The problem with defining a city isn’t that there aren’t any good definitions for what makes a city, a city; there are many. The question becomes, can any explain what happened on Manhattan? When we say “the city“ moved uptown, does it mean anything more than the fact more buildings were built?
A linguistic lifeline comes from Lewis Mumford and his 1937 answer in the Architectural Record to “What Is a City?” After explaining why cities are so complicated, he says
The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.
The phrase and snippet: a theater of social action is the heuristic key needed to decode New York’s built environment. When applied to building-types, especially shops and theaters, we can make sense of things.
The Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center, Fifth Avenue’s historic shopping blocks, Times Square and Herald Square, were collectively a “theater of social action” that moved uptown. They were, together one of three waves of development that overran and overwrote one another between City Hall to Central Park; they were the middle wave. As the second wave of development, entertainment and shopping districts were architecturally stylistically, technologically distinct (as well as being fundamentally different in other ways) from the suburban residential neighborhoods that came before, and loft and factory buildings that went after.
Uptown moving “theaters” of largely private residential domestic tranquility were followed by “theaters” of social action, that is, buildings and blocks of commercial consumption in the form of shops and theaters that were (mostly) open to and invited in the public. In turn, these structures were followed by “theaters” of business districts in cast iron and steel frame for manufacturing, industry, and trade.
This is not a new way of looking at the city. Authors and guidebooks have regularly described the horizontal layering of uptown-moving sectors through the middle of the island. A typical description of the geo-spatial ordering bottom-to-top is: financial⇒wholesale trade⇒commercial retail⇒residential. Depending on the year of the guidebook, districts shift uptown over time.
Of the three waves of development that ran from City Hall to Central Park, the middle wave was the “city,” and today’s New York City stretches from 34th to 66th Streets comprising Herald and Times Squares, Fifth Avenue and Lincoln Center.
All four came from Madison Square.
Hotels, apartment-hotels, flats, and other forms of shared housing bridged both the residential and commercial cultural waves of development; they have their own timeline and evolution in the cityscape. But just as Times Square has theaters, and Herald Square has department stores, Madison Square is the repository of early forms of multiple-family housing before the apartment building: apartment-hotels, flats, bachelor flats, family apartments, French flats, artists’ lofts, and early coops. Content for future posts.
A note about the map below: Districts are depicted as “leapfrogging” uptown through the island, that wasn’t always the case, sometimes districts expanded into new areas block by block. (I apologize for the rudimentary appearance of the map.)
Below, we look at the four districts around Madison Square (23rd Street, Broadway and Fifth Avenue) during the Gilded Age: where they were relative to each another, the order they developed around Madison Square, and how they moved to their current-day locations. Again, sorry for this graphic, it’s a little rough.
Creating the Gilded Age City, District-by-District
The Academy of Music: Upper Class Theater
Madison Square was an upper class residential neighborhood of brownstone homes, churches, clubs and schools when the Academy of Music (dark blue on the map) opened in 1854 as the premiere opera house. It was 10 blocks downtown on 14th Street, past Union Square, but the first major upper-class institution in the orbit of Madison Square.
In 1859 the Fifth Avenue Hotel opened as the finest hotel in the country in the very heart of Madison Square at 23rd Street, Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Other fine hotels and clubs soon joined, yet the neighborhood remained decidedly residential and suburban in nature. Things changed after 1868 when theaters and retail shops started to move in.
Ladies’ Mile: Upper Class Retail
In 1868 Arnold Constable & Co built a substantial cast iron building for the upper class “carriage trade” on Broadway and 19th Street, and soon fine shops filled in Broadway from Madison Square to 17th Street (btw, there is no Broadway between 14th and 17th Streets!). These blocks (light blue on the map) are uncharacteristically narrow and secluded for Broadway, and are now the upper-class side of the Ladies’ Mile Historic Shopping District.
Ladies’ Mile: Middle Class Retail
Within 10 years of fine shops coming to this part of Broadway, a middle class shopping district was developing on 6th Avenue on the same blocks below 23rd Street (orange on the map). The district had been growing west along 14th Street and turned up 6th Avenue to 23rd Street, stopping at the very hard boundary of the Tenderloin redlight district.
Tin Pan Alley: Popular Theaters
In early history, theaters were spread out on the major streets and avenues with small clusters on Broadway, the Bowery, and later around Union Square. In the 1880s a concentration of theaters developed on Broadway above Madison Square that would be the seedbed for Times Square’s theater district a few decades later, 10 blocks away. Tin Pan Alley is a recently landmarked tribute to that time (red on the map).
For about 30 years the Gilded Age city radiated out from Madison Square. Why the “city” moved on from Madison Sqauare is a complex of reasons, among them continued massive immigration and economic growth, Consolidation, and the automobile, just to start. Here we focus on the how the different component parts of the Gilded Age city came to be today’s four famous parts of town.
How they moved:
The Academy of Music to the Met(s)
The opening of the first Metropolitan Opera House at 39th Street and Broadway in 1883 still reverberates through history from the Gilded Age. The move was as geospatially dramatic as it was socially. When the Industrial wealth wrested opera night from the Patrician class and their hold on the box seats at the Academy of Music, it was a leapfrog from one end of the city to the other. The Astors now had to go uptown on Opera night (a social uno reverso), while for the Vanderbilts who lived about 20 blocks further up Fifth Avenue from the Astors, now had an opera house 20 blocks closer that was effectively built “out of the ‘city.'”
The Metropolitan Opera remained at 39th Street, now the Garment District, until 1966! It was the last, by about 50 years, of the component parts of the city to take its current place.
Ladies’ Mile to Fifth Avenue
The “great uptown move” of the fine retail shops to upper Fifth Avenue in 1914 is well-known in retail history. In the early 1900s though, high end retail shops lined Fifth Avenue along the slope of Murray Hill near the Waldorf Astoria, further downtown at the latitude of the Opera House on 39th Street. from Broadway, the high end retail shops leapfrogged over the early apartment-dwellers of Madison Square, and upper class retail spread up Fifth Avenue from there.
Ladies’ Mile to Herald Square
When Macy’s (coming from 14th Street and 6th Avenue since 1858!) opened at 34th Street and Herald Square in the early 1900s, the middle class shopping district leapfrogged the well-established Tenderloin redlight district of saloons, brothels and gambling halls of the Gilded Age city.
Tin Pan Alley to Times Square
New theaters were continually being built in a general uptown progression from Madison Square. When the Augustin Daly theater moved uptown, it leapfrogged over other theaters.
Just a few observations to end. Upper class commercial cultures came first to Madison Square, and a middle class developed later. While all commercial cultures would depart, the upper class cultures went geospatially further uptown, by definition.
The general growth dynamic of the city was this: On the grid, upper and middle class theater districts leapfrogged over each other up Broadway from Union Square to Lincoln Center, between and separating on either side, upper and middle class shopping districts on Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue respectively.
