Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House, Fifth Avenue’s historic shopping blocks, Times Square and Herald Square are the “city” that moved uptown and today span 34th to 66th Streets.
As a residential neighborhood Madison Square developed “overnight” so to speak in the 1850s. Both the massive Irish and German waves of immigration in the late 1840s and the Astor Riots of 1849 were pathways leading to the refrain of the upper class after 1850, Above Bleecker! Brownstone homes soon filled the blocks around Madison Square.
But Madison Square never had a neighborhood feel like the blocks in today’s East Village and parts of Greenwich Village had, where many upper class New Yorkers lived in the 1820s and 30s on Places.
Brownstone blocks around Madison Square in the 1850s were the first large scale developments on the grid, where there was no pre-ordained plan. Along with churches, clubs, and hotels, it wasn’t until 1868 that large retail stores and theaters moved into the residential neighborhood: Arnold Constable & Co, on Broadway and 19th Street, and the short-lived Booth Theater at the corner of 6th Avenue and 23rd Street. More shops and theaters followed and a cluster of theaters coalesced along Broadway north of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, adjacent the Tenderloin.
Color coordinated shopping districts are shown below on the Viele map. While the grid set a boiler plate for the city to fill in, elevation seems to have played a role in what was built where.
Key to above
1. Fifth Avenue Hotel 1854 – 1908
2. Madison Square Garden, 1890 – 1920
3. Metropolitan Life Insurance, 1893; clock tower, 1909
These first few posts lay down the broad strokes of how the built environment developed. Future posts will look around the area in more detail. These images show the extent of the historic shopping district.
Looking down Broadway from 23rd Street (left) at the carriage trade blocks of Gilded Age New York.
By the early 1900s, high end retailing turned up Fifth Avenue, following the upper class residential. Retailers first built along the slope of Murray Hill, just north of the Waldorf Astoria, and in 1914 made their so-called “great move” to upper Fifth Avenue.
Sixth Avenue began to develop as a shopping district in 1876 with B. Altman, and the area would develop as the middle class department store district of Gilded Age New York, stretching about the same number of blocks as the Broadway shops and stores, but in larger, fewer buildings.
We can see the department stores of ladies mile; we can’t see any old theaters.
New York has No Old Theaters
New York City can boast the largest cluster of old theaters in the country, likely the world, with 40 in Times Square, all 100 years old or more.
As one of the oldest US cities, one might think New York would have one of the oldest theaters in the country. It’s not even close, New York’s oldest theater is the Lyceum from 1903; Philadelphia and Boston’s oldest theaters are from 1809 and 1859 respectively!
If an owner/developer of a property couldn’t build-to-density, they could at least adapt-for-reuse to the same ends. A theater, however, is essentially a big empty building; what is an old theater good for? Traveling downtown from Times Square, one passes old homes, shops, hotels, and restaurants, but no old theaters, they would not survive New York’s rapacious uptown-moving real estate market.
Unlike homes that can transform into apartment buildings, and shops and stores that can transform into department stores, and countinghouses that can transform into office towers, with theaters, the stage can get bigger and more people can be squeezed in, that’s it. Theaters can only get larger, and that’s exactly what they did moving uptown through history. Each new silent movie house in Times Square through the 1910s and 20s was a thousand seats or larger than the next, reaching a peak with Radio City Music Hall, capacity 6,000.
It’s remarkable to think, given New York doesn’t have old theaters, it has so many. New York probably destroyed more theaters in its history than most cities ever had. As a one-time industrial powerhouse, New York was once a single bachelor male society living in bachelor flats, lodging houses, and, in a time before radio and television, went out all the time. There were once more than 100 Broadway theaters, including those below 42nd Street.