Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  They were later called masters of the beaux arts style, but most scholars say that there was no such style. The words mean simply “beautiful arts.” As the critic and historian Henry Hope Reed has written: “The key element that identified what we call Beaux-Arts is not the rule of locking façade to plan, the emphasis on symmetry in the plan, or the eclecticism, but the powerful drive for ornamentation.” The ornamentation, often executed by very skillful Italian and French immigrant craftsmen, made the buildings unintended expressions of the New York alloy; in the end, New York itself is the supreme example of the strengths of the eclectic.

  The architecture also expressed the wider culture of the late nineteenth century, when Paris was the artistic capital of the world. If Henry James or Marcel Proust had been architects instead of masters of ornamented prose, they’d surely have made buildings that resembled, in their own special ways, those that still exist in New York. Neither, of course, was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, but each lived in the world of which it was a part. Some École students were painters or sculptors, most were French, not American, and all learned from one another. Most of them lived in the bohemian world made so attractively real in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, a huge bestseller that served as a kind of social training manual for a generation of young artists.

  Those who labored in the workshops of the École in Paris were thoroughly educated in the arts of the long European past. Naturally, some rebelled against the disciplines of drawing from casts and copies of masterpieces. But for most, the training was not seen as a hindrance to creativity. Most students acknowledged a continuity between the past and present, and the American past (or so the Americans believed) was also European. For them, all of Europe was the Old Country. They drew on the past for ideas and inspiration in the same way that artists in the Italian Renaissance did when they went sifting through Roman models. If you were an artist, you took what was valuable, made your own variations on the older models, and discarded other models.

  By the time I was an art student at Pratt Institute in the late 1950s, almost all of the work of the men from the American Renaissance was being dismissed as “eclectic.” It was not “new.” It was not “original.” It did not adhere to “the law” as set down by the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan: “Form follows function.” It didn’t matter that in his only New York building—still there at 65-69 Bleecker Street, just off Broadway—Sullivan didn’t follow his own law. The building is a masterpiece of ornamentation.

  Sullivan’s maxim was used to justify some of the worst architectural junk in the twentieth-century city. These new blank and faceless examples of the International Style, with its roots in the Bauhaus, made the beaux arts buildings even more valuable presences in the city. They were also crucial to the city’s sense of itself. That is why the destruction of Penn Station in 1963-66 created such an uproar of protest and rage. I was living in Europe in 1963-64, working as a reporter, and when I returned, the demolition of this great building was already under way. Again and again, I would walk around the periphery or stand across Seventh Avenue wondering how they could destroy that row of columns, the pediments, the simple grandeur. Each time I came for a visit to Penn Station, there was less of it. I was not alone, gazing at this immense act of municipal vandalism and whispering, You bastards. You stupid goddamned bastards.

  The station was designed, as were so many of our treasures, by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. The basic model was the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, but the designers never lost sight of its function as a railroad terminal. It was the first to include electrically powered trains in the original planning, connecting by a new tunnel to New Jersey and the vast continent beyond. The Long Island Railroad was also part of the plan, carrying thousands of commuters each day to the growing suburbs. Construction started in 1902, as existing houses were cleared and workmen began to dig eighteen feet into the site, which stretched from Seventh to Eighth avenues, between Thirty-first and Thirty-third streets. Thousands of New Yorkers came to see the process of construction, including the painter George Bellows. Seen today, his paintings of the site have an eerie resemblance to Ground Zero in the weeks after September 11, 2001, with the deep pit, the rubble, the burning fires. The difference is obvious: Bellows was capturing the construction of beauty, not the mass destruction of human life.

