Postcards from Times Square Sights and Sentiments from the Last Century George J. Lankevich

ISBN: 0-7570-0100-9 Length: 192 Pages Size: 8.5 X 5.5-inch Format: Quality Paperback Category: NYC / Collectibles / History Price: $14.95 Availability: In Print Click below for: Synopsis • Contents Introduction • Reviews

Synopsis

Originally called Longacre Square, this New York landmark became Times Square after the opening of the Times Tower. And the rest is history. Located in the heart of the theater district and the center of New York nightlife, Times Square has, over the years, attracted people from all walks of life, from brewery workers to stage actors, from the poorest of transients to the cream of New York society. It has, in fact, become the "Crossroads of the World."

Through 130 postcards that span a century, Postcards from Times Square paints a picture of an area that has been the home of movie palaces and playhouses, of elite restaurants and fast-food chains, and, eventually, of the best-known New Year’s celebration in the world. You’ll see the Great White Way exchange its gaslights for electric bulbs and, eventually, for neon. You’ll visit famed sights like Roseland, Radio City Music Hall, and Sardi’s. And you’ll discover how this world-renowned landmark has weathered a tumultuous century, growing from its rural roots, achieving worldwide fame, suffering a twilight of decay, and, ultimately, recapturing its magic.

George J. Lankevich received his PhD in American History from Columbia University. He taught for over thirty years in the City University of New York, and is now a professor emeritus. Dr. Lankevich is the author of over twenty volumes of history, including American Metropolis: A History of New York City.

Contents

Introduction

1. ACT ONE: TIMES SQUARE, 1904-1919
Adolph Ochs and the Times Tower
The Theater District
The Grand Hotels
The Eastern Ridge

2. BETWEEN THE WARS: TIMES SQUARE, 1919-1941
The Great Ziegfeld
Vaudeville and Burlesque on Broadway
Commercialism and the Great White Way
Radio City Music Hall

3. FROM TRIUMPH TO TWILIGHT: TIMES SQUARE, 1941-1975
Times Square Goes to War
Palaces on Times Square
The Stork Club
Rockefeller Center

4. RESURRECTION: TIMES SQUARE, 1975-2000
Rebuilding Times Square
The Saga of the Empire Theater

Conclusion
Index

Introduction

New York City is a world metropolis offering the widest variety of experiences to permanent residents, the commuters who daily fill its streets and especially to the thirty five million plus visitors who annually arrive to sample its wonders. The contemporary bustling city is filled with places that absolutely must be seen--Miss Liberty in the harbor; internationally famed skyscrapers; urban neighborhoods as varied as Little Italy, Chinatown and Harlem familiar to all modern Americans through movies. Yet as early as 1902, Harper’s Weekly confidently asserted there was “no American so lowly in condition, or so remote geographically, but cherishes in his heart the ambition to see New York at least once before he dies.” The magazine was correct then and its judgment remains true today. And for an entire century, no tourist has considered a trip to Manhattan complete unless they could stand in and marvel at Times Square. Famous around the globe, the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway is universally considered the beating heart of the Big Apple, its entertainment center, the “Crossroads of the World.” Everyone “knows” that if you stand at 42nd Street and Broadway, you will soon meet somebody from your home town. Perhaps no other place on earth is so attractive, familiar and forbidding--all at the same time.

Postcards from Times Square traces the history of Times Square across a tumultuous century, documents its changing face and examines its enduring mystique. Like the larger metropolis it symbolizes, Times Square has undergone dramatic changes over time yet it maintains its undeniable allure for both tourists and natives. Perhaps the areas unique ability to reshape itself every generation is the reason it continues to draw visitors from across the world; it is always the same, yet different. It is hard to tire of Times Square, whether you are seeing it for the first time or pass through it every day on your way to work. It is the one part of the world’s greatest city that has become transcendent, leaping across all cultural barriers to become an entertainment center for the world. Times Square is theater, movies, bright lights, fine dining, nightclub, elegance and more than a hint of danger. Everything about it seems outsized yet familiar, a heightening of experience which carries a shiver of recognition. Attempting to understand its successive incarnations, visitors to Times Square are also introduced to the even greater miracle of New York City.

Most people know that “old New York was once New Amsterdam,” a Dutch trading settlement established around the Battery (southern Manhattan Island) early in the seventeenth century. But relatively few appreciate how slowly the physical city expanded as it became America’s metropolis. Early in the nineteenth century John Jacob Astor, a land speculator with great faith in New York’s future, decided to accumulate large tracts of land in still undeveloped mid-town Manhattan. Astor ruefully lamented his inability “to buy every foot of land on the island,” but he would purchase as much as his fortune allowed. In 1811, city planners optimistically established a street map of the entire island which designated a yet unbuilt 42nd Street as a major East-West artery. Among the many pieces of cheap mid-island land Astor acquired was the farm of John Norton, which extended from the future 42-46 Streets and stretched from Broadway over to the Hudson River. The property included the Great Kill stream which meandered westward (along what became 42nd Street) and passed a small village before emptying into the river. When Astor bought the farmland it held far more animals than people, and into the 1830s 42nd Street remained little more than a cowpath along which cattle were driven from landing sites on the Hudson River to slaughter houses on the east side of Manhattan. But by mid-century Astor’s heirs were finally seeing the fulfillment of his vision. Anticipating the housing needs of a growing city, they began to fill the bucolic precinct with rows of brownstone houses available for rent or purchase.

