New York Songlines: Broadway

W 59th (Columbus Circle) | W 58th | W 57th | W 56th | W 55th | W 54th (Ed Sullivan) | W 53rd | W 52nd | W 51st | W 50th | W 49th (Brill Building) | W 48th | W 47th (Duffy Square) | W 46th (Times Square) | W 45th | W 44th | W 43rd | W 42nd/7th Ave | W 41st | W 40th | W 39th | W 38th | W 37th | W 36th | W 35th (Herald Square/Macy's) | W 34th/6th Ave | W 33rd (Greeley Square) | W 32nd (Koreatown) | W 31st | W 30th | W 29th | W 28th | W 27th | W 26th | W 25th (Worth Square) | W 24th (Madison Square) | 23rd/5th Ave (Flatiron) | E 22nd | E 21st | E 20th |
E 19th | E 18th | E 17th (Union Square) | E 14th/4th Ave | E 13th | E 12th (The Strand) | E 11th (Grace Church) | E 10th | E 9th | E 8th | Waverly Place | Washington Place | 4th St | 3rd/Great Jones | Bond | Bleecker | Houston (SoHo) | Prince | Spring | Broome | Grand | Howard | Canal | Lispenard | Walker | White | Franklin | Leonard | Catherine | Worth (Federal Plaza) | Thomas | Duane | Reade | Chambers (City Hall) | Warren | Murray | Park Place (Woolworth Tower) | Barclay/Park Row | Vesey/Ann (St. Paul's) | Fulton | Dey/John | Cortlandt/Maiden | Liberty | Cedar | Pine | Thames | Wall (Trinity Church) | Rector | Exchange | Morris | Beaver | Battery/Stone (Charging Bull/Bowling Green/Customs House)

Broadway was originally an Indian trail, called the Wickquasgeck Road, that followed the ridge of the hilly island of Manahatta. The Dutch settlers called it Heere Straat, or High Street, because of its elevated position; one of several other names it was known by was the Broad Wagon Way, which presumably was the origin of its present appellation. Above what is now Union Square it was known as the Bloomingdale Road, after a village located on the present-day Upper West Side.

Broadway now runs all the way to Albany, making it the longest street in the world. It may also be the street most sung about, immortalized in countless songs like "Lullaby of Broadway," "On Broadway" and "A Lamb Lies Down on Broadway."

It's said that there's a broken heart for every light on Broadway--or is it a broken light for every heart?



Columbus Circle

NYC: Columbus Circle from The Shops at Columbus Circle by wallyg, on Flickr

A roundabout honoring one of history's greatest monsters. It's not that he should be held responsible for all of Europe's effects on a New World that he didn't even realize he had found; Christopher Columbus atop the pillar at Columbus Circle by NYCArthur, on Flickr rather, he should be held responsible for what he did personally to the inhabitants of Hispaniola, whom he exploited and exterminated with an efficiency that would have made Eichmann proud. His statue, by Gaetano Russo and dedicated on the 400th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage in 1892, stands on a 70-foot pillar featuring representations of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.

The circle got a major makeover in 2005 to make it more hospitable and accessible to pedestrians.

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2 Columbus Circle

2 Columbus Circle by Vidiot, on Flickr

990 (block): In 1964, a 12-story concave tower designed by Edward Durell Stone was built here to house the Gallery of Modern Art, the collection of A & P heir Huntington Hartford. Known as the Lollipop Building for its distinctive ground-floor columns, it was noted for its almost windowless white marble facade, which attracted both ridicule and affection.

After being owned by Fairleigh Dickinson University and Gulf + Western, the building became home to the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau from 1980 until 1998. The city transferred the property to the Museum of Arts & Design, which embarked on a highly controversial redesign of the building. 2 Columbus Circle by DrewVigal, on Flickr

Despite vocal calls to preserve the building as a historically important example of Modernism, the Landmark Commission stubbornly refused to even hold hearings on the matter. The new look was unveiled in 2008.

From 1874 until 1960, this was the site of the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel, a seven-story brownstone with a mansard roof. Actors Equity was founded there in 1913.

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1802 (block): Dino Shoe Repair; West Park Market; Blues













































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Columbus Tower

3 Columbus Circle marked up for surgery by jskrybe, on Flickr

Block: Also known as the Newsweek Building, for its most prominent tenant (since 1994), the first three stories of this 25-story building went up in 1921 as the Collonade Building, noted for its Ionic columns (William Welles Bosworth, architect). The Broadway side was leased to the Hudson Motor Car Company for an Essex showroom, a space that from 1974 to 2003 was home to Coliseum Books, one of New York's most storied bookstores. The northern corner is the Cosmic Coffee House. In 1926, Shreve & Lamb added 22 stories to the building, which became General Motors' East Coast headquarters; the building was known as the General Motors Building until 1968, when the company moved to 5th Avenue. The current owner decided to reclad the building in glass in 2008, an aesthetically dubious move. It's also being renamed, inanely, 3 Columbus Circle, despite not being on Columbus Circle.

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1790 Broadway by Infinite Jeff, on Flickr

1790 (corner): This was the address of the NAACP, where on October 25, 1976, the pardon of the last surviving Scottsboro Boy, Clarence Norris, was announced.
















1780 (corner): Lazarus Building houses the Perfect Picture Store, Pax Wholesome Foods.

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Corner (250 W 57th): The Fisk Building is a 26-story office building from 1921, designed by Carèrre & Hastings and Shreve, Lamb & Blake for the Fisk Tire and Rubber Company. It has its own entrance to the Columbus Circle subway station. Once a hub for auto industry offices, it now specializes in entertainment; David Bowie had his offices here in the 1980s, and it's currently home to RZO, which provides business services to a roster of rock stars like Bowie, the Rolling Stones, U2, Madonna, etc.

The Fisk Building where supervillain Wilson Fisk (aka The Kingpin) works seems to be an entirely different building--though it is somewhere in Midtown.

Corner (235 W 56th): Symphony House Apartments, 43-story building from 1986

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Foreign Dignitaries by d.billy, on Flickr

Corner (211 W 56th): Carnegie Mews Apartments, a 37-story high-rise designed by Emery Roth & Sons (1979), houses the only Manhattan branch of Hooters. From 1905-69, this was the site of the French-Gothic Broadway Tabernacle, a United Church of Christ congregation that now shares a home with Advent Lutheran on Broadway and 93rd.

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Random House Tower

1745 (block): The headquarters of the publishing giant, built in 2003. The triple slab tower atop the trapezoidal base, which is residential, resembles a trio of giant books. The residences here are known as the Park Imperial; Sean "Puffy" Combs was one of the first tenants.

Random House was founded in 1925 by Bennett Cerf, who intended to publish a random assortment of books--which turned out to include works by Faulkner, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand and Dr. Seuss, and the first complete edition of Joyce's Ulysses.




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MONY Building

55th & Broadway by Andrew Baron, on Flickr

1740 (block): Built in 1950 as the 25-story headquarters of the Mutual Life Insurance Co. (Shreve, Lamb and Harmon were the architects), the building was known for the MONY logo at the top that inspired the Shondells song "Mony Mony." MONY moved out after a 2004 merger with AXA, and the logo was replaced with a "1740" in 2008.

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Eating at Applejacks Diner, Broadway... by rmcgervey, on Flickr

1727 (corner): Applejack Diner is on the site of the Hotsy Totsy Club (then numbered 1721), Jack "Legs" Diamond's speakeasy and the headquarters of his rackets. A gangster named Red Cassidy was murdered here on July 13, 1929, but the case against Diamond was dropped when some eight witnesses died or disappeared.

Corner: 54 Broadway Cafe

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The Dream Hotel, New York, NY by Grufnik, on Flickr

Corner (210 W 55th): Dream Hotel (formerly the Majestic, originally the Woodward Hotel) is in a Beaux Arts building from 1895, given an ethereal blue lighting scheme. Serafina, Italian, on the ground floor.

1710: Bad Boy Worldwide, Sean "Diddy" Combs' management company

1708 (corner): International Ladies Garment Workers Union

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56th & Broadway by mikeyNYC, on Flickr

Corner: Ameritania Hotel (formerly Bryant Hotel) has scary online reviews. Twist Lounge on ground floor.

Ed Sullivan Theatre

New York City by Ryner12, on Flickr

1697: Built in 1927 as Hammerstein's Theater, Arthur Hammerstein's tribute to his father Oscar, it was later known as the Manhattan Theater and Billy Rose's Music Hall. In 1936, CBS began radio broadcasts from here, and it was converted to a TV studio in 1950. It was home to the classic show The Honeymooners and The Merv Griffin Show and such game shows as What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth, Password and The $20,000 Pyramid. Ed Sullivan Theater by sarowen, on Flickr

But it was most famously home to the The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired from here until its 1971 cancellation. It was here that Elvis Presley performed on September 9, 1956, the camera famously avoiding his swiveling hips, and the Beatles made their U.S. television debut on February 9, 1964. Since David Letterman moved to CBS in 1993, it's been the studio for his Late Show.

1695 (corner): Omido, sleek sushi restaurant designed by AvroKO.

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1700 Broadway by Mr Curle, on Flickr

1700 (block): A 42-floor Emery Roth building from 1969 that has been home since 1996 to DC Comics and Mad magazine (which Bart visited when The Simpsons came to New York). Europa Cafe is on the ground floor.

MAD Hallway by sandrino, on Flickr






































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Broadway Theatre

Broadway by RcktManIL, on Flickr

1685 (corner): Built in 1924 to a Eugene DeRosa design, it was originally the Colony Theatre, where "Steamboat Willie," the first talking cartoon, debuted in 1928. (Mickey Mouse had been introduced in "Plane Crazy" six months earlier.) After being renamed the Broadway, it saw the premiere of Fantasia in 1939. My Fair Lady, The Music Man and South Pacific all had their Broadway debuts here, as did My Sister Eileen. It's also been home to such successful musicals as The Wiz Evita, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon and The Color Purple.

1675 (corner): A green granite office tower, designed by Fox & Fowle and built 1986-89, wraps around the Broadway Theatre.

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Flash Dancers by Thomas Hawk, on Flickr

1678 (corner): Earle Building was the original home of Birdland, Charlie Parker's legendary jazz club from 1949-65. After such incarnations as Ubangi, Ebony and Clicque, now houses Flash Dancers, a topless club. Also in the building are Leone Pizza and Gourmet Deli & Hot Bagel.

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Novotel/Little Women by baslow, on Flickr

1657 (corner): Novotel New York Times Square is part of a French hotel chain; includes the Broadway Bar. Art Cafe, Broadway Deli are on the ground floor.





















1653: Phantom of Broadway, souvenirs

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Sheraton Manhattan at Times Square

Block (790 7th Ave): This was the Loews City Squire, built in 1962, bought by Sheraton in 1979 and given its current name in 1989. The hotel takes up the entire block, but the businesses on the Broadway side have their own addresses:

1666: Zan Boutique

1662: This was the site of Warners' Theater, where the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, had its premiere in 1927. The cinema was built as the Piccadilly Theater in 1924; in 1936, it was Minsky's Oriental, a high-end burlesque house that was shut down by LaGuardia.

1658: Georgi-oh!, women's clothing, is at the address of the original Roseland Ballroom-- a popular dancehall where the phrase "taxi dancer" is said to have originated. Bandleaders like Harry James, Louis Armstrong and Glenn Miller played here; Count Basie wrote "The Roseland Shuffle" about it. The space had opened in 1916 as the Iceland skating rink; Joseph Crater (not yet a judge) was one of the original incorporators. When the venue here was torn down in 1956, the Roseland moved to another former Iceland space on 52nd Street.

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Paramount Plaza

1633 (block): Originally known as the Uris Building, this 48-floor building went up in 1970 on the site of the Capitol Theatre, demolished in 1968. The 1919 cinema was designed by Thomas Lamb and was managed for a time by Samuel "Roxy" Rothapfel. It originally sat 5,300, making it the largest cinema in New York at the time and probably the world. It was the flagship of MGM's cinema chain; The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind both opened here in 1939. The talent show Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour, a huge phenomenon in its 1930s heyday, was broadcast from here on CBS Radio. The last movie to play here was 2001. Mars 2112 by Cord Woodruff, on Flickr

Now houses the U.S. offices of Hachette Filipacchi, the world's largest magazine publisher; several of their American magazines are based here, such as Elle, Woman's Day and Premiere. Located in the sunken courtyard is Mars 2112, a touristy sci-fi-themed restaurant.
















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NYC: Ellen's Stardust Diner by Professor Bop, on Flickr

1650 (corner): Ellen's Stardust Diner features 1950s nostalgia and a singing waitstaff. Below is the Iridium Jazz Club. In the film Pat and Mike, the Spencer Tracy character's office is on this corner--though out his window you can see the I. Miller Building, at 7th and 46th.

1638: Was Hawaii Kai, a Polynesian-themed restaurant from the 1950s through the 1980s. The scene in Goodfellas with Joe Pesci and the waiter was shot here.

Winter Garden Theater

hot strike by somethingstartedcr azy, on Flickr

1634 (corner): Starting Life in 1885 as the American Horse Exchange Building, it was largely rebuilt as the Winter Garden in 1911 and remodeled by Herbert J. Krapp in 1923. Its debut production included the Broadway premiere of Al Jolson. Here were the Broadway bows of Wonderful Town, West Side Story, Funny Girl, Mame, Steven Sondheim's Follies and Pacific Overtures, Beatlemania and 42nd Street. Cats set a Broadway record by playing here 7,485 performances between 1982 and 2000. The Twyla Tharp/David Byrne collaboration The Catherine Wheel was performed here in 1981.

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In the Damon Runyon story "Breach of Promise," Harry the Horse says he carried eight slugs in his body from this intersection to Brooklyn. It's also where Runyon runs into the title character of "Madame La Gimp."

At this intersection on December 7, 1988, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev got out of his limousine to greet New Yorkers--an incident that symbolized the new spirit of glasnost.

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Corner (210 W 50th): Snapple Theater Center, an Off-Broadway house owned by the iced-tea company. Perfect Crime moved here after playing since 1987 at the Duffy Theater, making it the longest-running play on Broadway. Also at this address is Emmett O'Lunney's Harmony View, a pub; Emmett's father owns O'Lunney's on 45th Street.

Brill Building

brill building by traffic sounds, on Flickr

1619 (corner): Built in 1931 by developer Abraham Lefcourt, it was soon taken over and renamed by the Brill Brothers clothing store. In 1932, Southern Music Publishing Company moved here, starting the building's role as a center of music publishing that would last until 1974. (Buddy Holly met his soon-to-be wife, Maria Elena Santiago, at Southern Music, where she was a secretary.) Almost a third of the songs played on Your Hit Parade from 1935 until 1958 were published by Brill Building companies. Songwriters like Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka got their starts here. Big Bands like the Dorsey Brothers, Guy Lombardo, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway were also headquartered here. colony by Digiart2001, on Flickr

On the ground floor, the Colony Music Center, with vintage vinyl and a great sheet music collection, is a reminder of the building's glory days.

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Caroline's

Caroline's by Thomas Hawk, on Flickr

1626: Opened in 1981 in Chelsea, this famous comedy club has featured big names like Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno and Rosie O'Donnell.

It's on the site of the original Lindy's, immortalized in Damon Runyon's stories as "Mindy's." The late-night diner was opened August 20, 1921, by Leo Lindermann. Gambler Arnold Rothstein used it as his office, with a table no one else could sit at after 9 p.m.; he was Runyon's model for Nathan Detroit. Lindy's latter-day chain incarnations are regarded as charmless and overpriced.









1620: The site of the Rivoli Theatre, New York's grandest movie palace, designed by Thomas Lamb for Paramount with 2,092 seats. Torn down in 1988 after being defaced to avoid landmarking.





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Gambler Sky Masterson met the mission worker Sarah Brown at this corner in the Damon Runyon story "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown."

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Crowne Plaza Manhattan

Crowne Plaza NY by Martin de Witte, on Flickr

1605 (block): This 1989 building by Alan Lapidus stands out for its purplish glass and curved concrete corners.










DSC02115 by StrahlemannBE, on Flickr

1593 (corner): On the southeast corner of the hotel is Hershey's Times Square, a chocolate store with a 215-foot multimedia facade. Spot any broken lights? It's supposed to look like that.

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1600 Broadway by pakec, on Flickr

1600 (corner): The site of the Studebaker Building, built in 1902 as an auto showroom. In the 1930s it was Joseph Hilton & Sons suits, in 1939 the Ripley Believe It or Not! Odditorium ("Curioddities From 200 Countries"), in the 1940s-60s Howard Clothes, and more recently Tony Roma's A Place for Ribs. Before the Renaissance Hotel was built, it was one of the most visible spots in Times Square, bringing the rooftop memorable signage from Maxwell House to Sony. Torn down in 2005, it's being replaced by a high-rise apartment building designed by Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Achitecture & Engineering. ("Einhorn" is German for "unicorn"--a cool name.)

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Morgan Stanley

CIMG2805.JPG by L.x. Fringes, on Flickr

1585 (block): Headquarters of the financial firm co-founded in 1935 by J.P. Morgan's grandson, this building's post-modern facade features rolling financial quotes. As a result of the financial crisis of 2008, it got out of investment banking and allowed Mitsubishi to buy a 21 percent stake.

In 1914, this block became the site of The Strand, the first Times Square theater designed specifically for movies.

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Ramada Renaissance

NYC - Times Square by wallyg, on Flickr

1580 (block): This wedge-shaped building, put up in 1989, is most famous for its signage-- Coca-Cola has had a sign here almost continuously since 1936. The site has a storied history: In the 1920s it was the Palais Royale, with the Moulin Rouge in the basement; then from 1936 to 1940 it was the Cotton Club's post-Harlem home, featuring stars like Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. From 1942 to 1969, it was the Latin Quarter nightclub--run by Lou Walters, Barbara Walters' father.


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Starting May 24, 2009, Broadway between 47th and 42nd streets is closed to vehicle traffic--an excellent solution to both snarled traffic and overflowing pedestrians.

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1565: Roxy Delicatessen; Time Square by gwenael.piaser, on Flickr the name recalls the great Times Square movie palace.











1557: This building was the site of Horn and Hardart's first New York City Automat, opening in 1912 (a decade after the coin-operated dining concept was launched in Philadelphia). It closed in the mid-1970s.

1553: Duffy Theatre, an off-Broadway theater right on Broadway. "Perfect Crime" has been playing here since 1987.

Howard Johnson's

Howard Johnson's Times Square by Adry Long, on Flickr

Corner: This was not only the last HoJo's in New York--it was one of the last in the entire country. Missed for its cocktails and Americana.