  But there were many Penn Stations, not simply the one I remember and Bellows painted. Each was seen through separate eyes, by people of all ages, classes, and races. After the destruction, each of those remembered Penn Stations inflamed the anger of millions of New Yorkers before cooling into nostalgia. There was the Penn Station of memory, of arrivals and departures, of hope and disappointment, and the trembling prospects of romance. How many had arrived in that waiting room to begin new lives, passing through a magnificent place that made each arrival feel momentous? Such people were filled with desire for careers, for excitement, for the great velocity of the city. Many found what they were looking for. But how many left through the same vast room in bitterness and defeat italicized by that same dominating majesty? I’d look at the site in 1964 and 1965, and remember the great spaces of the waiting room, with its high, graceful wrought-iron arches and many windows, the whole suffused by day with the light of the city and at night—if you only looked up—with rectangles of a dark, luminous glamour. For generations, young men had waited near the clock for young women arriving for a night together on the town. I was one of them. We could look at the ruins of the station and remember girls in polo coats with snow melting in their hair. We could remember what followed an arrival. Certain tiny restaurants in the Village, or wanderings through the Metropolitan Museum, or trips to the Five Spot to hear Thelonious Monk. We could remember a time when we were so young that we thought the things we loved would last forever.

  When it was over, and that Penn Station was gone, and a new, infinitely inferior one put in place on the site, along with the fourth Madison Square Garden, the anger did not go away. The vandals had attacked some core image New Yorkers had of their city and themselves. The landmarks movement rose from the rubble. Now we know: Such a thing will never happen again. My own anger has faded, but I still regret one accident of life. Because I was in Europe at the time of the first assault, I never had a chance to walk through that magnificent waiting room and run my hands over the sensual marble and travertine, and say a proper good-bye.

  Chapter Five

  The Music of What Happens

  FOR ME, THIS commonplace is true: Broadway exists as a concrete place and as an idea. As a place, physical, touchable, it stretches the length of Manhattan from the Battery to the Harlem River, just short of thirteen miles, and then moves four more miles into the Bronx and as far into Westchester as Sleepy Hollow, a final destination that would have delighted Washington Irving. I’ve walked most of the avenue in Manhattan block by block across more than a half century, and certain parts of it live vividly within me no matter where I am. Broadway in my mind is an immense tree, with its roots deep in the soil at the foot of Manhattan, which is why I insist so stubbornly to my friends that the uptown places I cherish on Broadway are actually part of Downtown.

  There is the Broadway block on the Upper West Side where the Thalia movie house once stood at Ninety-fifth Street and where I first saw the films of Kurosawa, Fellini, and Bergman. It drew students and faculty from Columbia University, from the Village (where it resides in time with the Art and Eighth Street theaters as part of Downtown), and from as far away as Brooklyn and New Jersey. There was a coffee shop nearby, its name gone from memory, where knots of people sat up after the movies, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and argued about the French new wave and whether Black Orpheus was a drama or a musical, while a few auteurists insisted that Howard Hawks was the equal of Eisenstein.

  There are certain Broadway buildings where my friends once lived, full of laughter and passion and intelligence, right up to the hour of their deaths. Other Broadway blocks are a mus
hy blur of shops and food markets and take-out stores. They offer the cuisine of the New York alloy: sushi and pizza and tacos, or delights from India and Thailand and China. That is, they tempt you with the same food that can be found in the parish of Trinity Church and in all other boroughs, the food that can be delivered to home or office in all weathers. On parts of Broadway, in the mornings and at dusk, hundreds of people walk dogs. Across the afternoons, nannies push baby carriages past the latest outposts of Starbucks. Kids rush around on skateboards, leaping over curbs, terrifying the old. Scrawny guys on bicycles demand passage on crowded sidewalks, their helmeted heads wearing masks of self-righteousness. Everywhere there are dense lines of trucks: delivering groceries to Gristede’s or Pathmark, packages from UPS and Fed Ex and the US Postal Service, while police officers from the traffic division lay tickets on illegally parked cars and unattended trucks. I’ll only be two minutes, I swear! You already had your two minutes, buddy. . . .

