Fran Leadon - Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

BROADWAY

A HISTORY OF

NEW YORK CITY

IN THIRTEEN MILES

FRAN LEADON

FRONTISPIECE:
Lower Broadway, looking south from Ful ton Street, 1899.

I T HAPPENED FOR THE FIRST TIME NOT ON BROADWAY BUT on Wall Street. It was a rainy, overcast afternoon, October 28, 1886, and a group of revelersarmy veterans, firemen, and a contingent of Columbia and City College studentspeeled off onto Wall Street from Broadway, where they had been marching in a parade celebrating the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. They were in high spirits and making noise. Office workers heard the commotion and as a practical joke began dumping used ticker tape from their windows onto the street below. Every window, the New York Times reported the next day, appeared to be a paper mill spouting out squirming lines of tape.

Ticker-tape parades didnt really become a Broadway tradition until 1899, when Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, was welcomed back to the city at the end of the Spanish-American War. But Broadway processions were hardly a new idea: There had been celebrations, military parades, and funerals up and down Broadway since at least as far back as the Colonial era. Many of those parades, long forgotten, were nothing if not ambitious: An 1825 parade marking completion of the Erie Canal began and ended at the Battery and took in not only Broadway but also the Bowery and Greenwich, Canal, Grand, Broome, and Pearl streets, a tour of cheer and hoopla that took five hours to complete.

In 1842 a parade inaugurating the Croton Aqueduct wound its way from the Battery up Broadway two and a half miles to Union Square, then turned around and headed south down the Bowery, detoured to the east along Grand Street, and returned along East Broadway and Chatham Street (present-day Park Row) to City Hall Park. Fully 15,000 people marched in the parade while 200,000 spectators, crowded to suffocation, the New York Tribune reported, watched from the sidewalksat a time when the citys population was less than 400,000. The mass of people and festive floats took over two hours to pass a single spot along the route. The parade was so longsix miles in totalthat by the time John Aspinwall Hadden, a young soldier marching at the head of the parade, completed the circuit and returned to City Hall Park, the tail end of the procession was still visible slowly making its way up Broadway.

The 1858 Cable Carnival celebrating the first successful connection of the Atlantic Cable included as its centerpiece a Broadway parade hailing Cyrus W. Field, a wealthy local paper merchant and the driving force behind the cable project, as a conquering hero. As Field was trundled up Broadway, he was accompanied by the crew of the steam frigate Niagara, one of two ships that had unspooled the cable across the ocean. They carried a scale model of the ship and marched just behind a wagon loaded with a huge coil of the cable itself. Then came the inevitable aldermen, policemen, firemen, and representatives of trade societies that were part of every Broadway parade, plus 2,000 laborers then occupied in the construction of Central Park, their hats festooned with sprigs of evergreen.

Thousands of people watched from rooftops and balconies along the parade route, hoping for a glimpse of the renowned Field; one balcony collapsed under the weight of spectators. It took six hours for the procession to make its way from Bowling Green to a reception at the Crystal Palace at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, where Field said he was overwhelmed by the vast crowd testifying their sympathy and approval; praises without stint and friends without number! He was hailed as Cyrus the Great, Gallant Cyrus, and the Columbus of America.

Cyrus W. Field in 1858, following his Atlantic Cable triumph.

Broadway gave itself over to cable mania. The famous Broadway jewelers Tiffany & Company struck a commemorative gold coin in Fields honor and bought miles of leftover cable from Field and cut it into short strands to sell as souvenirs. A musical production, Love and Lightning, or the Telegraph Cable, was performed at Laura Keenes Theatre, on Broadway near Bleecker Street. A special service was held at Trinity Church. Archbishop John J. Hughes buried a written tribute to Field in the cornerstone of St. Patricks Cathedral, then under construction on Fifth Avenue. The Atlantic Telegraph Polka briefly became a dance craze.

That evening the citys Common Council gave a banquet in Fields honor at the swank Metropolitan Hotel at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, with a dinner menu featuring turtle soup, lobster, salmon, oysters on the half shell, stewed terrapin, wild duck with olives, lamb tenderloin, broiled English snipe, and chartreuse of partridge with Madeira sauce. The table was ornamented with ice sculptures approximating the shapes of Queen Victoria, President James Buchanan, and Field himself. The celebration continued into the night, with a second procession down Broadway by torchlight. There were illuminations, fireworks, and strings of colored lanterns, lending Broadway a carnivalesque appearance which it is almost impossible to describe, one reporter for the New York Herald raved.

The Cable Carnival procession passes up Broadway.

In the late nineteenth century Fifth Avenue began to vie with Broadway as the citys uptown parade route, and Broadway parades became truncated, typically encompassing only the streets first mile between Bowling Green and City Hall Park. But as Broadway parades got shorter in length, the advent of ticker tape gave them a thrilling new vertical dimension. Between 1900 and 1970 the city was absolutely besotted with ticker tape: Over those seventy years, through two world wars and the Great Depression, ticker tape rained down on Broadway, cascading from windows high above the street and gathering in drifts along the curbs. (Budget cutbacks and the general urban malaise of the 1970s and 80s turned ticker-tape paradesthe ticker tape replaced with shredded sheets of 8-by-11-inch paperinto exceedingly rare events.)

But during its golden era, if someone was famous, even temporarily, they had a good chance of entering the city through a storm of paper. Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Jesse Owens, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy were obvious choices for adulation, but throngs also assembled in Broadway to cheer Douglas Wrong Way Corrigan, Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden, President-elect Jlio Prestes de Albuquerque of Brazil, and German airship designer Hugo Eckener. (Einstein insisted on an impromptu detour from Broadway to the Lower East Side, where Jewish immigrants greeted him with something approaching euphoria. New York has been kind, most kind, he told reporters the next day. Your citys landscape is not the landscape of a town. It is more like the landscape of a mountain in its impressiveness.) Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, was honored with a parade in 1926; two weeks later so was Amelia Corson, the