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Duffy Square

the new tkts # 008 by workinpana, on Flickr

At the north end of this triangular traffic island is the TKTS booth, offering half-priced tickets to selected plays on the day of the show. The old canvas-and-pipe structure was quite attractive, but it's been replaced by a more Blade Runnerish form whose roof is a red staircase-to-nowhere with a great view of Times Square. NYC: Duffy Square - Father Duffy Statue by wallyg, on Flickr

Standing in front of the staircase is a statue of the square's namesake, Father Francis P. Duffy, who after serving as chaplain to the "Fighting 69th" Division in World War I helped to clean up Hell's Kitchen. He was also Broadway's spiritual advisor, which is why he can be found here, backed by a Celtic cross. Give my regards to Broadway by Jeff Tabaco, on Flickr

Also here is George M. Cohan, forever giving his regards to Broadway.

In 1909, a 50-foot statue of Purity was erected here. It lasted two months.


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The traffic island in Times Square between 46th and 45th Street is the site of Times Square, a sound installation by Max Neuhaus.

This is the intersection where Giselle emerges from the manhole in the movie Enchanted.

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New York Marriott Marquis

dsc01681 by Adam Comerford, on Flickr

1535 (block): When this glitzy mammoth was built in 1981-85--the first major new hotel in Times Square in 75 years--it destroyed five classic theaters: the Astor, Bijou, Gaiety, Morosco and the old Helen Hayes. (It did add one new one--The Marquis.) This wanton destruction led to a wave of landmarking in the Theater District. Up by kirbyfest, on Flickr

The design is by John Portman, noted for similar hotels around the country. The atrium/elevator column is pretty spectacular, I have to admit.

The facade of the hotel features a huge electronic sign for Bank of America, and an enormous ad for Kodak. See a 360-degree panoramic photo.

In the movie True Lies, Arnold Schwarzenegger rides a horse on this building and almost falls off the edge.

1537 (corner): The Astor Theatre, which opened on this corner in 1906, showed both films and legit theater. Gone With the Wind premiered here in 1939; other films that debuted here include The Hunchback of Notre Dame, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without a Cause and The Apartment. In 1948, Babe Ruth made his final public appearance here, to attend the premiere of The Babe Ruth Story.

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1550 (corner): Digital Cameras & Computers

Bertelsmann Building

Bertelsmann Building by insuh, on Flickr

1540: The U.S. headquarters of the German media conglomerate, which owns Random House and RCA records, among much else; better known as the home of the Virgin Megastore, billed as the world's largest record store. The post-modern blue-and-green glass structure, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, was put up between 1989 and 1990. The site used to hold the Loews State Theater Building, built 1920, and memorialized by the Loews State Theatre 4 in the basement.




North of the Megastore, from 2000-02, was Bar Code, a combination club/video arcade.



New York City by maxirafer, on Flickr

At the southwest corner of the Bertelsmann Building is the Times Square branch of Planet Hollywood. Formerly the Official All Star Cafe, a sports-themed restaurant.


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Astor Plaza

mtv by azizk, on Flickr

1515 (block): Best known as the location of MTV's studios, this 1969 Kahn & Jacobs building was allowed to grow to 50 floors because it added theatrical space--The Minskoff, named for the skyscraper's developer. (Pippin, Sunset Boulevard and The Scarlet Pimpernel had their debuts here.) On the ground floor are Element clothing, Billabong Surf Shop and the MTV Store. MTV Times Square by wooohooo, on Flickr

The building replaced its namesake, the Astor Hotel, a well-loved Times Square landmark. Built in 1904 by William Waldorf Astor, the hotel housed such celebrity residents as Toscanini, Will Rogers, Jimmy Durante and Carmen Miranda. It was here, according to Cole Porter, that Mimsie Starr got pinched in the Astor Bar.














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Toys R Us Times Square by aa440, on Flickr

1528 (corner): A Swatch outlet

This block has long been famous for its signage-- from 1936 until 1942, Wrigley's had a block-long sign here featuring giant neon fish and the "Wrigley's Spearman." This was replaced, from 1948 to 1954, by the Bond Clothiers sign, a neon spectacular that featured two 7-story nude figures (later clothed in neon after complaints from the Hotel Astor) and an actual waterfall with 50,000 gallons of recirculating water. Pepsi took over the spot, turning the giants into giant bottles, and an illuminated clock into a bottlecap. Today the site features relatively mundane ads for Liz Claiborne and Jockey underwear.

The building below the sign has been known as the Bond Building (after the clothing store) and the Bow-Tie Building (for its peculiar Times Square shape). In the 1980s, there was a large disco called Bond's here.

From 1895 until 1935, this was the site of Oscar Hammerstein's Olympia Theater, the first theater above 42nd Street. The huge complex sat 6,000 people--too big to survive being too early for Times Square's heyday. The rooftop garden, the Jardin de Paris, was the first home of the Ziegfeld Follies. Toys R' Us . Times Square, NYC by Stinkie Pinkie, on Flickr

1520 (corner): This Toys "R" Us superstore is noted for its interior ferris wheel and animatronic dinosaur. See images. It replaced the Criterion Theater (at 1514 Broadway), a movie palace that hosted the premieres of blockbusters like The Ten Commandments, Lawrence of Arabia and Patton. Demolished in 2000 to make room for the toy store.


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Paramount Building

NYC - Times Square: Paramount Building by wallyg, on Flickr

1501 (block): Built for the film company in 1927; the step-like setbacks are intended to resemble the mountain on the Paramount logo. Here was the Paramount Theater, which was Frank Sinatra's home base in the early 1940s, and a Beatles venue in 1964; the space was later the Hard Rock Cafe NYC by L-ines, on Flickr WWE New York, a wrestling-themed restaurant. It's now the Hard Rock Cafe, the theme restaurant that started them all; this one was christened in 2005 with the smashing of 100 guitars. On the northern end of the block is the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., named for the business in Forrest Gump. (Boy, I hated that movie.)

The superhero Captain Marvel was born on the 22nd floor here in 1940, in the offices of Fawcett Comics.

This was earlier the site of the Putnam Building, which was used as a base by racketeer Kid Dropper. Involved in a gang war with another mob leader, the Kid was shot while being sent out of town with an escort of 80 cops.

The Paramount Building has pre-recorded chimes that play "Give My Regards to Broadway" at 7:45 p.m. every day to remind theatergoers that it's 15 minutes until curtain.

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Times Square Studios

NYC - Times Square: Times Square Plaza at 1500 Broadway by wallyg, on Flickr

1500 (block): This holds the set of ABC's Good Morning America, and for Dick Clark's New Year's Eve broadcasts. ABC News runs a zipper here.

Corner: The northern end of the block used to be the Hotel Rector, later known as the Hotel Claridge. From 1941 to 1966, it displayed the famous Camel sign that blew real smoke rings. The hotel was home and office for a time to mob boss Lucky Luciano; it also housed director D.W. Griffith while his upstate estate was being built. The music-writers group ASCAP was founded here in 1914 with members like John Philip Sousa, Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert. John Voight and Dustin Hoffman stayed there in Midnight Cowboy.

In the middle of the block was Rector's, a Gay '90s "lobster palace" that was a favorite with Diamond Jim Brady--Charles Rector called him his "best 25 customers." New York's first revolving door was installed here in 1899. Torn down in 1899 to make way for the hotel.


Branded... by Trapac, on Flickr

Corner: The southeast corner of the block (where the JVC globe is today) was the site of the Barrett House Hotel, where playwright Eugene O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, while his father was in town playing The Count of Monte Cristo.


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Recruiting in Times Square by inkbase, on Flickr US Army rekrutering på Times Square #1 by Stig Nygaard, on Flickr

The Times Square Armed Forces Recruiting Station is in the middle of the square at this intersection. Opened in 1946, it has signed up more people for the military than any other recruiting booth. It was the target of a smallish bomb on March 6, 2008.

West:

At the tip of this block is a small NYPD substation.














One Times Square

One Times Square by Alex Castella, on Flickr

It was Longacre Square until the New York Times shockingly moved its offices from Newspaper Row downtown to what was then the edge of town, suddenly made accessible by subway. (It replaced the Pabst Hotel on the site.) Building an Italian Renaissance castle on the spot, the paper got the city to rename first the subway stop and then the square after itself.

The paper celebrated moving in on New Year's Eve, 1904, with a fireworks display--starting the tradition of Times Square as the place to be on December 31. The ball, which used to drop from Trinity Church downtown, has been dropping from here since 1908. The Times moved off the Square in 1913, but the name stuck. NYC - Times Square: Mototron by wallyg, on Flickr

The world's first illuminated news ticker (dubbed the "Motogram") circles the building; it got its start reporting the 1928 election returns. (Hoover won.) Its announcement of Japan's surrender set off Times Square's famous celebration of the end of World War II.

The tower was modernized by new owners Allied Chemical, who moved out in 1975. Since then the building has mostly been a place to put giant signs. The ground floor was a Warner Brothers store for a while.

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Conde Nast Building

Conde Nast Building, Times Square by dsjeffries, on Flickr

1520 (block): This building, unhelpfully known as "4 Times Square," houses the offices of the Conde Nast publishing empire (Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Wired, etc.). The building, designed by Fox & Fowle and built from 1996-99, is praised for letting its freak flag fly on Times Square while presenting a more sober facade on the newly respectable 42nd Street. NASDAQ Times Square by aa440, on Flickr

The northwest corner of the building is the Blade Runner-esque NASDAQ display. The exchange, which is the successor to Wall Street's Curb Exchange, has a PR outpost here; its real headquarters are still downtown, at One Liberty Plaza. ESPN Zone by kcjc009, on Flickr

The southwest corner is the ESPN Zone sports-themed restaurant.

The architect says he was inspired by Nathan's, which used to have an Art Deco restaurant on the northwest corner--originally Toffenetti's, built for the 1939 World's Fair.



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"The Crossroads of the World"

Starting May 24, 2009, Broadway between 47th and 42nd streets is closed to vehicle traffic.

West:

Times Square Subway Station

Subway Sign by _MaO_, on Flickr This is the busiest station in the system, handling 11 subway lines and half a million passengers a day. 42nd and Broadway by Nose in a book, on Flickr

It features a large mural by Roy Liechtenstein, among other art. The Cricket in Times Square is set in a newsstand here.

Uptown: Times Square subway by Ddrucki, on Flickr
1/9/A to 59th Street
2/3 to 72nd Street
N/R to 57th Street
C/E to 50th Street Times Square Subway by andy in nyc, on Flickr

Downtown:
1/2/3/9 to 34th Street
N/R to 34th Street
A/C/E to 34th Street

Crosstown:
7 to 5th Avenue
S to Grand Central

Times Square Tower

NYC: Times Square Tower by wallyg, on Flickr

1459 (block): This 47-floor office building (2001-03) was supposed to house the headquarters of Arthur Andersen, but the Enron scandal scuttled the deal. Has the fake and confusing address of 7 Times Square.

The Times Square Brewery, a post-Disneyfication microbrewery, used to be on this site; it had a half-scale model of a Concorde on its roof.

Earlier it was the location of the Heidelberg Building, aka the Crossroads Building, a white elephant from its 1910 construction until its 1984 demolition. Built with an 11-story tower atop a seven-floor base, it was meant primarily as a platform for ads, but would-be advertisers pointed out that you had to be blocks from the crowds in Times Square to see the tower. Plans over the years to transform in into a hotel, an auto showroom or a taller office tower fizzled over the years. It had its greatest moment of glory in 1912, when Harry Houdini escaped from a straitjacket while being suspended over the edge of the building.

Prior to that, the Hotel Metropole was on this block.

1457: Also in the building was XS, a virtual reality and lazer tag arcade--now defunct.

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Former Knickerbocker Hotel

Gap in Time Square by tedwang, on Flickr

1466 (corner): Built between 1901 and 1906 for John Jacob Astor IV, this Renaissance Eclectic structure was once one of the city's most fashionable hotels, housing celebreties like George M. Cohan and Enrico Caruso, who used to serenade fans from the balcony of his suite. The hotel's King Cole Bar was noted for its Maxfield Parrish mural, which now graces a bar of the same name at the St. Regis Hotel.

It later became known as the Newsweek Building when it housed the newsweekly's offices. Now I guess it's officially Six Times Square.

Monk Eastman, the famous gang leader, was captured here by police while having a shoot-out with a Pinkerton detective; the 10 years he got spelled the end of his power in the underworld.











































1460 (corner): Siemens Building


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1441 (corner): Cool ziggurat-like building houses offices of the fashion company Liz Claiborne.













1431 (corner): The address of the Poodle Dog, a restaurant/cabaret opened in 1913.

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1450 (corner): This 1931 building houses Walt Disney Theatrical Productions and Nederlander Producing, among other tenants. Cafe Duke is on the ground floor.

1440 (corner): Here Federated Department Stores, owners of Macy's, Bloomingdale's and other retail giants, has its headquarters. Here also for 79 years were the studios of WOR radio, a historic station founded in 1922 that launched Golden Age programs like The Lone Ranger and Superman. For 75 years the station (whose call letters stand for ''Orpheus Radio'') broadcast Rambling With Gambling, a morning show continued by its founder's son and grandson. Much of the station's airtime is now devoted to far-right hosts like Bob Grant and Michael Savage. The station moved downtown in 2005.


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Broadway & 40th by Vidiot, on Flickr

1411 (block): This block was home to the Metropolitan Opera House from 1883 until 1966. Built by Gilded Age businessmen like William Vanderbilt who were denied boxes at the Academy of Music on 14th Street, it soon eclipsed the older venue as the central stage of New York society (as depicted in Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country). It saw the American debuts of Enrico Caruso (11/23/1903), who performed here 861 times, and Vaslav Nijinsky (4/12/1916). After Dorothy Parker was fired from Vanity Fair, she and Robert Benchley rented an office here for writing--so small, Benchley said, that one cubic foot less "would have constituted adultery."

Sculptor Karl Bitter was struck by a car and killed leaving the opera here on April 9, 1915, the day he completed the model for the Pulitzer Fountain.

The beloved house was doomed by the Metropolitan Opera company, which insisted, when it moved to Lincoln Center, that the building's buyer tear it down so that a rival opera company could not use it.

It was replaced with the World Apparel Center. NYC: Golda Meir Square by wallyg, on Flickr With more than a million square feet of space, this block-spanning 1970 building is touted as the premier showroom for the Fashion District.

There's a triangular space in front of the current building called Golda Meir Square--with a bust of the Israeli prime minister at the southern end.

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1430 (corner):






































1418: The Kaiserhof Restaurant opened here in 1914.

1412: The Europa Cafe

1412 (corner): The Fashion Gallery Building has the Gotham Bank of New York on the ground floor.


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1407 (block): This building houses (among other things) the restaurant Abigael's on Broadway, Harrie's Delicatessen & Bakery, Peter's Flowers (since 1937) and Via Rossi shoes.



























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Peek-a-Boo, I See You by Vidiot, on Flickr

1410 (corner): Where the Andrews Coffee Shop is now was the Casino Theater (1882-1929), said to be the best example of Moorish architecture in the country. It was the first theater with a roof garden, the first to be entirely lit by electricity, and the first to feature a chorus line--the Floradora Girls, who included Evelyn Nesbit, over whom Harry K. Thaw murdered Stanford White.

The X-ray machine was demonstrated here in 1896-- as a curiosity billed as the "Parisian Sensation."

The current building is the Bricken Casino Building, a 1929 effort by Eli Jacques Kahn noted for its inventive use of setbacks" and its "blade-like precision and grace."

1400 (corner): On the site of the old Knickerbocker Theater can be found the New Yankee Cafe and the Israel-based Leumi Bank (founded by Theodor Herzl). This building was also designed by Eli Jacques Kahn.


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West:

Broadway & 38th by Vidiot, on Flickr -->

1385 (corner): Gideon's Drugs








1375 (corner): The home of Broadway's Jerusalem 2 Kosher Pizza & Falafel

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1384 (corner): Lefcourt Normandie Building, built by Garment District developer Abraham Lefcourt, on the site of the Hotel Normandie. Tchaikovsky stayed there in the spring of 1891 to inaugurate Carnegie Hall. Nick and Nora Charles also stayed here in the novel The Thin Man.

The Lefcourt Normandie National Bank of New York, founded in 1928, after a series of mergers and name changes became Chemical (now Chase) Bank.

Beads World, a Garment District supplier, can be found here now.

1372 (corner): Includes Mr. Broadway Glatt Kosher cafe and Another Good Location deli.


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1369 (corner): Showroom of Ecko Unltd., hip-hop clothing line with the rhino logo.















1359 (corner): Lefcourt Marlboro Building provides space for Kosher Delight, Eurovision Optical and Food Merchants.

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1370 (corner): Rosenthal & Rosenthal, financial services for the apparel industry since 1938.

Haier Building

NYC: The Haier Building by wallyg, on Flickr

1356 (corner): Built 1922-24 for the Greenwich Savings Bank and later used by Republic National Bank, this striking landmark surrounded by Corinthian columns is now the New York headquarters of the Haier Group, China's leading refrigerator manufacturer. Inside is Gotham Hall, a dramatic domed space often used for fashion shows.


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The Broadway Cable and Seventh Avenue Railroad Company ran cable cars from here down to Bowling Green, with the cables all pulled by 100-ton wheels in the basement of the Cable Building on Houston Street (where the Angelica is today).

West:

1333 (block): The Johnson Building's ground floor is mostly occupied by Conway Herald Square, "some of Herald Square's cheapest threads"--Time Out. The Marlborough-Blenheim hotel used to be at No. 1353.



Corner: The site of the New York Aquarium from 1876 to 1883. Later there was a theater variously called the New Park, Harrigan's and the Herald Square.

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1350 (corner): Herald Square Building contains an HSBC bank. The entire block was once the site of the New York Herald Building, a two-story Venetian palace built in 1893 by McKim, Mead and White and housing the paper that now lives on only in the International Herald Tribune. Demolished 1921, but its name remains in the square to its south.


The southern end of the block is a Florsheim shoe outlet.


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Starting May 24, 2009, Broadway between 35th and 33rd streets is closed to vehicle traffic. Herald Square was previously one of the hardest parts of the city to get through on foot or by car.