  But there also exists in me an idea of Broadway. It swells with every variety of urban swagger. You see the swagger in the old downtown financial district, where men in conservative suits and overcoats walk toward offices, or clubs, or lunch at India House in Hanover Square as if certain of their destinies. Today, in cold weather, they are once more wearing fedoras and sometimes look like players from the movies of the 1930s. The swagger appears around City Hall, where men and women with agendas hurry out of taxis or limousines and pass the policemen on permanent alert against terrorists and skip up the stairs to meet with the mayor. You see it beyond Chambers Street, among the almost eight thousand federal employees who work in the federal buildings, men and women with the confident stride of those who have attained permanent employment.

  The swagger isn’t seen among the thousands of immigrants lined up each morning of the week for visits with bureaucrats who will decide whether they can stay in New York or must depart unwillingly for their version of the Old Country. I hope that in a short while the time will come when they can swagger too. Nor do you see the swagger among the last of the men who in the nineteenth century made that part of Broadway the center of the fabric industry. Talk to them and they sound like the exhausted survivors of a once-regal line, their businesses reeling from cheap imports from China and Latin America, their rents rising in the great loft buildings that were built by their mercantile ancestors. They walk in a more tentative way, eyes on the sidewalks before them, like men who know that they will soon go away.

  And yet here come the young people who are now filling the emptying lofts: artists, lawyers, designers, computer people. Even in the wake of the dot-com collapse, when you saw SUVs every weekend being loaded up with computers, they have attained the Broadway swagger. They have survived a long season of adversity. They’ve learned that life here will never be easy, that there will be no long runs of success upon success, that impermanence is part of the deal. Sometimes, New York knocks you down. It also teaches you, by example, how to get up.

  And so you see them in the mornings with their children, waiting for school buses or walking with them to the schools of Tribeca. The domestic responsibilities are satisfied, and then they walk to work, often south to Wall Street or north to some of the temporary uptown offices that were opened after September 11. The destination doesn’t matter. They walk with the swagger. And it was earned. After the calamity, they did not run.

  To be sure, the Downtown stretch of Broadway is not the same as the grand avenue that pushes up through Soho and into Union Square and Times Square and Columbus Circle and through the Upper West Side into Harlem and beyond. Nor is it the generic Broadway of theaters and musicals, haunted by images of Damon Runyon, actually seven or eight blocks long and two blocks wide. Obviously, each of these Broadways is shaped by the neighborhoods through which it passes. Some are centers of retail shopping, or transportation, or entertainment. Others are residential. Many are too mixed for narrow labels. On some streets you can see a heroin addict trying to rent her ruined body to a tourist. You can see peddlers of knockoff Rolex watches or Vuitton handbags or the latest CDs. Or you can see the ghost of Broadway Danny Rose coming toward you from the direction of the Carnegie Deli.

  All, in mysterious ways, are meshed in my head. The idea called Broadway is one of mixture, of difference, of a familiar unknowability, and of movement too, of rushing, honking velocity. On certain days, I walk the avenue and feel in my arrogance that I know everybody. I know what’s on the walls of their living rooms. I hear the talk at their dining tables. I know what they drink and how they vote. And then I cross the street and I’m an alien, knowing nothing. I descend into the nearest subway station for the swift ride home.

  Broadway never obeyed the commandments of the grid, and the reason was simple: Broadway was Broadway, and even the planners knew they must not tamper with what it already was. They handled it on the map by leaving it out. Today, it’s the only major Manhattan avenue that moves diagonally across the island, from the center to the west. It is the only one that carries us through time from the seventeenth century to the present. It will surely be part of the innovations of the unknowable Manhattan future.

  By the 1840s, Broadway was one of several man-made asphalt rivers moving north into the open land of Manhattan. Eventually it would absorb the Bloomingdale Road and the road called the Boulevard, making Broadway the longest street on the island. Downtown in midcentury, above and below Trinity Church, was the city’s most illustrious commercial avenue, filled with elegant shops, restaurants, places of entertainment, side-street bordellos, and evolving forms of merchandising. Speed ruled. One primary example of this evolution (and the velocity that drove it) still exists. In 1846, while American soldiers were fighting in Mexico, a diminutive (five-foot-tall) Irish immigrant named Alexander T. Stewart opened the city’s first department store on Broadway between Chambers and Reade streets. With that one act of innovation and faith, Stewart radically changed the city.

