked the occasion with a reenactment of the ecstatic “Wedding of the Waters” festivities that had inaugurated the Erie Canal seventy years earlier. A marine parade of steamers, yachts, tugs, rowboats, and the warship Cincinnati proceeded up the Hudson to Inwood, where they lined up in the river and then passed slowly and cautiously down the canal, sailing under bridges crowded with spectators. The flotilla emerged into the East River and Long Island Sound, whereupon Mayor William L. Strong, on the deck of the steamship Elaine, handed a ceremonial keg of Lake Erie water to one Grace McVeigh (someone’s daughter; described in the Evening World as “pretty”), who poured it overboard amid much hoopla, just as officials had done in 1825. The pageant concluded with a banquet, speeches, and, later that evening, fireworks.