West:

Macy's

Macy's New York by CeeKay, on Flickr

Since 1902, this has been the location of the famous department store founded by Capt. Rowland Hussey Macy, a former whaling captain whose red star tattoo is still the store's symbol (and a whale is still used in sale ads). With expansions to take up (almost) the entire block, this still holds the record for the world's largest store. NYC: Herald Square - R.H. Macy & Company Store by wallyg, on Flickr

Macy's claims credit for such innovations as standardized sizes (1934), colored bath towels (1932), the tea bag (1912), the baked potato (1926) and the department store Santa (1870)--the latter claim to fame cemented by the 1947 classic Miracle on 34th Street, set at the store. NYC: Herald Square - R.H. Macy & Company Store by wallyg, on Flickr

Another holiday tradition is Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, first thrown in 1924 by immigrant employees in imitation of European street processions. (The balloons were added in 1927.) Macy's is also responsible for New York's July 4th fireworks. NYC: Herald Square - R.H. Macy & Company Store by wallyg, on Flickr

The one part of the block not owned by Macy's is, ironically, the southeast corner with the enormous "Macy's" sign on it. When Macy's was buying up the block, competitor Henry Siegel of the Siegel-Cooper department store snatched up the corner-- perhaps to leverage Macy's into selling Siegel-Cooper its old space on 14th Street. Macy's simply built around the holdout, and now leases the space above for its giant ad. Currently the corner itself is a Sunglasses Hut.

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Herald Square

Herald Square: Bennett Memorial by peterjr1961, on Flickr

As in, "Remember me at..." Named for the New York Herald, a racist, anti-Semitic newspaper founded by James Gordon Bennett whose offices were directly to the north of this triangle. The paper introduced such features as the gossip column and Wall Street coverage. It later merged with the New York Tribune; the International Herald-Tribune is the surviving relic.




Herald Square by Smaku, on Flickr













NYC - Herald Square: Bennett Clock by wallyg, on Flickr

The clock and statuary, crafted in 1895 by Jean-Antonie Carles, are from the old Herald building; the goddess is Minerva, complete with owls, and the bellringers, which swing their hammers on the hour, are nicknamed Stuff and Guff.
















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Herald Center

NYC - Herald Center by wallyg, on Flickr Built for Saks & Company in 1901-02, as shopping moved to this neighborhood to take advantage of the new rail hubs. In 1966, after the area's appeal had faded, it became Korvette's. Rebuilt in 1982-85 as a mall with a glass elevator on the corner; Daffy's is the anchor store. At one point the mall was owned by Ferdinand Marcos.


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Herald Towers

Herald Square, NYC by doitintheroad, on Flickr

1300 (block): AKA McAlpin House; built as the Hotel McAlpin in 1913, at the time the largest hotel in New York; noted for its "silent floor" for the nocturnal. Converted to apartments in 1979; the murals of New York Harbor in the hotel's Marine Grill were removed and installed in the Fulton Street subway stop. Claims the dubious distinction of housing the highest-grossing Gap outlet in the country.


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S <===       6TH AVENUE                                            

Starting May 24, 2009, Broadway between 35th and 33rd streets is closed to vehicle traffic.

West:

Greeley Square

by Cresny, on Flickr

This triangular square is named for Horace Greeley, the founder of the New York Tribune. Though chiefly remembered as the guy who said "Go west, young man" (which was not actually his line), Greeley was actually one of the most influential journalists in American history. a monument in Greeley Square by miss goose, on Flickr

An advocate of social reform (Karl Marx was a European correspodent), Greeley supported abolition, worker's rights and (yes) Western settlement. As a reporter covering Congress in 1855, he was given a concussion by the cane of pro-slavery House Speaker Albert Rust. He helped found the Republican Party and was instrumental in making Abraham Lincoln the 1860 candidate. Surprisingly, he was the 1872 Democratic candidate for president; he was trounced by U.S. Grant and died a month later.

The statue of Greeley in a chair is an 1890 work by Alexander Doyle. The square was dedicated in 1894.

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1270-1280 (corner): The Wilson Building, 1912, houses Cambridge Members clothing store, founded 1966.
















Hotel Martinique

Radisson Martinique by Paperghost, on Flickr

1270 (corner): Built from 1897-1911 and named for its owner, William R.H. Martin. Designed in French Renaissance style by Henry Hardenbergh, architect of The Plaza and The Dakota.

It went through a bad spell in the 1970s and '80s as a forbidding homeless shelter; refurbished by the Holiday Inn chain, it's now part of the Radisson family. The restaurant on the corner, Diner on the Square, has closed.


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In the movie Hospitality, made in 1923 but set in 1830, Buster Keaton on a proto-bicycle waits at this intersection--then a crossing of two country roads--for a buggy to pass. "Gettin' dangerous out here," a sherriff remarks.

West:

Broadway & 32nd by Vidiot, on Flickr

1271 (corner): Speedy's deli restaurant






1265: Olden Camera

1255 (corner): Porox, wholesale outlet in a handsome old building.

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What, Me Woori? by animalvegetable, on Flickr

1250 (block): Big oddly-angled glass tower houses Woori America, a Korean bank. (32nd Street is the heart of New York's Koreatown.) On the southwestern corner is Style & Smile, a large wholesale outlet. Previously on this lot was the Imperial Hotel, very fashionable when it opened in 1890.


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1239: Fair Deal is on the site of the Brighton Theater, which opened in 1878; later the Bijou. Demolished and rebuilt in 1883; demolished and moved uptown in 1915. The present 17-story highrise dates to 1917.








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1232-1238 (corner): Was the Grand Hotel (1868), once one of New York's grandest accomodations. Now home to wholesale joints like Design Time Watch Inc. Note the mansard roof, a French affectation that allowed Parisians, whose buildings were limited by stories, to pretend that their top floor was an attic. A thoughtless owner painted over the marble facade, in violation of the landmark law.

1226 (corner): Decent Trading Inc. is on the site of Wallack's Theater, which moved up from 13th Street in 1881.


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West:

Broadway & 30th by Vidiot, on Flickr

Corner: Yurim Co., direct importer








1225: The address of American Hatter, a monthly in 1930

1221: The address of Wood's Museum, an early burlesque house that featured Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes in 1868. Later Daly's Theater, a highly regarded company. Became a movie house in 1915, torn down in 1920.

1217: The address of Dick Darling's saloon, where on November 7, 1881, forger/thief Billy Tracey shot and killed Charles P. Miller, king of the bunco men. Miller had previously shot and wounded Tracey in Tracey's own saloon.

1205 (corner): Tomato Import & Wholesale

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1216 (corner): Perfume Americana

1204: India Handicrafts and Jewelry is at the address of Shanley's, a popular ''lobster palace'' opened in 1912. Composer Victor Herbert sued the restaurant for playing his music without paying royalties, a case that went to the Supreme Court in 1917 and resulted in a victory for songwriters.

Gilsey House

Gilsey House by ShellyS, on Flickr

1200 (corner): This beautifully restored cast-iron Second Empire landmark is a former grand hotel (1872-1911), the first to offer telephone service to guests. Noted for its bar made of silver dollars, it was a favorite of Diamond Jim Brady and Oscar Wilde. Converted to housing in 1979. The ground floor is now occupied by wholesalers like New York Sunglasses and Hair Accessories.


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This block down to 28th Street was burned down during the draft riots of 1863.

West:

1201 broadway, home of school products by cafemama, on Flickr

1201 (corner): Building with Peace Trading and European Frangrances has a cool jungley bas relief strip.














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Ace Hotel

1186 (corner): Opening in 1904 as the Hotel Breslin (designed by Clinton & Russell), it was noted in its heyday for attracting boxers like Joe Louis and Gene Tunney fighting at Madison Square Garden. In 1951, an 83-year-old W.E.B. du Bois was arrested here for running the anti-Korean War Peace Information Center. Later the Breslin Apartments, an SRO that fell victim to gentrification. Now a cool hotel with rooms ranging from shared bunks to high-end "loft suites."

Previously on this site was Sturtevant House, where on June 2, 1873, novelist (and accused Confederate spy) Mansfield Walworth was shot to death by his son for making threats against the son's mother.

1182-1184: Centurian Building houses Broadway Linen, Silver by Fenix.

1180: Designer's Mart, where you can get a string of pearls for $10.

1178: Young Town Jewelry


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The block of 28th Street west of Broadway to 6th Avenue was Tin Pan Alley, music publishing hub in the early 20th Century.

West:

1181 (corner): Clover Trading Corp. is in the Baudouine Building (1896); note Greek temple on roof.

This is the Wholesale District, where shops get their stuff from. Supposedly most of these places will sell to the public if you ask nicely, but most of their stuff is more fun to look at than to actually own.

1165-1175: Was the Coleman House Hotel, built 1907--note Chicago School-style bay windows. Now houses such wholesale outlets as Fashion City, Lavish International, Manhattan Street Wear and Over Mars Ltd.

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1170 (corner): House of Perfume is in the Johnston Building, a 1903 13-story structure by Schickel & Ditmars. Note lions' heads, dome on roof.








1158 (corner): Wholesale shops like Source USA, Omi Perfume (formerly Undefeated Wear) are in a peculiar red-and-black vertically striped building.


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West:

Broadway & 27th by Vidiot, on Flickr

1157 (corner): Broadway Plaza Hotel is in a fairly nondescript modern-looking building that actually dates to 1920; Broadway Pizza's on the ground floor.

1153: Three Kings Trading is on the site of Holland Brothers' Kinetoscope Parlor, the world's first movie house-- where Edison's hand-cranked movies were first shown on April 6, 1894. Built on the site of the studio of John Rogers, a popular 19th Century sculptor.

1151: In front of this address, until 1880, stood the Varian Tree, named for the farm family whose land this once was. An old sign used to boast that the present building was once the nation's only distributer of Maxell batteries.

1149: Was Wallace & Co., according to the rusticated facade of this 1886 rowhouse by DeLemos & Cordes.

1147: Star Sportswear

1145: Lucky Trading/Broadway Boutique Trading

1141 (corner): Zena Coffee Shop; Fortuna Jewelry

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1150 (corner): The Victoria Building is on the site of the Victoria Hotel, where President Grover Cleveland lived between his two separated terms of office. The present 19-story building, a 1914 effort by Schwartz & Gross, houses the X-Tensions wholesale hair dealer (formerly Sportique), and the National Tree Company (Christmas trees, that is).






















1140 (corner): Ground floor of the 1915 Lowell Building has Kids Spot, Touch Down ("Wholesale to the Public"). Upstairs is Arnold Joseph, a railroad-oriented bookstore.


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The world's first electric streetlights, turned on December 20, 1880, lined Broadway from 26th Street to 14th.

West:

St. James Building

Broadway by lucathegalga, on Flickr

1133 (corner): This 1897 office building provided offices for architects, including its designer, Bruce Price, and the Flatiron's Daniel Burnham. Oscar F. Spate had his office here when in 1901 he made an ill-fated attempt to turn seating in Madison and Central parks into a for-profit enterprise. Future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir worked here for the Pioneer Women's Organization for Palestine (1932-34). From 1965 to 1968, this was the base of the Mattachine Society, the leading pre-Stonewall gay rights group.

Built on the site of the fashionable St. James Hotel, which Confederate saboteurs tried to burn down on November 25, 1864.

Ultimate One Distribution Corp is on the ground floor. Upstairs is Photo Village, a high-end camera boutique.








1123 (corner): The Townsend Building, a 12-story 1898 highrise designed by Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz, houses the Broadway Cafe.

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1134 (corner): This 21-story building went up in 1913.

1132: Dramatic bay windows and over-the-top detailing mark the Cross Chambers Building, a 1901 project of John B. Snook & Sons.

1130: Broadway Deals & Electronics (was Yedsonic), in a seven-story 1915 building

1126: Memories of New York, elaborate souvenir shop. On the 3rd floor of the 5-story red-brick building is Urban Angler.

1124: Most of the facade of this 1913 building is taken up by a larged arched window. Houses Pentagram, an international design company that has done work for the Public Theater, the Mesa Grill and the New York Times Magazine, among other clients. Used to be MK, a 1980s nightclub where Moby played his first live electronic gig in 1989. IMG_2695 by CampoDiPace, on Flickr

1122 (corner): Commodore-Criterion, manufacturer of Christmas decorations, part of the Christmas District. The site of Worth House, a hotel that by 1900 housed the Berlitz School of Languages. The present building, a Buchman & Kahn design from 1918, was the flagship store (with science museum) of the A.C. Gilbert Company, a toy company that made the Erector set, radioactive chemistry sets and American Flyer model trains.


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West:

Broadway & 25th by Vidiot, on Flickr

1115 (corner): 40/40 Club, Jay-Z's sports-oriented nightclub, is named for the elite group of ballplayers who have hit 40 homeruns and stolen 40 bases in a season. Was Liu Imports, Chinese antiques. The building, which dates to 1912, is calling itself Toy Tower 25.

On this site was Hoffman House, elegant hotel whose bar shocked Victorian NYC by displaying Bouguereau's Nymphs and Satyr -- which became a major tourist attraction. The painting belonged to Edward S. Stokes, an owner of the Hoffman, who had spent time in Sing-Sing for shooting financier Jim Fisk, his rival for singer Josie Mansfield's affections. Publisher William Randolph Hearst lived at the Hoffman when he first came to NYC in 1895. In 1901, the bar posted private detectives at every entrance during ax-wielding prohibitionist Carry Nation's visit to New York.

1111: Kurt S. Adler, aka, Santa's World, Christmas wholesaler since 1946, moved to 34th Street in 2006.

Toy Center North

Toy Center Traverse by LarimdaME, on Flickr

1107 (corner): Note skywalk connecting to Toy Center South (see below). Built in 1911, replacing the Albemarle Hotel; Sarah Bernhardt stayed there when she made her U.S. debut in 1880, her room redecorated in Parisian style to remind her of home. Lillie Langtry stayed in the same suite on her first U.S. visit, in 1882, but on opening night watched the theater burn down through opera glasses from the hotel. ( See below.)

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Worth Square

NYC: Madison Square - General William Jenkins Worth Monument by wallyg, on Flickr

Memorial to Gen. William Jenkins Worth, namesake of Ft. Worth, Texas and downtown's Worth Street. After fighting in the War of 1812, he became commandant of cadets at West Point. During the Seminole Wars, he pioneered the targeting of civilian populations and the use of starvation as a tool of warfare. NYC - Madison Square: General William Jenkins Worth Monument by wallyg, on Flickr

Fighting in the Mexican-American War, he led the capture of Mexico City, and was given command of the newly conquered territories of Texas and New Mexico. He died of cholera in San Antonio, 1849, and was buried here in 1857.

The rectangular structure leads to Water Tunnel No. 1, carrying water from the Catskills.



















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West:

International Toy Center

Toy Center by aka Kath, on Flickr

(Block (200 5th Ave): International Toy Center, since 1925 the center of U.S. toy business; note toy and holiday displays. The LA Cafe is on the ground floor. On the corner, you can still make out a sign for the Garfield National Bank, which was around from 1881-1929 before merging with the Chase National Bank.




Fifth Avenue Building by Rev. Santino, on Flickr

In The Sweet Smell of Success, it serves as the offices of The New York Globe, J.J. Hunsecker's newspaper.









Replaced the Fifth Avenue Hotel (1858-1908), once the most exclusive hotel in NYC; presidents Grant and Arthur, as well as the Prince of Wales, stayed here. It was a gathering place for fat cats like Boss Tweed, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk and Commodore Vanderbilt, who would would trade stocks here after hours. A Republican bastion, it was here that the Democrats were first described as the party of "rum, Romanism and rebellion." But it was also a hangout for cultural figures like Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edwin Booth, Jenny Lind, William Cullen Bryant and Stanford White. It was used as the setting of Gore Vidal's 1876.


Earlier on this site was Franconi's Hippodrome (1852-59); before that was Corporal Thompson's Madison Cottage, a roadhouse described by the New York Herald as "one of the most agreeable spots for an afternoon's lounge in the suburbs of our city." It had been the house of John Horn, who used to own what is now Madison Square Park.




Note the 1909 sidewalk clock, a once-common sight in the pre-wristwatch era.



















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Madison Square Park

The Empire State Building through the haze of Madison Square Park by permanently scatterbrained, on Flickr

The 1807 plan set aside 240 acres in this vicinity as The Parade, to be used for military training. In that same year, the U.S. Arsenal was built here to defend the strategic intersection of the Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) and the Eastern Post Road. By 1814, when the park was named Madison Square after the then-current president, it had been reduced to 90 acres. In 1847, when Madison Square Park was opened, less than seven acres remained. Madison Square Park by alistairmcmillan, on Flickr

The park, which was laid out in its current form in 1870, was the center of New York society in the 1860s and '70s. "The vicinity of Madison Square is the brightest, prettiest and liveliest portion of the great city," James McCabe wrote in 1872.

In July 1901, an attempt to turn seating in the park into a for-profit concession sparked rioting. Madison Square Park April 7, 2007 _MG_6845 by Darny, on Flickr

The park provides a setting for O. Henry short stories like "The Cop and the Anthem" and "The Sparrows in Madison Square").

The U.S. Arsenal was converted by 1824 to the House of Refuge of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents--the first such institution in the country.

Eternal Light

World War I memorial flagpole (1918-23), said to symbolize the eternal peace produced by the "War to End All Wars." When Charles Lindbergh was given a parade in 1927--attended by an estimated 4 million spectators--he stopped here to lay a wreath.

Statue of William Seward

NYC: Madison Square Park - William H. Seward Statue by wallyg, on Flickr

An early abolitionist who became NY governor (1838-42) and a U.S. senator (1848-61), Seward served as secretary of state under Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. He's most remembered for paying Russia $7 million for Alaska in 1867.

Making the statue in 1876, sculptor Randolph Rogers re-used his cast of Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation for the body; Seward was actually short with a large head.

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Madison Square Park by Das Bobby 2000, on Flickr

Broadway--then known as the Bloomingdale Road--was opened in 1703 from here to the village of Bloomingdale, near what is now 114th Street.

Stage coaches left twice a week for Albany from this intersection in the late 18th Century.

In the late 19th-early 20th centuries, Broadway from 23rd to 10th Street was known as "Ladies' Mile" for its fashionable stores, which launched the American culture of "shopping."

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Flatiron Building

Flatiron Building by MCSimon, on Flickr

Built in 1903 as the Fuller Building, its unusual and striking shape (designed by Daniel Burhnam to match its triangular lot) quickly earned it its lasting nickname. It is not true that it is New York's first skyscraper-- just one of its most memorable. A traditional publishing center, it's still home to St. Martin's Press. In 1910s, it housed the offices of the Socialist Labor Party, ancestor of most U.S. left parties. It features in the Spider-Man movies as the Daily Bugle building, and Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak are teleported here in Bell, Book and Candle. NYC - Flatiron Building (detail) by wallyg, on Flickr

The ground floor features parfumerie Jo Malone, and MAC, cosmetics chain worn by RuPaul and sung about by TLC.

The phrase "23 Skidoo" (supposedly) originated with a police officer chasing off loiterers at the 23rd Street corner hoping to catch a glimpse of stocking under a skirt blown up by the freakish Flatiron winds.