  The store was five stories high (a sixth and seventh floor were later added) and gleamed with its facing of white Tuckahoe marble. Immediately, it became known in the newspapers as the Marble Palace, so distinctive a structure in the downtown city that it did not bear Stewart’s name or any other; suddenly, it was just there, the Marble Palace. For a brief period during its construction, it was known too as Stewart’s Folly, because he chose to build on the east side of Broadway, and right behind his emerging store lay the Five Points. No decent woman, it was said, would risk shopping there, where thieves and pickpockets and other predators could strike swiftly and then vanish into the lawless alleys of the city’s worst slum. At night, it was predicted, armed gangs from the Points would come to loot the place. Stewart was clearly a mindless fool.

  But the palazzo-style Marble Palace was an instant success, and Stewart revolutionized New York merchandising. He divided his store into departments that made it easier for customers to choose goods. He insisted on fixed prices, which meant that nobody could bargain for better prices, including clerks who might be privately servicing friends or relatives. He invented the low-priced “sale,” offering the remainders of damaged lots of goods (the “fire sale”) or out-of-fashion clothing for quick turnovers of cash. He understood that most consumer decisions were made by women and so hired almost two hundred handsome male clerks with impeccable manners. Aristocratic women flocked to the Marble Palace from uptown. New York was abruptly, and permanently, changed.

  Other downtown merchandisers began to imitate Stewart, opening new stores on Broadway as it pushed north into what is now known as Soho. These included Arnold Constable, Tiffany, Hearn Brothers, Brooks Brothers, and Lord and Taylor. Window-shopping was born. Business boomed. Eventually, Stewart followed his customers uptown and opened in 1862 a grander store on Broadway between Ninth and Tenth streets, across the avenue from the elegant Grace Church (which was now drawing many refugees from the old Trinity parish). The newspapers dubbed it the Iron Palace, for its cast-iron architecture. Stewart then used the original
Marble Palace for the production of clothes by battalions of seamstresses, most of them Irish. The new store had a central rotunda and organ music, and was even more successful than the store he’d built on the corner of Chambers Street. Stewart became a man of such wealth that only the Astors could rival him. For a time (in that era before income taxes), he paid more taxes than any other American. His private mansion on Thirty-fourth Street was for a while the grandest in the city, with a block-long sculpture gallery and a collection of paintings that at least in bulk was one of the most impressive in the city. The old Knickerbocker society never accepted him, with his abrupt Belfast accent, his hard work, his acknowledgment of his Irish roots when he sent food and other aid to those afflicted by the Irish famine. But if A. T. Stewart cared about the approval of the old elite, he never showed it.

  The first Marble Palace is still there at Broadway and Chambers Street. It has recently been rehabilitated after years of decay, but there is no sign that tells passersby about Alexander T. Stewart or his extraordinary monument. He is, in fact, largely forgotten by all New Yorkers except students of the city’s history. One reason: He left no heirs. There would be no family foundations to perpetuate his name, no doors erected in his memory to decorate a city church, no college scholarships. Even today’s department store operators seem to know little about him. After his death in 1876 there was a brief period of lurid publicity when his body was stolen in 1878 from the graveyard of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery and held for $200,000 ransom. His widow and her lawyer refused to pay. Bargaining ensued, that wretched process that Stewart so despised in life and commerce. Eventually, the widow paid $18,000 for a collection of bones that fit into a gladstone bag. It was impossible in those days to know if the bones were actually those of the richest single individual of the period. But they were buried with ceremony in Garden City, Long Island, a town established by Stewart to provide affordable housing to those who worked for him.