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Madison Green

MadisonGreen.23Broadway.NYC.25mar06 by ElvertBarnes, on Flickr

940 (block): This very large luxury condo building (with Benvenuto Cafe on the ground) was built after the Wonder Drugs Fire of October 17, 1966, which killed 12 firefighters--the worst disaster in FDNY history, until the World Trade Center attacks. An earlier fire (January 5, 1952) at No. 2 E. 23rd Street, which was then the address at this corner, destroyed the studio (and much of the work) of sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. The Bartholdi Hotel was found at the corner of 23rd and Broadway in 1911.
















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The modern rules of baseball were developed by teams who played near this intersection in 1846--though other accounts place the field near Madison and 27th.

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Albert Building

Waiting around by mystical_swirl, on Flickr

935-939: The building that houses Renaissance Hardware was built in 1861-62 as the Glenham Hotel by architect Griffith Thomas. Also known as the Albert or Mortimer Building. On the Broadway side, remains of letters that once spelled out "ALBERT" can be seen. According to City Reads, this building once housed the saloon of Dr. Jerry Thomas, master mixologist (for whom the Tom and Jerry was named). Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., son of the Commodore, shot himself here on April 2, 1882, after a night of drinking and gambling.

929-933: Former site of M. Gordon Novelty Inc.--last remainder of Broadway's former Novelty District. These three-story tenements date from 1902.

927: Bang & Olufson, high-end audio and video, is in a 1910 building

921: Duxiana furniture was Victor Kamkin, Russian bookstore.

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armani by killthebird, on Flickr

936 (corner): This was once the site of the Buck's Horn Tavern, which as long ago as 1816 was described as "an old and well-known tavern." Later the first bicycle-riding school opened on this site in 1868. Still later it was Abbey's Park Theater, where Lillie Langtry's American debut was scuttled by the theater burning down on October 30, 1882. Present building built for Brooks Brothers in 1883--it's been modernized since. Until recently housed Domain interiors, a casualty of the 2008 housing bust; Just Bulbs, which sold light bulbs, also used to be here, prompting a David Letterman routine where he tried to get them to sell him something that was not a bulb.

928: Bar Stuzzichini is on the first of 12 floors from 1910, designed by William H. Birkmire.








924: Weirdly modernized black building used to house Eneslow, shoe store whose name seemed to spell something backwards, even though it didn't.

922 (corner): Shine Deli's short, mansard-roofed building looks like it was built a lot earlier than 1925.

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915: A castle-like 20-story building from 1926, designed by Joseph Martine. On the ground is the restaurant/club Strata, formerly Metronome, swanky jazz restaurant that appeared as "Balzac" in the TV show Sex and the City. Upstairs is the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine's clinic. On this site was the Park & Tilford grocery house.

913: Punch Bar & Grill, snazzy bar with dangerous-looking sign, in a 1910 rowhouse. Upstairs used to be Eau, a bar with a waterfall in the window.

911: Metropolitan Design Center was Ferdossi Rugs, 1905-2004. Expanded from No. 909 next door.

Warren Building

NYC - Warren Building by wallyg, on Flickr

903 (corner): Portico furniture is in an 1887 Stanford White building in an overly ornate Renaissance Revival style.

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920 (corner): A 1916 building with 16 floors houses Lunetta, Italian-American (with a Brooklyn older sibling) that replaced the long-running neo-diner Mayrose. Also at this address is also Zaro's Bakery, local chain founded in 1927-- formerly See interior design. Upstairs is the ICF Group, which stands for International Contract Furnishings--est. 1962.
















906-908 (corner): Was B. Shackman & Co., a novelty company. Now houses Safavieh oriental rugs and the flagship of the Jennifer Convertibles sofabed chain. Previously at this corner was the Continental Hotel.

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Lord & Taylor Building

NYC: Lord & Taylor Store by wallyg, on Flickr

901 (Corner): A whimsical cast-iron Bohemian Renaissance building (James H. Giles, architect) that was Lord & Taylor's main store from 1873 to 1914. Current occupant Energie/Miss Sixty was Intermix, before that Villeroy & Boch china store. In the early 1990s, it housed a topless club.

895-899: ''Equinox Building'' houses the Equinox fitness club; it used to be part of the Lord & Taylor building, with the same cast-iron facade. It was redesigned by John H. Duncan to give it a neo-classical facade when Lord & Taylor moved to 38th Street in 1914.

893: Jennifer Leather sofas; Men's Suits New York

Gorham Building

Gothic by ShellyS, on Flickr

889 (Corner): A somewhat spooky red-brick structure built in 1884 by the Gorham Manufacturing Co. as a silver factory, store and residences--an early example of mixed-use development. Owned by the Goelet family, whose mansion was up the block. Now houses Fishs Eddy, which sells virtually indestructible china--the name is an upstate town where the owners used to buy a lot of antiques.

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Goelet Building

Broadway/20 by jpchan, on Flickr

900 (corner): This orangish structure is another (and better) Stanford White design, erected in 1886 on the site of the old Goelet mansion, the last such house on Broadway--a gloomy place haunted by peacocks. The top five floors of the present building are an ill-conceived addition. Was Bombay Co., Metropolitan Carpet Gallery; also houses craftbar, formerly the wine bar Morrells.










890-892 (corner): Lawrence A. Wein Center for Dance and Theater; houses American Ballet Theatre, a dance company founded 1939 whose artistic director from 1980 to 1990 was Mikhail Baryshnikov. (They're based here-- they don't perform here.) Also home to Ballet Tech, AMC Loews 19th St. East 6, NYC, 5/30/08 - 1 of 8 by goodrob13, on Flickr the New York City Public School of Dance. Loews 19th Street cineplex is on the ground floor. From 1899 until c. 1920, No. 890 was the address of McLoughlin Bros., pioneering children's book and game company.

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Arnold Constable Building

bldg43a by ShellyS, on Flickr

881-887 (corner): ABC Carpets' rug department was the Arnold Constable department store (1869-1914), with a mansard roof worthy of the Addams Family; founded by Aaron Arnold and son-in-law James Constable, the old store offered "Everything From Cradle to Grave." Carnegies, Rockefellers and Morgans were frequent customers here.

By buying and renovating this building (designed by Griffith Thomas), ABC pioneered the revitalization of Ladies' Mile in the 1960s.








873 (corner): More of the Constable building, though a different color; houses Kundalini Yoga East, Illuminations candle chain, Broadway Futon and New Andy's Deli.














The Constable store was built on the site of actor Edwin Booth's home (1862-65) at No. 28 E. 18th Street; his brother, fellow actor and assassin John Wilkes Booth, often stayed with him here.

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ABC Carpets & Home

broadway & 18th by dickuhne, on Flickr

888 (corner): Fascinating furniture store in a beautiful red-brick-and-chocolate building; frequently featured on Sex and the City. ABC Carpet and Home by Tom Harpel, on Flickr Was W & J Sloane (1881-1912), a carpet store that introduced oriental rugs to NYC; it carpeted the Waldorf-Astoria, the coronation of Czar Nicholas II and the homes of New York's elite. W(illiam) Sloane was the foreman of the jury that convicted Boss Tweed in 1873.

876: This quite lovely red-brick-and-cream building has fascinating detailing: workmen's tools--or Masonic symbols? Formerly ABC Carpets' annex, it's now home to Environment Furniture, which sells items made from recycled wood from Brazil's endangered Peroba tree.

McIntyre Building

moonrise by dmansouri, on Flickr

874: Sleepy's (formerly Klein Sleep) is in this over-the-top 1892 tower by Robert H. Robertson; note name behind awning. When it was first built, until 1898, it was occupied by the children's publishers McLoughlin Bros. In the 1970s, the seventh floor was the illegal nightclub Cobra Club; for years, escaped snakes were found in the building.

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867-869: Paragon Sporting Goods, since 1908; the building, dating to 1882, was home to the pioneering sheet-music store Charles Ditson Co. In the crime novel Drowned Hope, Dortmunder buys scuba gear at Paragon to rob a submerged town.

865: J&S Imports--"Africa, India, Haiti, Spain"--is in a strongly detailed five-story.


863: True Religion

861: Steve Madden Shoes

859: Nicely restored three-story.

857 (corner): Tisserie, Venezuelan bakery/cafe, replaced Union Square Deli. Painter Isabel Bishop's studio was on the fourth floor here (1934-44), helping to name the "14th Street School" of social realism.

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872 (corner): Hawes Building houses Fresh, organic soap chain; was Dynasty Deli.

870: goodburger, local mini-chain, replaced Nicholas Reggae, Rastafarian paraphernalia (oils and such).

868: Was Java 'n' Jazz, cool coffeeshop.

862: Was Errico Brothers, retailers of Florentine carved furniture.

860 (corner): Building that houses Petco was Andy Warhol's Factory from 1974 until the artist's 1987 death--though by this time he was calling it "the Office," having declared the "Factory" concept "too corny." From 1980-89, it also housed Underground, a new wave dance club featured in the movie Liquid Sky. (Around 1987, it changed its name to Union Square.)

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Union Square

Union Square, New York City December 2005 by Trig's, on Flickr

Union Square was not named for labor or for the North, but for the fact that Broadway meets and briefly converges with the Bowery (now 4th Avenue and Park), once Broadway's rival as NYC's main street. In the city plan of 1811, Broadway was supposed to be eliminated north of 14th Street, permanently uniting it with 4th Avenue. Fortunately, NYC was unable to raise money to reroute Broadway, saving Manhattan above Downtown from complete predictability. NYC - Union Square: Greenmarket in the Fall by wallyg, on Flickr

The square has a rich political history: 250,000 gathered here to support the Union during the Civil War (1861), the largest crowd ever assembled in North America up to that point. Here were the first U.S. labor day parade (1882), Emma Goldman's arrest for telling unemployed to steal bread (1893), a funeral march for Triangle Shirtwaist Fire victims (1911), protests against Sacco & Vanzetti's execution (1927) and the Rosenbergs' (1953). After the destruction of the World Trade Center, Union Square became the site of an impromptu memorial and peace vigil.

The parking lot at the north end of the park hosts Union Square Greenmarket, Manhattan's biggest farmers' market. It used to be used for weekly recreations of medieval combat by the Society for Creative Anachronism.







Sand Playground I by edenpictures, on Flickr

The playground in Union Square is sometimes known as the Sand Playground. It underwent a revamping in 2008.




James Fountain

by xolives, on Flickr

This 1881 work by Karl Adolph Donndorf, surmounted by a statue of Charity, was intended to promote temperance. ''Here's something else you can drink--water!'' was a popular anti-alcohol message.


























Gandhi statue

Mohandas K. Gandhi by Monika N., on Flickr Placed here in 1986 to commemorate Union Square's history of (mostly) non-violent protest. It depicts him on his famous Salt March, and there's flagstones in the garden beside his statue that invite you to march along with him.
IMG_2284 by mrgeneko, on Flickr

In the summer months, there's an outdoor cafe in Union Square called Luna Park, named for the legendary amusement park at Coney Island.

Abraham Lincoln Statue

NYC - Union Square: Abraham Lincoln Statue by wallyg, on Flickr

Sponsored by the Union League Club and sculpted by Henry Kirke Brown in 1869. It used to be where the Gandhi statue is now, and it used to be surrounded by a fence inscribed ''with malice toward none; charity toward all'' from his Second Inaugural Address. Lincoln's body lay in state in Union Square on April 24, 1865, before being taken to City Hall.

Independence Flagstaff

NYC - Union Square: Independence Flagstaff - Tyranny by wallyg, on Flickr The flagpole in the center of the square, with a base by Anthony de Francisi and a quote from Jefferson about how we don't know how good we have it. Francisi's bas reliefs depict the subversion of democracy by empire; they're really quite radical. (Officially the flagpole is dedicated to Tammany Hall leader Charles F. Murphy, but public sentiment dissuaded the city from elevating the machine boss to the level of Lincoln and Washington.)

Statue of Washington

NYC: Union Square - General George Washington Statue by wallyg, on Flickr Equestrian statue by Henry Kirke Brown and John Quincy Ward (1856) was formerly on the traffic island next to 4th Avenue, where it supposedly marked the actual spot where Washington greeted the citizens of New York when he liberated the city from British rule after the Revolutionary War, on November 25, 1783. The present spot actually seems more likely to be where the roads met 220 years ago.



























Statue of Lafayette

Lafayette by Ayres no graces, on Flickr

By Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty; he made this statue to remind New York of Franco-American friendship as part of his campaign to raise money for Liberty's pedestal. Should be facing toward Washington, to whom Lafayette is offering his sword; as it is, he's more or less facing a tree.



















Zeckendorf Towers by Lee Kottner, on Flickr

NEW YORK CITY - UNION SQUARE FOLKS by Punxutawneyphil, on Flickr

The steps at the south end of Union Square have become one of Manhattan's great public spaces--used by skateboarders, break dancers, political agitators and people just hanging out on the steps. The Critical Mass bicycle rallies gather here on the last Friday of every month, though they've largely been suppressed by extra-constitutional NYPD action. There's a craft fair here every year in December.



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The northern boundary of the Village.

The corner of 14th Street and Broadway was nicknamed Deadman's Curve for its fatal cable car accidents.

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851 Broadway by edenpictures, on Flickr

851 (corner): Shoe Mania is in a 29-story building from 1929 known as the Union Building. Previously here was the Union Place Hotel, later the Morton House and then the Hotel Churchill.

Earlier on this site was the home of Cornelius van Schaanck Roosevelt, Theodore's grandfather (and Eleanor's great-grandfather), who hosted celebrities like James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Louis Napoleon. Young Teddy watched Lincoln's funeral procession from a second-story window on April 25, 1865.

Roosevelt Building

cool building by gwarcita, on Flickr

839-841: Building with the Cosi cafe (formerly Xando Cosi) on the ground floor is named for Cornelius Roosevelt, who lived up the block. The rooftop was original site of Biograph Studios (1896-1908), which later made movie history on 14th Street. The building housed Cheap Jack's, a misnamed vintage clothing store.

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1 Union Square South

Metronome by Captain Chaos, on Flickr

842 (block): Like most of the new buildings on this stretch of 14th, designed by Davis Brody Bond architects (1999). The Virgin Megastore here was a key location in the zombie novel Monster Island. There's also a branch of the reprehensible Circuit City.

The stuff on the wall, including steam and 24-hour clock (counting forward and backward), constitute an art piece called Metronome.



NewYork200710 097 by Ecnerwal, on Flickr

850: Site of Wallack's Theater, which Newland Archer attends in The Age of Innocence. Later at this site (as No. 842) were the offices of the Village Voice in the 1980s. The Union Square 14 multiplex is here now--in my experience, the cinema where movies are most likely to be sold out.

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835 (corner): This was the home of the Harvard Club of New York from 1866-87.

A strip of antique stores, including...

833: Universe Antiques

827-31: Howard Kaplan Antiques (bath fixtures a specialty) and Lions Antiques; the AIA Guide calls this "a truly magnificent pair of Italianate business buildings." Used to house Belle Epoque, a restaurant evoking the Gilded Age.

825: Chinese Art and Antiques-- porcelain, jade, ivory. A century ago this was the address of the St. George Hotel.













Old Forbidden Planet by edenpictures, on Flickr

821 (corner): No Difference shoes is in the former home of Forbidden Planet, when it was the greatest comic book store in town. Before 1981 it was the University Place Book Shop, which opened here in 1932. The 10-story building is an impressive prow-like red brick in the Rundbogenstil.

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Forbidden Planet

Everywhere Signs (And People) by J.L. McVay / StereoactiveNYC, on Flickr

840 (corner): Part of an international chain of comics stores. Gives out free boards-and-bags--for comic collecting. Used to have a great science-fiction section. Noted for its action figure selection. In a 12-story 1899 building.

836: Hyde Park Antiques, 18th Century English furniture is in a six-story mansard-roofed building.

832: Mavi Jeans (Turkish for "Blue") replaced Lawrence Michael Antiques, in an obsessively detailed building.

830: Detailing gets more hallucinatory as you go up. Used to house Philip Colleck of London. An automat opened here in 1902.

The Strand

The Strand by drauh, on Flickr

828 (corner): Billed as the world's largest used bookstore with "18 miles of books," this store opened 1927 on 4th Avenue's Booksellers Row, and moved to this location in 1957. A recent renovation kept all that was cool about the place and removed much that was annoying.

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815: Abe's Antiques; Shala Yoga House, opened 2002

813: Simon Ross Antiques











801 (corner): Was James McCreery & Co. dry goods, which opened here in 1869; it later moved to 23rd Street. Now Global Fine Repro, David Murray Collections.

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Street skipped a block here to save landowner Henry Brevoort's apple orchard.

Hotel St Denis 01 by rollingrck, on Flickr

799 (corner): Was the St. Denis Hotel (1848-1917), one of NY's most elegant. Guests included Lincoln, Grant, P.T. Barnum, Sarah Bernhardt, Buffalo Bill Cody. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone by calling Brooklyn from here in 1877. Now houses Far Eastern Antiques, Flores & Iva antiques, Bag House.

795: Was the offices of Grove Press, which helped fight censorship of literature by publishing Lady Chatterly's Lover and Tropic of Cancer.

791: Poet and art critic Frank O'Hara had an all-white loft here; this was his home when he was killed in 1966, run over by a beach buggy on Fire Island.

Brittany Hall

Brittany Residence Hall (NYU) by Bryan Bruchman, on Flickr

787: NYU dorm was formerly the Brittany Hotel, which has housed columnist Walter Winchell, actor Al Pacino and rocker Jerry Garcia. The penthouse, now a study lounge, was once a speakeasy. The ground floor features Broadway Windows, displays of often interesting student art.

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824 (corner): Proctor Galleries Fine Antiques is in Hewlett House, a 1963 white-brick building.

820: Bon Vivant Diner is in a building that was uglified in 2007.

818: The site of John Morrisey's Gambling Hall, noted for its imperviousness to raids, "thanks to an ingenious basement vault...that permitted all the gambling apparatus and the bank to be hidden rapidly behind a false wall."--Low Life.

816: Place de Vosges, named for an old square in Paris, is in a crumbling 3-1/2 story rowhouse from 1910.

814: Midtown Antiques is in a Greek Revival townhouse. Also here are Rafik Video and Digitpost.

812: Turbulence antiques, founded 1984, is in a c. 1900 building with layers of pillars.

810: Ariyoshi Sake Bar is in a seven-story neo-Gothic building, built 1907.

The Renwick

808: Halloween Adventure, a costume superstore, is on the ground floor of this 1888 building intended to form a backdrop to James Renwick Jr.'s Grace Church. Formerly Agostino Antiques. The detective in the novel The Alienist had his office here.

Grace Church

god is in the house by dickuhne, on Flickr

800-804: One of NYC's architectural jewels, erected 1843-46. James Renwick, Jr.--a member of the Brevoort family, whose land this once was--won a contest to design it, his first professional work; Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park, landscaped the garden in 1881. Grace Church by Zesmerelda, on Flickr Circus star Tom Thumb married here, as did Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence; David Duchovny married Tea Leoni in the backyard here in 1997. The funeral for Commander Henry Honeychurch Gorridge, a naval officer who became a celebrity for transporting Cleopatra's Needle to New York, was held here in 1885.


Grace Church @ night by Kelly McCarthy, on Flickr

Corner: The churchyard was once Fleischmann's Vienna Model Bakery, whose daily donations of unsold bread gave rise to the term "breadline."

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The bend here in Broadway, like the interruption in 11th Street, was designed to save the Brevoort orchard.

West:

785 (corner): Was Mathew Brady's daguerreotype studio, where he took his famous photograph of Abraham Lincoln. The image, taken February 27, 1860, the day of Lincoln's Cooper Union address, was credited with changing the candidate's image and helping him win the election.

Randall House

771 (block): Apartments named for Capt. Robert Richard Randall, an old sea captain whose house was where Silver Spurs burger joint is now. Randall owned most of the land from 10th St to Waverly Place between 5th and 4th avenues; in his will, written by Alexander Hamilton and said to be unbreakable, he left it to establish Sailor's Snug Harbor, an old folks' home for sailors; the trust still owns 21 acres of prime Manhattan real estate. Snug Harbor used to be in Staten Island (1833-1975), and is now in North Carolina.








Silver Spurs salad, NYC, 7/18/08 - 2 of 2 by goodrob13, on Flickr









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Stewart House

Stewart House by edenpictures, on Flickr

786: Apartments built on the site of (and named for) A.T. Stewart's Cast-Iron Palace (1862), the first large store on Ladies' Mile, of which it was the southern endpoint. Stewart, called "one of the meanest men that ever lived," died in 1876, and his body was kidnapped from St. Marks' graveyard in 1878 and held for ransom; they were returned by parties unknown in 1881 in exchange for $20,000. Wanamakers NYC 03 by rollingrck, on Flickr

The store, purchased by John Wanamaker in 1896, closed in 1954 and burned down two years later in an inferno that injured 208 firefighters.

These apartments were home to Leon Klinghoffer, the man in a wheelchair on the Achille Lauro cruise ship who was shot and pushed overboard by Palestine Liberation Front terrorists, October 8, 1985.

Corner:Prior to being bought by Stewart, the 9th Street corner was owned by the art dealers Goupil & Co.

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9th Street between Broadway and 4th Avenue was renamed for the Wanamaker's stores that it separated.

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757 (corner): Sbarro, Italian fast food, had Village-themed murals. Site of F.A.O. Schwartz's first toy store.

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Wanamaker's

by Heather Miller, on Flickr

770: Ann Taylor Loft and Chase branch are in a famous former department store (1907-1954) designed by Daniel Burnham, Flatiron's architect; it was the center of New York shopping in the early 20th Century. (It's on the sailor's must-see list in On the Town.) It was famous enough to get the name of this block of 9th Street changed.

a first for an American. He sparked a chess craze and had a cigar and a hat named after him.

754 (corner): This defunct address was the Sinclair Hotel c. 1903.

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755 (corner): Perfumania

753: Hudson News




745: Was Star Magic, space age/new age gifts The Famous Cozy Soup 'n' Burger by aturkus, on Flickr

739: The Famous Cozy Soup & Burger is noted for its enormous burgers and omelettes.

735: Warehouse Wines & Spirits. Good bargains; I bought my wedding champagne here.

729 (corner): Delion Deli & Grocery. Sculptor Ana Mendieta landed on the roof of this business on September 8, 1985, when she plunged to her death from the adjacent apartment tower during an argument with her husband and fellow artist Carl Andre; Andre was tried for murder and acquitted.

W <=== WAVERLY PLACE

Tisch School of the Arts

NYU's Tisch School of the Arts by atp_tyreseus, on Flickr

715: Part of NYU, it's arguably the country's top film school; among its alums are directors Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Joel Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee and George C. Wolfe; actors Alec Baldwin, Billy Crystal, John Leguisamo and Adam Sandler; and playwright Tony Kushner.

Built on site of the New York Hotel (1844-95), believed to be a hotbed of Confederate spies during the Civil War. It introduced room service and the ala carte menu. Bookseller August Brentano got his start with a newsstand here in 1853.















NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Named for Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's treasury secretary, who helped found NYU. My friend Kimberly Phillips-Fein teaches here.

713: Writer Bret Harte took an apartment at this address in 1875.

W <===WASHINGTON PLACE

NYU Physics by Ingorrr, on Flickr

Corner: NYU's Meyer Hall of Physics. At one point the plan was to have all of NYU's buildings be this reddish color.



















Corner (1 W 4th): Hebrew Union College's Brookdale Center, housing the Jewish Institute of Religion (founded 1922) and the School of Sacred Music (1948).

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Astor Place Building

Red building by Ed Yourdon, on Flickr Yet another reason to dislike the "Sculpture for Living"--the glass tower across from Cooper Union--is that it ripped off the address of this building--1 Astor Place--which had been happily using it for more than a century. This red-brick Victorian beauty went up in 1881 with the same builder--lawyer Orlando Potter--and architectural team--Starkweather & Gibbs-- who later produced the Potter Building on Park Row. It was a very early example of the use of terra cotta for ornamentation--colored to resemble the then-ubiquitous brownstone. (Potter's buildings so popularized terra cotta that he went on to start the New York Terra Cotta Company.)

ASTOR PLACE ===> E

Broadway was paved to this point by 1809.

740 (corner): Vitamin Shoppe, a chain with an eye for good architecture. Also houses Papa Beard Sweets, an Asian cream-puff franchise.

This area, stretching east to what is now Cooper Square, was from 1806-55 the Vauxhall Garden, a popular amusement center featuring "mead booths, flying horses, fireworks, concerts, etc." (Historical Tour of... Broadway). In 1942, the newly formed Manhattan Savings Bank was headquartered here.

742: Village Tannery

740: Rubber Sole shoes, part of the Yellow Rat Bastard alterno-clothing complex

738: The Beez Neez clothes, one of many sportswear outlets along this stretch of Broadway

736: Tempo clothes, owned by Yellow Rat Bastard. At this address and its two neighbors to the south lived Mary Mason Jones--the inspiration for Mrs. Mingott in The Age of Innocence-- and her two sisters, who between them had married two brothers and the brothers' cousin. The houses had separate entrances but with grand interiors that could be combined.

732: This 1882 building says ''Treffurth's'' near the cornice, marking the former home of a noted restaurant. More recently it housed XOXO clothes. Upstairs is Otakuden, an anime shop.

730: Headquarters of labor-owned Amalgamated Life Insurance; note the brass cockatrices above the doors. The building is on the site of the Broadway Atheneum, a theater converted from the Unitarian Church of the Messiah by A.T. Stewart in 1865. It also ran under the names Daly's New Fifth-Avenue Theater, Fox's Broadway Theater, The Globe and Harrigan & Hart's New Theatre Comique. Burned down in 1884.

724: The address of the Medical College for Women and Hospital for Women and Children, a homeopathic institution opened in 1862 with support from Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Also the address of the Church of the Messiah.

720: Jimmy Jazz clothes

718: The new home of Canal Jeans, which was the cool place to shop for clothes in the 1980s. In 1980, Unique Clothing Warehouse opened here, marking the rebirth of this stretch of Broadway as a hip retail zone. (It went bankrupt in 1991.)

716: An 1891 building by Alfred Zucker houses Shakespeare & Co., a great independent bookstore mini-chain, named for a famous Parisian bookshop. Look for the terra cotta devil's heads.

712-714: Was Antique Boutique, a vintage clothing store whose surreal window displays sometimes got it in trouble. In the 1970s, there was a "smoke-easy" here, a clandestine clearinghouse for the city's pot dealers.

708: Dome Boutique

704: Le Chateau clothes; formerly Bayamo, Chino-Latino restaurant that had a full-size 3-D dragon on the ceiling.

700 (corner): French Connection UK and Aldo shoes are on ground floor of the Audubon Building, HQ of the environmental society, a building supposed to be model of energy efficiency. Was the Schermerhorn Building.

W <=== 4TH STREET ===> E

From 4th Street on down, Broadway replaces 5th Avenue as the division between West and East.

West:

the owls... by IntangibleArts, on Flickr

693 (corner): Merchants Building has Bath & Bodyworks on ground floor. Note scary owls on 4th floor.

691: Was Andy's Chee-pees, vintage clothing chain. Site used to be Union Club HQ until 1855.




Mercer and West 3rd. by gak, on Flickr

683 (corner): Le Basket, cafeteria, was Pamela's Cafe.

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Silk Building

Crossing over to the other side by j o s h, on Flickr

692 (corner): Tower Records was on the ground floor of this luxury apartment building, which has been home to Cher, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Keith Richards, Britney Spears and other celebs.

New York established its first "Normal and High School on this site in 1869, under the leadership of Thomas Hunter.

Next to the Silk Building is a weekend flea market.




684 (corner): Au Bon Pain; note lions on cornice.

W <=== WEST 3RD ST /GREAT JONES ST===> E

West:

667-677 (corner): NYU dorms built on site of Metropolitan Hall, aka Tripler's Hall, which from 1850 to 1859 featured performers like Jenny Lind and Adelina Patti (only 10 when she sang here in 1852). That same year a memorial service for author James Fenimore Cooper was held here, conducted by Daniel Webster and featuring addresses by Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. In 1853, the theater hosted the World's Temperence Convention, featuring Susan B. Anthony, Horace Greeley and P.T. Barnum.

After fire destroyed the hall in 1859, the Winter Garden Theater was built here (originally called the New York Theatre and later Burton's Theater). On November 25, 1864 theatrical brothers Edwin, Junius and John Wilkes Booth performed here together for the only time in their careers, as a benefit to raise money for the statue of Shakespeare in Central Park--in Julius Caesar, a play about an assassination.

The theater was replaced by the Grand Central Hotel (aka the Broadway Central Hotel), on whose staircase on January 6, 1872, Edward Stokes fatally shot financier Jim Fisk, his rival for the affections of singer Josie Mansfield. It was also the home of Arnold Rothstein, a gangster who is said to be the inspiration for The Great Gatsby's Meyer Wolfsheim and Guys & Dolls' Nathan Detroit. Renamed the University Hotel, it collapsed in 1973, killing four tenants and destroying the Mercer Arts Center, which was in the same building on the other side of the block.

675: Herman Melville's family moved to this address in 1828, when he was about nine.

667: Was the address of the Bay State Hotel.

Transit

665: The best sneaker store in New York, according to Time Out New York. People come from as far away as Italy and Japan to buy shoes here. Was the address (along with No. 663) of the Marble Houses, which attracted great curiosity for being faced with that material. The two later became the Tremont Hotel.

663: The National Academy of Design, founded in 1826 by telegraph inventor Samuel Morse, opened its first building at this address in 1850. Louis Comfort Tiffany and Augustus Saint-Gaudens studied here. Later this was the address of a theater that was variously called the Old Stuyvesant, Academy Hall, Donaldson's Opera House, The Canterbury and Mozart Hall.

661: Was the address of publisher G.P. Putnam

659: Blades, Board and Skate is at the address of the city's first YMCA, opened 1852--at that time more focused on Bible classes than on athletics.






649: Watch World

Pfaff's Beer Hall

647: The basement of what is now Mikai clothing was a hangout for pre-Civil War bohemians like Walt Whitman; satirist Artemus Ward; actress Ada Clare, the "Queen of Bohemia"; Henry Clapp, editor of the New York Saturday Press, the first U.S. countercultural newspaper; cartoonist Thomas Nast. Closed 1870, replaced by present building, originally a W. and J. Sloane carpet store (see above). Later housed Infinity, a pioneering gay/straight disco, gutted by fire in 1979.

643: VG Restaurant; Mathew Brady briefly had his daguerreotype studio on this site.

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682 (corner): General Nutrition Center is on the site of the house of Philip Hone, mayor of NYC in 1826-27. He lived here from 1837-51.

680: Make 10 clothing

678: Upstairs from Paper House is The Cutting Room, a recording studio used by Wu-Tang Clan, Queen Latifah, Beastie Boys, Missy Elliott, etc. Also in this building is USA Shaolin Temple, a dojo run by a Shaolin monk who defected in 1992, who claims to have trained the Wu-Tang Clan in martial arts. Was Marap Leather, distributor.

676: Upstairs from Lighting Plus, on the fifth floor, was Keith Haring's studio, now the offices of his foundation. 1874 Brooks Brothers Building by Alan Cordova, on Flickr

670 (corner): Leica Galleries, Wet Seal clothing are in the former Brooks Brothers store (1874-1884); built on site of the Samuel Ward mansion, art patron (his private gallery here was said to be 1st in U.S.) and father of Julie Ward Howe, who composed "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

BOND STREET ===> E

666 (corner): 666 Broadway, current home to Harper's Magazine, Center for Constitutional Rights; first offices of the media watch group FAIR.

654: Co-Pilot Shoes. This was at one point the site of the Astor mansion, and later an address of the Broadway Atheneum.

648: Fat Jeans, owned by Yellow Rat Bastard. The Manhattan Savings Institute was founded here as a working-class bank in 1850.

The One That Almost Got Away by rcherubin, on Flickr

644 (corner): This beautiful building was once the offices of the Manhattan Savings Institution; note MSI monogram. Atrium clothing complex on ground floor; was the Blue Willow Restaurant, opened in 1983. Scenes from Ghostbusters and Hannah and Her Sisters were shot here. An earlier MSI building was the site of the 19th Bleecker Tower by Alan Cordova, on Flickr Century's biggest bank robbery. Carried out by the King of the Bank Robbers, George Leonidas Leslie, on October 27, 1878, with a gang that included such notables as Jimmy Hope, Shang Draper, Red Leary, Johnny Dobbs, Worcester Sam Perris, Banjo Pete Emerson and Eddie Goodie Gearing. They made off with over $2.7 million; unfortunately for them, all but $12,000 was in non-negotiable bonds.


W <=== BLEECKER STREET ===> E

Two hundred police officers armed with clubs attacked and dispersed a mob of 5,000 here during the draft riots of 1863.

West:

641: Infinity Haircut

639 1/2: B&B News








627: Noho Building houses Stereo Exchange, Time Out New York's former offices Gonzalez Y Gonzalez by tracky_birthday, on Flickr

625: Gonzalez y Gonzalez, ironic Mexican. The modeling agency Clear is based here, as is the record label Matador--which has released some great music, like Guided By Voices, Belle & Sebastian and Cat Power.

623: Crunch Fitness. From 1886 until 1892, this was the address of the pioneering children's book and game publisher McLoughlin Bros.


Cable Building

Angelika Film Center by karlo, on Flickr

611-621 (corner): Designed in 1894 by Stanford White for Broadway Cable Traction Co., cable car operators. Ground floor now houses Manhattan Deli & Pizza, Crate & Barrel. Theaters Angelika Film Center, a popular art-house cinema, are in the basement, where machines once pulled cable cars from as far away as 36th Street. Also in the building is A to Z Music Services, CD-presser for indie labels.

Before the Cable Building, this was the site of St. Thomas Church, built 1824. John Jacob Astor was put to rest in the Astor family crypt here in 1848; Washington Irving was an honorary pallbearer. Astor was relocated in 1851 to Trinity Church Cemetery at 155th Street. The congregation moved to 5th Avenue and West 53rd in 1866.

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Nom De Guerre by the dancing kids, on Flickr

640 (corner): Underneath the Swatch outlet is a secret store called Nom de Guerre. Behind a door marked with a sign for a copy shop is a black staircase that leads to two subterranean stories of really expensive streetwear. The building dates to 1897, was designed by Macy's architects De Lemos & Cordes, and was the first structure to be named the Empire State Building (after the Empire State Bank on the ground floor).

628-630: Urban Outfitters; built for New York Mercantile Exchange. (Note name on facade.) Later was home to Commercial Plastics.

622-626: Fiorucci is on site of Laura Keene's Varieties Theater (1856); Keene played in Our American Cousin the night Lincoln was assassinated. Later the Olympic; destroyed by fire, 1880. Current building from 1882; heavily modernized.

620: David Z shoes is in an outstanding (and early) cast-iron building from 1858, designed by John Butler Snook. Adidas Building on Houston by erik jaeger, on Flickr

Corner: The Adidas Building is on the former site of "Whale of a Wash," a car wash that mostly served taxis. It had the one billboard on Houston that I actually liked.

BROADWAY/LAFAYETTE STATION: B/D/F/Q trains to West 4th
F train to 2nd Avenue
B/D/Q trains to Grand Street

In the 1980s, as many as 200 people were living in the subway tunnels between this and the 2nd Avenue station.


W <=== HOUSTON STREET ===> E
The boundary of Greenwich Village and Soho

Near this intersection was the Thieves' Exchange, where, according to historian Herbert Asbury, "criminals and their fences met each night and dickered openly over their beer and whiskey for jewelry and other loot."

West:

Houston Street by Rafael Chamorro, on Flickr

Corner: This building's north wall featured a 1972 art installation called The Wall, by Forrest Myers, consisting of blue girders arranged in a grid. The owner of the building had it removed in 2003 so that he could sell the wall as ad space, but after a long legal struggle it was replaced in 2007-- spiffed up and moved up somewhat so an ad can fit underneath.

599: Was The Flamingo--pioneering gay disco.

597: This 1867 building looks cast-iron, but is actually marble. Houses Kenneth Cole shoes.












Museum for African Art

593: The Classical-style building dates to 1860; the interior, redone for the museum's 1993 move, is by Maya Lin, architect of D.C.'s Vietnam Memorial. Also the address of The Lounge boutique.

591: Eastern Mountain Sports, gear for rock-climbing, yoga and the like




585: Tony Pastor, the inventor of Vaudeville, moved his theater here from The Bowery in 1873. Lillian Russell debuted here November 22, 1880, a year before Pastor moved his theater to Tammany Hall on 14th Street.

583: The Astor Building, designed by Cleverdon & Putzel in 1896, was built on the site of the house where John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the U.S., died March 29, 1848. His last regret: not buying "every foot of land on the island of Manhattan." In 1983, it became the home of the New Museum of Contemporary Art-- which is now building a new home on The Bowery.

579: ALDO shoes is at the address where Stanwix Hall once stood, a fancy saloon that witnessed the February 24, 1855 shooting of Know-Nothing leader Bill ''The Butcher'' Poole, which inspired the Gangs of New York film. DSC06336 by Kramchang, on Flickr

575 (corner): What was in the 1990s the Guggenheim Museum Soho, the downtown branch of the uptown museum, is now a futuristic Prada outlet. Carrie spends her book advance here on Sex and the City. The structure itself was built in 1882 for the Rogers Peet clothing store.

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Liberty by Joel Bedford, on Flickr

600-602 (corner): With its cast-iron, prefab facade, this is an example of the characteristic Soho building-- collectively representing some of the finest commercial architecture Former intersection. by gak, on Flickr in the world. The Corinthian-columned loft building, finished in 1882, has stories that get progressively shorter to create an illusion of greater height.

596: Was the Empire theater, later the Santa Claus, from 1853-59. The Salmagundi Club, an artists' society, was founded here in 1871 as the New York Sketch Club in the studio of Johnathan Scott Hartley. Now the address of New York Model Management.

594: This was the home of the Alternative Museum, founded in 1975 to promote socially conscious art, from 1991 until 2000, when the institution relocated to cyberspace. The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is now housed here.

590: Ricky's, an extra-large outlet of the funky local cosmetics chain

588: Offices of the Academy of American Poets. The writers group PEN held a reading of The Satanic Verses here on February 22, 1989, to protest the fatwah against its author, Salman Rushdie; authors like E.L. Doctorow, Gay Talese and Susan Sontag read. On the ground floor is Express, fashion chain.

568-578 (corner): the site of Niblo's Garden, one of New York's longest-standing theaters--built in 1827 as the Sans Souci, it was rebuilt after several fires and was finally demolished in 1895. It featured actors like Edwin Forrest and orators like Daniel Webster (who spoke here in 1837), but it is most famous for the 1866 premier of The Black Crook, which some consider to be the first musical. It was a huge hit, being the first Broadway show to run more than a year.

After 1852, the theater was part of the Metropolitan Hotel, one of the city's most luxurious; Japanese Crown Prince Tateish Onojero stayed here in 1860. The hotel bartender, Professor Jerry Thomas, is immortalized as the creator of the Tom and Jerry cocktail. Corner Building on Broadway & Prince St in Manhattan by bitchcakesny, on Flickr

The current building is an 1890s Renaissance Eclectic building by George B. Post, architect of the New York Stock Exchange. It now houses Bliss Soho, upscale spa; upstairs is Bway.net, a friendly neighborhood ISP.


W <===         PRINCE STREET         ===> E

A log cabin was set up at this intersection in 1840 to promote the presidential campaign of William Henry Harrison. On April 12, 1861, Walt Whitman bought a newspaper at this corner and learned that the Civil War had started.

West:

Lunch at Victoria's Secret by Ed Yourdon, on Flickr

565 (corner): Victoria's Secret Soho is in the former Ball & Black Jewelry store, with appropriately Corinthian columns. The first five stories are marble, built in 1860, and the upper four are brick, added in 1893. In 1992, apartment 2C here served as the setting for the first season of The Real World.

Little Singer Building

561-563: Designed by Ernest Flagg in 1902 for the sewing machine company, it was little compared to Flagg's Singer Tower, one of New York's great lost buildings. This survivor is "one of the outstanding architectural achievements of the early 20th Century" (Guide to the Metropolis), the delicate metal and glass skin foreshadowed the modernist curtain wall. Replaced Anglo-American Church of St. George, a satellite of Trinity. The ground floor was Kate's Paperie, fancy stationery; now Mango, Spanish clothing brand.

557: The headquarters of Scholastic Books, world's largest children's publisher, are in the last building designed by Aldo Rossi before his untimely 1997 death; it includes the Scholastic Store, for all your Clifford the Big Red Dog and Harry Potter needs.

549-555: This granite building, built in two sections from 1889 to 1900, is the Charles Broadway Rouss Building, named by and for a businessman who changed his middle name to honor the street that took him from rags to riches. A native of Virginia, he also funded the construction of a number of public buildings in his home state, including the Battle Abbey Confederate war memorial.

In 1853, this was the address of the New York Free Love League, a group founded to oppose coercion in sexual relations.

No. 555 is now Sephora, where makeup is alphabetized.

545: 1885 cast-iron by Samuel A. Warner.

543: Tailor James McCall, founder of McCall's magazine, started the McCall Pattern Company at this address in 1876. The present building dates to 1903.

537-541: Three cast-iron buildings from 1888, housing Fossil and Guess. Nos. 539-41 had been the second site of P.T. Barnum's American Museum which moved here in 1865 after a disastrous fire; this incarnation, too, burned down, in 1869. Previously, this space had been the Chinese Rooms.

535: In 1974, a resident here claimed that the ghost of Juliana Elmore Sands-- a woman who drowned in the Spring Street well on New Year's Day, 1800--emerged from his waterbed. Sands' sweetheart, Levi Weeks, was accused of murder, but was acquited after being defended by both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

531: Lush, green bath products

529 (corner): This was the site of the Prescott House hotel. Today there's Cafe Bari; upstairs is a club called Upstairs, described as a "celebrity sanctuary."

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Dean & Deluca

Dean and DeLuca Soho by Shiny Things, on Flickr

560-566: An 1883 masonry building by Thomas Stent houses this famous gourmet food store.

558: H & M, Swedish fashion bargains (stands for Hennes and Mauritz).

556: David Z, hip shoe mini-chain

552-554: Built to a John Snook design in 1855, these buildings are among the oldest on Broadway.

550: This 1854 building was originally the Tiffany & Company jewelry store; a cast- iron facade was put on in 1901.












548: Church of the Divine Unity, a Unitarian church, was located here; novelist William Thackeray made his first U.S. apperance here on November 19, 1852, lecturing "On the Humorous Writers of Queen Anne's Reign."




542-544: An 1864 marble building with notable caryatids.




540: An 1867 marble building, designed by David and John Jardine with a fleur-de-lis motif.

536: Levi's store, one of the jeans maker's two direct outlets in Manhattan.














532: Scoop, trendy super-boutique





W <===         SPRING STREET         ===> E

West:

525 (corner): Nine Muses and Apollo Incorporated, literary agency

521-523: The last remnants of the St. Nicholas Hotel, which used to stretch from 507 to 527. One of the city's most opulent hotels when it was built in 1853 (at a cost of more than $1 million), it boasted the novelty of central heating. In 1854, the last murder committed with a sword cane occurred here--when one guest killed another who told him to make less noise. In 1863, the hotel was the headquarters for Mayor George Opdyke's efforts to suppress the Draft Riots. Later in the Civil War, on November 25, 1864, Confederate saboteurs attempted to burn down this and other hotels. Mark Twain and his future wife, Olivia Langdon, met here for the first time in 1867. The hotel closed its doors in the 1870s.

No. 521 now houses Puma, a sneaker superstore.

513-519: SoHo Lighting is in 1884 Queen Anne building by Samuel Warner.

503-511: Three 1878 cast-iron buildings by John B. Snook--now much altered. No. 509 was once a vacant lot where, in 1838, two giraffes (survivors of a group of 11) were exhibited--the first such animals seen in the U.S.

499: SoHome, home decor New York by Clafou, on Flickr

491: The New Era Building, an 1897 art nouveau structure built for a printing company, looks like it could be in Tim Burton's Batman. Features the New Era Cafe, and the Exstaza clothing store.




SoHo by jwowens, on Flickr

489 (corner): Brisas del Caribe (''Smiles of the Caribbean'')

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524 (corner): Bayard Building dates to 1903.

520: DNA, hot modeling agency.










514: The address of Wood's Minstrel Hall, also known as Wood's Theatre and Wood's Theatre Comique, a converted synagogue that between 1862 and 1881 featured minstrel shows, Lydia Thompson's British burlesque troupe and Harrigan and Hart's musicals-- their Mulligan Guard Picnic, produced here in 1878, has a claim to being the first musical comedy.

502-504: This 1860 cast-iron building was cast by Daniel Badger's Architectural Iron Works; the white marble columns are in what's known as the "sperm candle" style. This was for many years the home of Canal Jeans, a funky clothing store that recently moved to Brooklyn. Now it's Bloomingdale's ''edgy'' Soho branch.

496: So Good Jewelry Soho, budget-priced bling

494: Anita's, eclectic menu in a Madrid hacienda.

Haughwout Building

Edificio Haughwout by Mossaiq, on Flickr

488-492: Pronounced "HOW-out," this landmark 1857 building is "the most beautiful commercial cast-iron building in the country" (Guide to the Metropolis). Designed by John P. Gaynor, the cast-iron facade is by Daniel D. Badger Architectural Iron Works--the oldest such ironwork in the city. Haughwout's was a tableware store whose china was used at the White House; this store featured the first passenger elevator, a steam-driven model designed by Elisha Otis. The building now houses an office supply chain and Corcoran real estate.


W <===         BROOME STREET         ===> E


West:

Soho Style Skyscraper by bicameral, on Flickr

487 (corner): A dramatically detailed 12-story building by John Townsend Williams (1896)--like a slice of wedding cake. Casket, a trade publication, was published at this address in 1930.






wrong way by Runs With Scissors, on Flickr

485: Address of Wallack's Lyceum Theatre, which opened in 1850 as Brougham's Lyceum and was bought by the Wallacks--a prominent theatrical family--in 1852. After Lester Wallack moved his productions uptown in 1861, this venue operated as the Broadway Music Hall, the Olympic and the Broadway Theatre before being demolished in 1869.

483: Sloppy Joe/Dirty Jane, jeans-- part of the Yellow Rat Bastard empire

481: Alice Underground, vintage clothing, shoes etc.

Pearl River Mart

Peoplewatching by LarimdaME, on Flickr

477: This five-story cast-iron building holds an amazing array of Chinese imports. Moved here from Canal Street. Pearl River is the main waterway of Guangdong Province, where many Chinatown immigrants are from.

473: The address of Mme. Demorest, the dressmaker who in 1863 made a wedding gown for Lavinia Warren, diminutive bride of Barnum performer Tom Thumb.

465: Bose, hi-tech audio







Corner: Lord & Taylor had its department store here, in a building by Griffith Thomas put up from 1860-72. The store armed its employees against draft rioters in 1863. The company moved up to Ladies Mile around 1900; this building was demolished after a 1967 fire.

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Broadway & Broome by Vidiot, on Flickr

486 (corner): Madewell, funky, pricey clothing with a DJ booth; was Western Spirit, cowboy stuff. Building dates to 1882.

484: Universal News is said to sell 7,000 magazine titles. Yellow Rat Bastard by Lab2112, on Flickr

478-482: Roosevelt Building, 1873; built to make money for Roosevelt Hospital. This is the only surviving commercial building in New York City designed by Richard Morris Hunt, architect of the Metropolitan Museum. Now houses Yellow Rat Bastard, flagship of an alterno-clothing empire that was caught paying subminimum wages in 2008.

476: Thread Waxing Space, art/performance space opened 1992 in an old thread factory. taken over to just such a point by beigeinside, on Flickr

474: Miro Cafe

472: The address of Mechanics Hall, which featured blackface acts such as E.P. Christy's Minstrels, who played here for a record-breaking decade. The song "Dixie" was premiered here in 1859 by Bryant's Mistrels.

466-468: Was Brooks Brothers

French Culinary Institute

inside by roboppy, on Flickr

462 (corner): Students here show off their skills at the restaurant here, L'Ecole. There's a Daffy's branch at the same address.

The building is an 1879 cast-iron design by John Correja, made for the linen and lace importing firm Mills & Gibb. Earlier, Brooks Brothers opened a store here in 1858; during the Civil War, the company supplied uniforms for Union troops, and was a target of draft rioters.


W <===         GRAND STREET         ===> E


West:

broadway-and-grand-street by dandeluca, on Flickr

Corner (459 Broadway): The Devlin Building, a five-story cast-iron built in 1861 to house a branch of Devlin & Co., a clothing store founded in 1843. This branch closed in 1879. Bway.net, the local Internet provider, was based here for a time.

455: Muji, utilitarian housewares from Japan. Was Iceberg Army Navy of Soho.

451: CB2, more affordable sibling of Crate & Barrel. Was (is also?) Dance Space Center.

443-445: This 1860 neo-Renaissance building by Griffith Thomas housed the offices of D. Appleton & Co., publishers of the memoirs of Matthew C. Perry, William Tecumseh Sherman and William H. Seward; this may have been where Darwin's Origin of the Species was first published on U.S. soil.

Corner: The plaza houses what was a neo-Georgian bank building that dates to 1967. All the trees here--badly needed in this neighborhood--were recently cut down by the tree-hating owner.

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458 (corner): This 9-story building, built in 1896 and designed by Alfred Zucker, has been home to Meryl Streep, Sandra Bullock and author Olivia Goldsmith. Previously, this was the site of the Singer sewing machine company's first headquarters and showroom, built 1857.

454: Amsterdam Boutique

444: Address of Robert Butler's Varieties, also known as the Olympia; Tony Pastor worked here before starting his own theater on the Bowery, considered the birthplace of Vaudeville.

442: Site of Mitchell's Olympic Theater, later the American Music Hall.







434 (corner): Address of Barnum's Hotel, aka the Howard House, where Margaret and Kate Fox held seances in 1850 that popularized spiritualism in America. Years later Margaret confessed that she produced the spirits' ''rapping'' by cracking her joints.


W <===         HOWARD STREET         ===> E


West:

427: An 1870 cast-iron building by Thomas Jackson in the Venetian Renaissance style. Home to Chill on Broadway clothes, NARAL Pro-Choice New York.

425: The original site of Hearn's, a dry-goods store that opened in 1842. It eventually moved to 14th Street, where it became Macy's chief rival. George Arnold Hearn had earlier worked with his uncle, Aaron Arnold, who went on to found Arnold Constable, another major department store.









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by antiparticle, on Flickr

418 (corner): The Oltarsh Building houses the Mall of the Great Wall--Chinese import market, formerly the Pearl River Market. It was built as the Major Theater, aka Cinema Giglio, which opened in 1927 and seated 599. The building and theater were both named for builder David Oltarsh, who was a major in the Army Corps of Engineers. Today it is a flea market-style retail space.


W <===         CANAL STREET         ===> E


West:

Broadway & Canal by ranjit, on Flickr

415 (corner): Formerly the First National City Bank of New York-- the predecessor of Citibank. This triangular space was once the location of Brandreth House, a hotel run by one Doc Brandreth, a dope peddler who later did time in Sing Sing. On the hotel's steps on July 23, 1859, Virginia Stewart was shot and killed by her lover Robert C. MacDonald, who had pursued her from North Carolina. He killed himself with opium while awaiting trial in the Tombs.


W <===     LISPENARD ST








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Wich Way? by abercrombieit, on Flickr

416 (corner): Was 416 B.C., "B.C." standing for Below Canal--Bulgarian restaurant that relocated to the Lower East Side.

412: Site of Apollo Hall, where the New York Philharmonic gave its first concert on December 7, 1842--making it the oldest permanent orchestra in the English-speaking world. Here on May 10, 1872, the Equal Rights Party was founded, which ''advocated free love, birth control, vegetarianism, easier divorce laws and the end of the death penalty''--All Around the Town. The party nominated Victoria C. Woodhull for president--the first female presidential candidate of any U.S. party--and Frederick Douglass for vice president.

410: Site of Euterpean Hall

402: The address of Allen Dodworth's Dancing Academy, founded in 1842, where New York's upper crust learned to waltz. Dodworth was a violinist with the Philharmonic.

W <===     WALKER STREET     ===> E

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395 (corner): Self-Service Stores; ''Serve Yourself and Save.''








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392: Boys and Chicks, part of Yellow Rat Bastard's alterno-clothing empire








W <===     WHITE STREET     ===> E

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379 (corner): World Journal Bookstore





365: This was the address of the New York Garden--from 1809 to about 1850, the most fashionable resort of its kind in the city.

361 (corner): James S. White Building

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376: Site of Union Club HQ

366 (corner): The Broadway-Franklin Building was put up in 1907 as the Bernard Semel Building, a 12-story office tower named after a Jewish philanthropist. It's also been called the Broadway Textile Building and the Collect Pond House Apartments-- the latter name referring to a filled-in lake in what is now Chinatown. On the ground floor is Antique Orange, owned by Yellow Rat Bastard.

W <===     FRANKLIN STREET     ===> E

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Franklin / Broadway by Laplander, on Flickr

361 (corner): The New York branch of Nyack College, a Christian school that quotes Jonah 4:11 on its website: ''Should I not love that great city?''






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350 (corner):

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343: Site of the first Union Club HQ, opened in 1837-- owned by William B. Astor.









337: The address of the Broadway Museum and Menagerie, where Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, were on public display between November 1853 and April 1854.

335 (corner): American Savings Bank

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346 (block): U.S. Office Building is used as offices by the city; was New York Life Insurance Building until 1928, when the company moved to Madison Square. A Stanford White design completed in 1899.

Earlier the D. Appleton publishing company was found here. Before that, the Society Library was at the corner of Broadway and Leonard, its second home. In the 1840s it also housed the Academy of Design, which in September 1847 exhibited Hiram Power's The Greek Slave, the first time a sculpture of a female nude was displayed in public in the U.S.


CATHERINE LN   E ===>

Block (95 Worth): Saranac Apartments. On this block, at No. 340-344, was the Broadway Tabernacle, a Presbyterian church founded in 1836 by Rev. Charles Grandison Finney, whose passionate abolitionist sermons led a pro-slavery mob to burn down the church. Finney left for Oberlin, Ohio soon after (where he later became president of the college), and his replacement at the rebuilt church was anti-abolition, leading the members to switch denominations to Congregationalist, the first such church in Manhattan. It was the site of many abolitionist meetings, as well as the Women's Rights Movement Convention in September 1853, attended by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth and other leading early feminists. Later, in 1856, former President Millard Fillmore was nominated here as the candidate of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party. In 1857, the church sold its building to the Erie Railroad and moved to 6th Avenue and 34th Street.

W <===     WORTH STREET     ===> E

West:

Between 1773 and 1870, the area between Worth (then Anthony) and Duane streets, from Broadway to Church, was the grounds of the New York Hospital. In April 13, 1788, in what came to be known as the Doctors' Riot, a mob of citizens occupied the hospital for two days, outraged over graves being robbed to provide cadavers for medical students.

319 (corner): Former Met Life Home Office; ''a cast-iron gem of the first order'' (AIA Guide), designed by David & John Jardine in 1869 and fabricated by the Daniel D. Badger Architectural Iron Works. On the ground floor is Stark's Veranda, an Italian restaurant. In the 1840s, this was the address of John Anderson's cigar store, where Mary Rogers worked; her puzzling death in 1841 inspired Poe's ''The Mystery of Marie Roget''.


W <===         THOMAS ST

315 (corner): At approximately this spot was the Rutgers mansion, which later housed the Ranelagh Garden tavern from 1765-69. The Rutgers family owned the property until 1790.

















305 (corner): Langdon Building, an 1894 Romanesque Revival building by William H. Hume.

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Federal Plaza

Federal Plaza in Manhattan by jfhatesmustard, on Flickr

26 Federal Plaza: Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building is named for the U.S. senator for New York from 1956 until 1980. He's remembered for his work passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the War Powers Act of 1973. They don't make Republicans like him anymore.

The building, which houses the New York offices of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly the INS), was begun in 1963 to a design by Kahn & Jacobs et al, with an expansion completed 1977.

326: Pearl Street used to come through this block to intersect Broadway; at that time the fashionable Broadway Theatre stood here between Pearl and Worth (then Anthony). Built in 1847, collapsed and rebuilt in 1855. It was here that Edwin Forrest's portrayal of Macbeth in 1849 inspired a riot against rival Charles Macready's version at the Astor Place Theatre.

322: In 1848, the address of William Rudde's Homeopathic Medicines and Books.

314-316: In 1826, a Masonic Hall was built here in Gothic style, designed for concerts and other public events. The same year it was built, however, the arrest and mysterious death of William Morgan, a Mason who threatened to expose the club's secrets, drove Masonry into unpopularity; in 1841 the building reopened as Gothic Hall.

The four cast-iron pylons in Federal Plaza are the Manhattan Sentinels, a 1996 sculpture by Barbara Pepper.

W <===     DUANE STREET     ===> E

West:

DSC05130 by Kramchang, on Flickr

299 (corner): Ungar Building contains a Duane Reade outlet; the drug chain's first store was somewhere on this block, and takes its name from the cross streets.






291 (corner): East River Savings Institution Building, a 1911 Classical building from Clinton & Russell.

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290 (block): This 1994 Post-Modernist building by Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum houses the New York offices of the Environmental Protection Agency. After September 11, the EPA had this building cleaned as a toxic waste site even as it was falsely assuring rescue workers and residents that Ground Zero air was safe. Previously, the NYC Department of Transportation was on this site. African Burial Ground Monument by julz91, on Flickr

During construction of this building in 1991, workers uncovered the old African Burial Ground (1712-1795), which the federal government tried to relocate. After protests prevented the move, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

W <===     READE STREET     ===> E

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NYC - 287 Broadway by wallyg, on Flickr

287 (corner): ''Lovely,'' says the AIA Guide of this 1872 cast-iron building by John B. Snook.

283: The original address of A.T. Stewart's dry-goods shop, opened in 1823, which later grew into the first department store.

281: Emigrant Bank



NYC - Civic Center - Broadway Chambers Building by wallyg, on Flickr

277 (corner): Broadway Chambers Building, Renaissance Revival from the Woolworth Tower's Cass Gilbert (1900). Nedick's used to have a hot dog stand on the corner. Built on the site of Irving House, which Magyar patriot Lajos Kossuth used as a base in December 1851.

In 1841, printer Sam Adams went to collect a $50 debt here from John Colt, brother of revolver inventor Samuel Colt. Colt killed Adams--with a hammer, not a revolver--and tried to ship the body to New Orleans. He was caught and convicted; on the day scheduled for his execution, he married his fiancee in prison, then committed suicide in his cell by stabbing himself in the chest.

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280: Argosy was published at this address in 1930.

Sun Building

Broadway and Chambers by Razmataz', on Flickr

274 (block): New York State Office Building, which houses the city's Buildings department, was built by A.T. Stewart in 1846 for the the world's first true department store, known as the Marble Palace. The building's marble-clad Italianate design inspired hundreds of other commercial buildings.

Later used (1919-50) as the offices of the New York Sun, a newspaper best remembered for its 1897 "Yes, Virginia" editorial and for the 1835 Great Moon Hoax. The Sun by 917press, on Flickr It was Sun editor John B. Bogart who said, in 1882, "When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news."

The paper's clocks, with the motto "The Sun--It Shines for All," are still on the building's corners.

Built on site of the Washington Hotel (1812), which served as the Federalist Party HQ.

-W <===     CHAMBERS STREET     ===> E

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Manhattan Project HQ

270 (corner): In 1848, Chemical Bank built its headquarters here, replacing it in 1907 with another building. That in turn was torn down for this 28-story building, put up in 1930, designed by E.H. Faile & Co. (which ought to be embarrassed to put up a building that looks like this across from a building like Broadway Chambers). It was during World War II that this building won its claim to fame, serving as the headquarters of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. (It was part of the regional office of the Army Corps of Engineers, which apparently is in charge of doomsday weapons as well as flood control.) In 1946 it was sold to the state of New York and became the Levitt Building, housing state legislative offices.

263: The first photograph taken in the Western Hemisphere was displayed on September 16, 1839, at this address, in the drugstore of Dr. James R. Chilton. The subject was St. Paul's Chapel.

261 (corner): Built 1906


W <===         WARREN ST

257 (corner): Home Life Insurance Building, completed 1894 by Napoleon LeBrun & Son. ''Lordly''--AIA Guide. This was the address of Peale's Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts, where the first rhinoceros in the United States was exhibited in September 1826.

No. 259, now defunct, was from 1837-41 the address of Charles Lewis Tiffany's first jewelry shop. The first subway train was built in the basement here in 1870.

253: Postal Telegraph Building, built 1894. ''Pallid''--AIA Guide.

252: The address of Peale's Museum (aka the Pantheon Museum), Scudder's chief competitor. A two-headed terrapin was exhibited here in 1826.

251 (corner): This was the address of the New York Dental Depot, where Solyman Brown had his practice. Known as the "poet laureate of dentistry," Brown helped found the first dental school, the first journal of dentistry and the first national society of dentists. In the winter of 1851, when the East River froze over, he walked to work from Brooklyn over the ice floes.

In 1857, the Great Western Despatch office here guaranteed delivery of goods as far west as Dubuque, Iowa within 12 days. It was also the office of Herring's Patent Champion Safes, which in 1865 received a letter from P.T. Barnum thanking them for a fire-proof safe that preserved his records when the American Museum burned down.


W <===         MURRAY ST

NYC's 1st sidewalk ran from Murray to Vesey.

City Hall Park by kamaru, on Flickr

250 (block): This 1963 building, a series of stacked boxes, has the headquarters of the New York City Housing Authority and other official offices.

245: William Sloane opened a carpet store here in 1844; it eventually became W & J Sloane, which built the building that is now ABC Carpet and Home.


W <===   PARK PLACE

The Woolworth Tower

NYC Feb. 2006 - Woolworth building by OliverN5, on Flickr

233 (block): This Gothic, 792-foot tower was the world's tallest building from 1913 until 1930--and is called ''possibly the most beautiful commercial building in the world'' by architecture writer Gerard Wolfe. Designed by Cass Gilbert as headquarters for the five & dime chain. Called the ''Cathedral of Commerce,'' largely because of its splendid lobby. Woolworth Building Tower by Aaron G Stock, on Flickr

In On the Town, sailor Chip wants to ''see New York/ In all its spreading strength and power/From the city's highest spot,/ Atop the famous Woolworth Tower''--only to be told ''You're just a little late/We got the Empire State.'' During World War II, atom spy Klaus Fuchs worked for a Manhattan Project front company that was based here. Today the offices of Harlequin Romance are located in the tower. sunset behind the woolworth building by Pennance368, on Flickr

The Tower was built where Philip Hone, mayor 1826-27, had his home at No. 235.

231: The address of the Jennings Building, which burned down April 25, 1855, killing 11 firefighters.

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City Hall Park

Tweed Courthouse and City Hall by Vidiot, on Flickr

This was originally set aside in 1686 by the Dutch colonial government as The Commons, a pasture adjacent to the Collect Pond where townsfolk could take their livestock to eat and drink. It soon became the city's main park, serving as a gathering place for celebrations--and protests.

On August 11, 1766, New Yorkers angry that their Liberty Pole protest in the park had been taken down, threw bricks at British soldiers here, who retaliated with bayonets--resulting in the first (non-fatal) bloodshed of the Revolutionary era. General George Washington had the Declaration of Independence read here on July 9, 1776. In 1826, African-Americans rioted here against slave-catchers pursuing escapees from the South. Another riot here in 1837 opposed the raising of the price of flour from $6 to $15 a barrel. During the Draft Riots of 1863, rioters attacked blacks here.

When Albany in 1857 replaced the corrupt Municipal Police with a new organization known as the Metropolitan Police, the two forces clashed here in a melee that left one officer permanently crippled. Closer to the present, police rioted here in September 1992 against Mayor David Dinkins' Civilian Complaint Review Board proposals.

Tweed Courthouse

Historic New York County 'Tweed' Courthouse by joseph a, on Flickr

52 Chambers: Built between 1861 and 1871, this former Criminal Courts Building was supposed to cost $250,000; it ended up costing as much as $14 million, with much of the difference being pocketed by William ''Boss'' Tweed and his Tammany Hall cronies. This graft, excessive even for those days, helped land Tweed in jail, but it is a remarkably beautiful building.

This site was earlier the New York Institution, the city's almshouse; the residents were transferred to Bellevue in 1816, after which the building served to house the New-York Historical Society, the Society Library, the American Academy of Fine Arts and the Bank for Savings.



City Hall

New York City Hall (1803-1812) by chrisinphilly5448, on Flickr

This has been called the city's ''greatest architectural treasure''--I wouldn't go that far, but it is pretty nice. Built in 1811 to a design by John McComb and Joseph Mangin, it was originally faced with marble on three sides and brownstone on the north--because nobody important lived north of City Hall in those days. By 1954, the marble was decaying, and the entire building was refaced with limestone. City Hall Park, Manhattan, New York, 14 Feb. 2008 by PhillipC, on Flickr

Abraham Lincoln lay in state in City Hall's rotunda on April 24-25, 1865. Other prominent citizens who have received the same honor include President Grant and editor Horace Greeley.






Statue of Nathan Hale NYC - Civic Center - City Hall Park - Nathan Hale statue by wallyg, on Flickr

Put up in 1893 to honor the 21-year-old Revolutionary spy, executed by the British in New York on September 22, 1776. The statue is by Frederick MacMonnies and the pedestal by Stanford White.

When author Jack London was homeless for a time, he spent his nights in City Hall Park-- a time that inspired his novel The People of the Abyss. Fountain by capnsponge, on Flickr

When the Croton Reservoir finally brought a safe and reliable water supply to New York City in 1842, this fountain fed by the reservoir was opened here to mark the accomplishment.

The southern end of City Hall Park used to be occupied by the Mullett Post Office--named for architect Alfred Mullett. The 1878 Second Empire building was considered an eyesore and demolished in 1939; it looks a lot better to modern eyes, gracing the cover of one popular New York architectural guide.

W <===     BARCLAY ST/PARK ROW     ===> E

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225: The Transportation Building, a 1927 York & Sawyer building where several major railroads used to have offices. This was also for a time the home of the Pace Institute (now Pace University).

Block: This block used to be spanned by the Park Hotel--better known as the Astor House Hotel-- an ultra-fashionable hotel built in 1834 by John Jacob Astor. (Astor had previously lived on the site, in the house of Rufus King, one of New York's two original senators.) Its guests included Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Davy Crockett, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Sam Houston, Jefferson Davis, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jenny Lind. The psychologist William James was born in the hotel on January 11, 1842. Inventor Nicola Tesla lived there from 1889-92. The hotel was torn down in 1914.

217 (corner): Was the Franklin Society for Home Building and Savings, a savings & loan.

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Millennium Park

A pano of the clock on our one snowy day. by p0psharlow, on Flickr

A nicely landscaped traffic island.















                                PARK ROW     ===> E
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St. Paul's Chapel

NYC - St. Paul's Chapel by wallyg, on Flickr

Depending on whether you count the starting date (1764) or the date of completion (1766), this may be the oldest building in Manhattan. (The Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem was built in 1765.) It was and is St. Paul's Chapel by joseph a, on Flickr a satellite of Trinity Church; it survived the 1776 fire that destroyed the first Trinity because its flat roof allowed rescuers to stand atop it and put out falling embers. The steeple was not added until 1796.

This was the church George Washington attended when New York was the new nation's capital; his pew here is marked, as is that of New York Gov. George Clinton. St. Paul's Chapel by jwowens, on Flickr Other notables who worshipped here are King William IV (as a prince), Lord Cornwallis, the Marquis de Lafayette, and presidents Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and the elder George Bush. NYC - St. Paul's Chapel - Sycamore Tree by wallyg, on Flickr The church served as a sanctuary for rescue workers after the September 11 attacks; the stump of a sycamore tree that protected the church from debris is preserved as a memorial.

This was the southeastern corner of the Queen's Farm, a large tract of land donated by Queen Anne to Trinity Church in 1705.

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P1020125.JPG by JayeClaire, on Flickr

222 (block): From approximately this corner to the northwest corner of Pearl and Maiden Lane was the farm of Anthony ''the Turk'' Jansen, whose wife, Grietse Reyniers, was New Amsterdam's first prostitute, arriving here in 1633.

Later, this corner was the site of the Spring Garden, New York's first pleasure garden, which opened ealy in the 18th Century and lasted until 1768.

By 1834, this was the site of Scudder's Museum, which featured elaborate dioramas, a mummy, scalps, John Hancock's signature, live boa constrictor feedings and a wax statue of Daddy Lambert, known as the fattest New Yorker ever.

In 1841, Scudder's became P.T. Barnum's enormously popular American Museum, where midget Tom Thumb and Siamese twins Chang and Eng performed. The famous sign marked ''This Way to the Egress'' tricked visitors into exiting. When the museum burned down on July 13, 1865, a Bengal tiger escaped and had to be killed on Broadway by a firefighter.

From 1866-96 here was the New York Herald Building, home of the racist, anti-Semitic newspaper founded by James Gordon Bennett. It introduced such features as the gossip column and Wall Street coverage, and was the paper that sent Henry Stanley to look for the missing Dr. David Livingstone.

From 1898-1958 the St. Paul Building was here, which one architecture critic called ''perhaps the least attractive design of all New York's skyscrapers.''

The current building served as the offices of Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen in the movie Wall Street.



216: Chemical Bank, a subsidiary of the New York Chemical Manufacturing Co., opened here in 1824.

Corner: Knox the Hatter, located here, got a court order to remove the bridge over Broadway at this intersection, fearing that he was losing business to rival Philip Genin on the opposite corner. Abraham Lincoln got a silk hat here on February 27, 1860.

W <===     FULTON STREET     ===> E

Loew's Bridge allowed pedestrians to cross this dangerous intersection in 1867, but was soon removed.

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205-207: At this address was Mathew Brady's National Gallery of Daguerrotypes, opened in 1844. Presidents James Polk, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore all had their pictures taken here, along with other powerful politicians like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.

Former AT&T Building

NYC - Financial District - American Telephone and Telegraph Building by wallyg, on Flickr

195 (block): Designed by William Wells Bosworth in 1913 as the headquarters for a company that was then as much or more Telegraph as Telephone. The building, patterned after the Septigorim in Rome, is said to have more classical columns than any building in the world, and more marble than any other New York building. 195 Broadway by niznoz, on Flickr

The bronze decorative elements are by Paul Manship.

Previously the site of Western Union's headquarters, which, as one of the city's tallest buildings, had a ball on the roof that was dropped every day at noon, upon a signal from the Naval Observatory in Washington. Ships in the harbor set their chronometers by it, and pedestrians their watches.

195 was Edgar Allan Poe's address in 1845.

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206: This was the address of Mrs. Poppleton's fashionable confectionary shop.

204: Caruso's Pizza & Pasta was in a two-story building from 1942, demolished 2007 along with most of the block, to make way for the Fulton Street Transit Terminal.

200: Original address of Daniel Appleton's publishing company, founded 1825. A one-story building was here from 1920 until 2007.

198: The 12-story Girard Building, c. 1902, demolished 2007. Grace Deli the last tenant.

196: OMG ("Oh My God") jeans was in a three-story building (1911-2008).

194: A branch of the Childs pancake chain was built here in 1911--torn down in 2007.







Corbin Building by epicharmus, on Flickr

192 (corner): Renaissance Jewelers is in the Corbin Building, an 1880s Queen Anne building with cast-iron bay windows--the sole survivor on this block. In 1864, at this address, Ebenezer and Ellen Butterick pioneered the marketing of paper patterns for making clothes.

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189 (corner): A two-story building from 1940, demolished 2008, housed New York Stocking Exchange, Cookie Island, World of Golf.

175: Century 21 Shoes, part of the noted discount store, is in the Germania Building, an 1865 Italian Renaissance survivor.

Corner: Daikichi Sushi chain. The widow Jane Renwick, a friend of Washington Irving's, the inspiration for Robert Burns' ''Blue-Eyed Lassie'' and the grandmother of architect James Renwick Jr., lived at the corner of Cortlandt and Broadway.

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180: Cafe Nanu

176: Record Explosion is on the site of Howard's Hotel.

174 (corner): William Barthman Jeweler was founded at this location in 1884. Barthman (1840-1914), who came to New York as a nine-year-old orphan by working as a cabin boy, was later an officer in Grant's army.

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Liberty Plaza

73.ZuccottiPark.LibertyPlaza.LowerManhattan.NYC.05sep07 by ElvertBarnes, on Flickr

165 (block): A hulk built by U.S. Steel (1971-73), designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill to show off the client's product--the facade is mainly steel. in 1971 for U.S. Steel. Owned for a time by Merrill Lynch, it also serves as the headquarters of NASDAQ, and houses the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Torn down for 1 Liberty Plaza was the Singer Tower, a 1908 building by Ernest Flagg that housed the sewing machine company's headquarters. Briefly the tallest building in the world at 47 stories, it became the tallest building ever demolished when it was torn down in 1968. The handsome Second Empire structure is considered one of New York City's great architectural losses, up there with Penn Station.

155: In 1848, the publisher G.P. Putnam had his offices here; his former partner John Wiley at No. 161. Together or separately, they published most of the major figures of early American literature, including James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and William Cullen Bryant.

153: The first commercial showing of a motion picture projected onto a screen took place in a storefront here on May 20, 1895-- a four-minute film of a boxing match.

149: Site of John Jacob Astor's home and offices, 1794-1803.

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160: Broadway Cafe

156-158: The Manhattan Life Insurance Co. moved here in 1865.



















150 (corner): Westinghouse Building is on the former site of Wallach's department store. Dr. Barry Goldman, who has an office here, saved my life.

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Liberty Plaza Park

Liberty Plaza by  Flatbush Gardener, on Flickr

Once an uninviting "brutalist" vacancy that allowed 1 Liberty Plaza to justify its bulk--particularly after the September 11 attacks killed off all its trees--as of 2006, it's been reimagined and reclad in pink granite (and renamed Zuccotti Park).




04.JoieDeVivre.MarkDiSuvero.ZuccottiPark.NYC.05sep07 by ElvertBarnes, on Flickr A new sculpture has been added, the 70-foot high Joie de Vivre by Mark DiSuvero, whose bright red echoes the Noguchi across Broadway.







It's still home to the statue Double Check, by J. Seward Johnson, Briefcase guy at Zuccotti Park by bnittoli, on Flickr a lifelike bronze of a seated stockbroker that became a symbol of survival after the September 11 attacks. One thing that didn't survive was the sign here marking Temple Street, which was eliminated in the 1960s.

145: After consolidating with virtually all other telegraph companies in 1866, Western Union moved its headquarters from Rochester to this address, moving them up the street in 1875.

133: John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, lived in a house at this former address in 1787 when he co-wrote the Federalist Papers.

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Marine Midland Building

Noguchi's Red Cube, far by Peter Kaminski, on Flickr

140 (block): This 1967 black-glass modernist skyscraper by Skidmore Owens & Merrill is considered to be more successful than their nearby Chase Manhattan Tower. (They also did Lever House and the Sears Tower, among many others.)

Marine Midland started out as the Marine Trust Company in 1850, a Buffalo-based company financing the Great Lakes grain trade. By 1929 it had become a bank holding company, eventually controlling dozens of local banks. In 1980 it was acquired by HSBC--the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.

An anti-Vietnam War bombing here on August 20, 1969 injured 20 people.









Red Cube & Yellow Ribbon - New York City, New York by Jose P Isern Comas, on Flickr

The red, off-kilter cube with a hole through it is Isamu Noguchi's Cube, a 1968 sculpture that is supposed to evoke rolling dice and hence the concept of chance.


130: This was the second outlet of the Childs pancake chain. In 1898, the branch became a cafeteria, revolutionizing the restaurant business.

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NYC: U.S. Realty Building by wallyg, on Flickr

115 (block): The U.S. Realty Building, like the Trinity Building across Thames Street, is a widely admired 1906 Gothic design by Francis H. Kimball; a catwalk connects the two.

This was earlier the site of the City Hotel, an early example of the modern hotel, built 1794. The most fashionable hotel of its day, a ball was held there on February 22, 1819, honoring Gen. Andrew Jackson. John Lansing Jr., a retired New York Supreme Court chief justice who represented the state at the Constitutional Convention, left the hotel on December 12, 1829 and was never seen again. In 1835, the hotel displayed "a grand moving panorama of the Moon," depicting lunar life as described in the New York Sun's Moon hoax. A dinner was held here for Charles Dickens on February 18, 1842, with Washington Irving as toastmaster. The hotel was torn down in 1850.

Before the hotel, the mansion of Etienne De Lancey stood here, built c. 1700, home to perhaps the richest family in colonial New York. It became the Province Arms Tavern (later known as the City Arms, Burns' Coffee House and the State Arms), where on October 31, 1765, the Sons of Liberty met to plan resistance to the Stamp Act. On May 5, 1789, George Washington's inaugural ball was held here, with John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Hancock in attendance. Thomas Jefferson lived here in 1790 when he moved to New York as the first U.S. secretary of state.


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NYC: The Trinity Building by wallyg, on Flickr 111 (corner): Before the present Trinity Building was built in 1906, an 1852 building of the same name stood on the site. The five-story structure was an early prototype of the office building, and was designed by Trinity architect Richard Upjohn, who had his offices in it.

This was earlier the address of Elam Bliss' bookstore, which in 1831 published Edgar Allan Poe's third volume of poetry--prompting Poe's first visit to the city.

The current building is home to WOR Radio, as well as the offices of Rabinowitz, Boudin et al, a law firm that has defended Alger Hiss, Paul Robeson, Benjamin Spock, Daniel Ellsberg, Jimmy Hoffa, Castro, Khomeini, Khadafy, Noriega, the Church of Scientology, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer and Isaac Asimov.

Trinity Churchyard

trinity in the trinity church cemetery by striatic, on Flickr

A burial ground dating back to 1681, before Trinity was built, this cemetery was decreed off limits to blacks when the church took it over, resulting in the creation of the African Burial Ground. Among the most noted residents on the north side of the church are Declaration of Independence signer Francis Lewis, Treasury Secretary and NYU founder Albert Gallatin, steamboat pioneer Robert Fulton, William Bradford, publisher of New York's first newspaper (whose headstone has a typo), and seduction victim Charlotte Stanley, who inspired a wildly popular novel. (Her grave bears the name of her fictional counterpart, Charlotte Temple.) Trinity Church - Memorial for Unknown Revolutionary War Heroes by wallyg, on Flickr

Here also is the Martyr's Monument, dedicated to the patriots who died in British prisons during the Revolution. ''It is stated that this was erected by Trinity Corporation to prevent the city from cutting Pine Street through the graveyard, there being some law on the State's statute books to prevent the removal or injury of any public monument for purposes of highway improvement.'' -- A Historical Tour of...Broadway NYC: Trinity Church and Burial Ground - John Watts by wallyg, on Flickr

There is a prominent statue here of John Watts, a relatively obscure politician--he was speaker of the New York State Assembly from 1791-93, and was later a U.S. congressmember and a Westchester County judge.



Trinity Church

Trinity Church by blhphotography, on Flickr

Established by a grant from England's King William III in 1697, after the Anglican church became the official church of New York, the church's first building lasted from 1698 until it burned down in 1776. It was replaced by 1790, but the new structure was unsound and had to be demolished in 1839. The current edifice was completed in 1846, an early Gothic revival building designed by Richard Upjohn. Trinity Church Door by riacale, on Flickr The bronze doors are a 1890s memorial to John Jacob Astor III and were designed by Richard Morris Hunt, with sculptural work on the central doors by Karl Bitter. The All Saints Chapel was added by 1913. lost by mudpig, on Flickr

A 1705 grant from Queen Anne gave Trinity all the land west of Broadway from Fulton to what is now Christopher Street; the church continues to be a major Manhattan landowner. It also was given the right to all shipwrecks and beached whales.

Trinity Churchyard Alexander Hamilton's America by Tony the Misfit, on Flickr

Buried on the south side of the church are Constitution framer Alexander Hamilton, diarist George Templeton Strong and War of 1812 hero Capt. James Lawrence (''Don't give up the ship!''), et al.


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Starting on July 10, 1924, Broadway had the world's first synchronized traffic signals, with operators in towers coordinating light changes from this intersection to 85th Street.

1 Wall Street and Empire Building by epicharmus, on Flickr

71 (corner): Empire Apartments were the Empire Building, built in 1895 by Francis Kimball and serving as the headquarters of U.S. Steel from 1901-76. An earlier building of the same name housed the office of financier IMG_0430 by monkico, on Flickr Russell Sage, who was almost killed by a suicide bomber on December 4, 1891; Sage threw his secretary at the dynamite-wielding assailant to protect himself. From 1809-46 this was the site of Grace Church, opened after a split in the Trinity congregation. In 1710 a Lutheran church was built here by German exiles from the Palatinate; it burned down in the fire of 1776. American Express building by Vedia, on Flickr

65: This Beaux-Arts structure by Renwick Aspinwall and Tucker was the American Express Company Building, that company's headquarters from 1917 until 1975. Now the Standard & Poors Building.

61 (corner): The Adams Building, built in 1914, is featured in Berenice Abbott's photo Canyon. The most prominent boardinghouse of the 1830s, that of ''Aunt'' Margaret Mann, was at this address.

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East:

Corner: This was the site of the National Hotel, where in 1826 a chess-playing automaton known as The Turk made its American debut. It turned out to have a dwarf hidden inside. The Equitable Building by plemeljr, on Flickr

120 (block): The Equitable Building, built in 1915 to replace an earlier Equitable Life headquarters that had burned down, managed to fit 1,200,000 feet of floor space on a one-acre lot--a density so great that zoning laws were changed in 1916 to require setbacks.

The old Equitable Building, erected in 1870, had the U.S. Weather Bureau's station on its roof. Equitable Building by Geff Rossi, on Flickr
















110: At this defunct address was the Tremont Temperance House, a hotel.


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108: The Manhattan Life Insurance Co. was founded at this address in 1850.

104: The Chase National Bank was founded here in 1863 by 75-year-old banker and journalist John Thompson. Thompson named the bank in honor of the late Salmon P. Chase, who in addition to being Supreme Court chief justice was responsible for reorganizing the national banking system as Lincoln's treasury secretary (earning him a place on the $10,000 bill). NYC - American Surety Building by wallyg, on Flickr

100 (corner): The 1895 American Surety Building was designed by Bruce Price, a 21-story neo-classical structure that was greatly influential on early skyscraper design. (It led the trend of trying to make skyscrapers resemble classical columns.) This was the first New York City building with ''a complete steel frame supporting both the interior and the exterior masonry,'' and one of the first large buildings to be supported by cassions. It features classical sculptures by John Massey Rhind at the third story.

The building was expanded in 1920-22, and renovated in 1973-76 to serve as the Bank of Tokyo's U.S. headquarters. Detail of Entrance at 100 Broadway by chaostrophy, on Flickr Dean and Deluca has a cafe here, and there's a Borders bookstore.












































Two-wall-street by Minerva condition, on Flickr

Corner (2 Wall): Banco Portugues do Atlantico


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Bank of New York

Irving Trust Co. (now Bank of New York) by Jim in Times Square, on Flickr

Block (1 Wall St):

This landmark was put up in 1929-32 for the Irving Trust Co., a company formed in 1851 and named for author Washington Irving simply because his was a prestigious name at the time. (Coincidentally, the building occupies the lot where Irving had his law office at 3 Wall Street.) Ralph Walker's blueprint is considered a masterpiece of Art Deco skyscraper design; the lobby in particular is praised. Bank of New York by mr.seymour, on Flickr

The Bank of New York acquired Irving Trust in 1988, and moved its headquarters here by 1998. BONY, New York's oldest bank, was founded in 1784 under the guidance of Alexander Hamilton, who was soon arranging loans from the bank to the new U.S. government as Washington's treasury secretary. The Bank's was the first corporate stock to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange in 1792. It helped finance the Erie Canal and the New York subway system. It merged with New York Life in 1922.

This building served as the Manhattan City Bank in Ghostbusters, which gave the heroes a loan to set up their paranormal small business.



64-68: This was the address of the Manhattan Life Building, the world's tallest building (at 348 feet) from 1894 until 1899, when it was surpassed by the Park Row Building. Demolished 1930.















































At the southern end of this block was the North American Building (1907).

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One of America's first circuses, led by John Bill Ricketts, performed near this intersection in 1793.

West:

1 Exchange Plaza

55 (corner): A post-modern 1982 tower by Fox & Fowle. Built on the site of the orchard of Hendrick Van Dyck, whose murder of a Native American woman picking peaches here sparked the last major Indian attack on Manhattan, September 15, 1655, in which 50 settlers were killed. Later, as No. 57, it was the architectural offices of McKim, Mead and White, 1879-94.

Papoo's Italian Cuisine & Bar moved here from Greenwich Street after September 11.

45: Broadway Atrium was meant to be part of 1 Exchange Plaza, but the fast-food business in between refused to sell.

39: This building is on the site of first European habitation on Manhattan--"four small crude huts" where the crew of Capt. Adrieaen Block spent the winter of 1613-14 after their ship, the Tiger, caught fire in the bay. Later the site of the Alexander McComb Mansion, where President George Washington lived in 1790 until the capital moved from New York to Philadelphia. In 1821, the house became a hotel, Bunker's Mansion House, where former President John Quincy Adams stayed in 1844.

37: From this defunct address down to Morris Street was the Old Church Yard, the first recorded cemetery on Manhattan--it was "old" by 1649. The bodies were relocated shortly after 1676.

29 (corner): A 31-story, 1929 Art Deco skyscraper by Sloan & Robertson.


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Cunard Building

Cunard Line building: 25 Broadway by niznoz, on Flickr

25 (corner): A 1917 work by Benjamin Wistar Morris (with help from Carrere & Hastings) built for the owners of the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, when these ships were the height of elegance in travel. During World War II, the Belgian businessman who supplied two-thirds of the uranium for the Manhattan Project, Edgar Sengier, had his office here. Since 1977, the building has housed the Bowling Green Post Office.

In 1846, this was the address of the Delmonico Hotel, opened by Lorenzo Delmonico of the famous restaurant family. Though considered a great success, Lorenzo shut it down in 1856, deciding that the city's social center was moving northward.

Bowling Green Building

9-11: A ''Hellenic Renaissance'' building raised in 1895 by Spencer Trask, the investor who bankrolled Edison, started General Electric, chaired the New York Times and founded the writers' colony Yaddo. This building housed the White Star Line offices, where anxious crowds gathered in 1912 for news of the company's Titanic.

5: At this defunct address was the house of Robert Livingston, a Revolution-era official who administered the presidential oath to George Washington; he later negotiated the Lousiana Purchase with Napoleon. When he lived here, his back garden extended to the Hudson.

3: Benedict Arnold lived at this former address after betraying the American Revolution.

International Merchant Marine Building

One Broadway by jpchan, on Flickr

1 (corner): Built in 1884 as the Washington Building, it was remodeled in 1921 for J.P. Morgan's shipping company, later U.S. Lines; note nautical motifs. Remodeled again in the 1980s, it now houses a Citibank branch. NYC - Bowling Green: Number One Broadway by wallyg, on Flickr

In 1760, a mansion was built on this site by Archibald Kennedy, a Royal Navy captain; this building served in 1776 as the headquarters of Gen. George Washington, and then as British headquarters after they occupied Manhattan. The plot to have Benedict Arnold hand over West Point to the British was hatched here.

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52 (corner): Chemical Bank. Replaced Exchange Court, a 12-story building from 1898. Since 2004, the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers.

50: Site of 1888's Tower Building, believed to be the first building with a steel frame. (Its small plot made traditional load-bearing walls impossible.) People supposedly feared the narrow, unconventional building would topple in a strong wind, so architect Bradford Lee Gilbert made his office on the top floor. The building was torn down in 1914, but was hugely influential.

42: Goldome Bank, formerly The Bank for Savings.










Old Standard Oil Building

26 Broadway by warsze, on Flickr

26 (corner): Starting in 1886, this was the headquarters of the Standard Oil Trust during the height of its power; John D. Rockefeller had his offices here, as did his partner Charles Pratt, founder of the Pratt Institute. When Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, this became the headquarters of Socony, later Mobil, which greatly expanded the building in the 1920s before moving to 42nd Street in 1956. DSC08600 by KeyExpert, on Flickr (The expansion was begun by NYPL architects Carrere & Hastings, and the tower added by Shreve, Lamb & Blake.) Upton Sinclair organized pickets here in 1914 in protest of the Ludlow Massacre. Sports Museum of America by Joseph Hoetzl, on Flickr

The building used to house the the Museum of American Financial History, opened in 1988. Now it's home to the Sports Museum of America.

On this site on December 6, 1732, New York's first recorded play was performed. Alexander Hamilton and John Jay both lived at this address.

16: Washington Irving lived at this former address with his friend Henry Brevoort.


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The first elephant in North America (post-Ice Age, that is) was exhibited near this intersection on April 29, 1796.




4: Site of the house of Aaron Burr (1790-94), when the future vice president was involved with New York politics.




2 Broadway

2 Broadway, From New Street by Frankenstein, on Flickr

2 (corner): This building was designed in 1958 by Emery Roth & Sons, the WTC architects, and reskinned in 1999 by the modernists Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It replaced George Post's 1882 Produce Exchange, a huge red Romanesque structure that ''was one of the city's greatest architectural losses'' (AIA Guide). 20070809-DSCF5152 by Francesco Federico, on Flickr

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Charging Bull

The Broadway Bull by Bas van Gaalen, on Flickr NYC - Bowling Green: Charging Bull by wallyg, on Flickr This popular statue was cast in bronze by Arturo Di Modica and left by the artist in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Broad Street in 1987 as an unasked-for Christmas gift to the city in the wake of a recent stock market crash. The city impounded the sculpture as a 7,000-pound act of vandalism, but public support for the artwork and the gesture compelled the parks department to reinstall it here.

Bowling Green

Bowling Green Park by Shiny Things, on Flickr

This may or may not have been the site of the celebrated $24 purchase of Manhattan from the Canarsie Indians--who in any case got the better part of the deal, as the island was not actually theirs to sell. (They lived, as their name suggests, in what's now Brooklyn.) NYC: Bowling Green Fence by wallyg, on Flickr

By 1733 this spot had been dedicated to the ''Beauty & Ornament'' of Broadway and the ''Recreation & delight of the inhabitants''-- recreation in those days often involving lawn bowling (ala Rip van Winkle).

In 1765 the colonial governor was burned in effigy here in protest of the Stamp Act. In 1770, a statue of George III was erected here to thank him for repealing that act-- only to be torn down (and melted down into Revolutionary musket balls) on July 9, 1776, in celebration of the Declaration of Independence. The present fence dates from that era, and is still missing the decorative crowns that were snapped off by the anti-royalists.

National Museum of the American Indian

Custom House by Drumaboy, on Flickr

A branch of the Smithsonian, opened in 1994. The former Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House, designed by Cass Gilbert in 1907 and considered the finest Beaux Arts building in the city. Old Customs House by T.SC, on Flickr In front, four massive sculptures by Daniel Chester French represent Asia, America, Europe and Africa; above are statues symbolizing 12 great mercantile nations. Reopened as a museum of Native American culture in 1994. The building serves as the Ritz Gotham Hotel in the movie Batman Forever, as a haunted museum in Ghostbusters II, and as the Trask Company in Working Girl.

The building is on the site of Fort Amsterdam, the Dutch colonial fort first built in 1623. This was the scene of the city's frst recorded murder, on May 15, 1638, when Jan Gysbertsen killed Gerrit Jansen in a knife fight at the fort's gate. Renamed Fort George by the British, it caught fire in 1741, sparking a hysteria about a ''Negro Conspiracy'' that resulted in 18 blacks being hanged and 14 burned alive.

The complex was demolished in 1787, replaced in 1790 by Government House, which was intended as a presidential mansion but had to settle for the governor, the nation's capital having moved during construction.



What's missing on Broadway? Write to Jim Naureckas and tell him about it.

New York Songlines Home.

Sources for the Songlines.

An extensive 1911 history of Broadway, A Historical Tour of the Greatest Street in the World, is online.

Sampling Broadway is a multimedia site about the street.

A Walk Down Broadway, with photos of every block, by Vidiot.

If you enjoy the New York Songlines, please link to them from your blog or website.

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