When the Civil War began in 1861 New York held 800,000 persons but the city proper still centered below 14th Street. The rural area around Broadway in the 40s was far from fully settled but growing numbers of neighborhood workers found employment in the farms of northern Manhattan or on construction jobs in Central Park. Wartime prosperity and a constantly rising city population stimulated further development and by 1870 the area had become a center for the carriage, wagon and harness trades. Another step towards prominence came in 1881 when William K. Vanderbilt and several of his gentlemen friends, needing a decent place to trade horses, stable their thoroughbreds, and practice riding, financed construction of the American Horse Exchange at 50th Street. Their building remains in Times Square today, disguised as the Winter Garden Theater. Although their surroundings were definitely working class, the horsemen reveled in the city’s designation of the area as Long Acre Square, after the carriage district of London. They understood that square was not geometrically accurate--Long Acre was really two triangles formed by the intersection of major north-south roads--but the name added a bit of class to the neighborhood. None suspected that within thirty years their playground would became New York’s primary theater district and enjoy international fame.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century the inexorable northward movement of New York, and the enormous demands of its population for work, news and entertainment, led to the creation of a new center of city life. Until the 1870s “newspaper row” clustered around the City Hall- Brooklyn Bridge area but the metropolitan journals then began to join the northern tide. For example, the Tribune hired America’s leading architect Richard Morris Hunt to design its new home near 34th Street (1875). Competition for circulation and influence was the essence of the newspaper business for the rest of the century, but no newspaper dared to venture as far north as 42nd Street. If a single factor is found to be vital in the emergence of Times Square as a city center, it was the 1902 decision of the New York Times to place its headquarters there.

Like the clannish newspapers, Manhattan’s entertainment district had also clustered in a relatively small area between Union Square and Madison Square. But in the 1880s a line of theaters began to wend their way north along the spine of Broadway. People began to remark on a “White Way” of gas lights that visibly drew audiences out of Madison Square. Theaters like the Fifth Avenue, The Strand, The Garrick and Weber and Fields Music Hall gradually extended the theater district northward, moving from 23rd Street into the mid 30s. It appeared that the edge of culture and civilization was on the march although as late as 1899, when Manhattan boasted a total of 22 theaters, only one of them was in Long Acre Square. Perhaps the boldest move occurred in October 1882 when the 1300 seat Casino Theater, whose specialty was comic opera, opened for business on Broadway at 39th Street. The Casino consistently attracted large nighttime audiences to its Moorish auditorium, and became a “must see” location when it introduced the Floradora girls to New York in 1900. Even more important in drawing an upscale audience to the emerging Rialto was the new 3700 seat Metropolitan Opera House, which opened in 1883 with a performance of Faust. Neither the Casino nor the Met survives today, but in the last years of the nineteenth century these two buildings at Broadway at 39th Street provided definite proof that the entertainment venue for both middle class and high brow culture had shifted northward.

In 1898 Greater New York was created when Manhattan was joined with its surrounding areas to become a single city. A final vital factor in the creation of Times Square was the development of a massive transportation system for a metropolis which suddenly had a population of 3.4 million people spread over five boroughs. Greater New York would build a subway, and when it opened in 1904 one of its planned stops would be in the Long Acre Square area. But until the subway proved itself, existing elevated lines running north would remain essential and these also had to be improved. City planners decided that the Sixth Avenue Elevated Line would be extended westward along 53rd Street to link up with the Ninth Avenue Elevated (1905). Like the Gaity Theater and the Metropolitan Opera to the south, the elevated structure established a boundary for the entertainment district that was to rapidly emerge in Times Square. In addition to the subway and the els, the creation of major railroad terminals at Penn Station (1911) and Grand Central (1913) provided the means for thousands of excursion customers to access the area every day. One of the first businesses to recognize the changing reality was the Pabst Brewery, whose directors opened a hotel at the southern edge of the Longacre in 1899 in anticipation of a growing demand for rooms. Significantly, the Pabst Hotel’s main entrance faced southward towards the Casino and the Met. During the next twenty years, Times Square would take shape in the blocks between the elevated tracks and the edge of the theater district.

Only in retrospect is it possible to discern the converging forces that made Times Square come to life. Visitors to the metropolis rightly see the entertainment district not as a subject for historical study but rather as a place of fun and excitement, an experience they wish to remember forever. For generations the preferred mechanism to accomplish this goal was not through the pages of a book, but in picture postcards recalling the amazing sights they had witnessed. And is there a better way for tourists to “keep in touch” with loved ones, to prove that they had braved the dangers, delights and decadence of Times Square than sending a postcard home? Practically everyone has mailed a postcard at some time in their life. Americans probably all remember that Benjamin Franklin organized the first postal system and philatelists will know that the first United States postage stamps appeared in 1847. But it may come as a bit of a shock to learn that the seemingly ubiquitous postcard is a relative newcomer in American life. During the 1860s a few privately printed cards made their way through the US mails, largely as advertisements, but not until May 13, 1873 did the government first issue postal cards. They cost only a penny, and provided Washington with a monopoly over the sending of reduced rate messages for the next twenty years. During that time a few souvenir cards with a picture or a message on one side were delivered, but only at the 2-cent letter rate. Not until Chicago’s Colombian Exposition (1893) did the United States Post Office authorize the issuance of picture postcards, awarding Charles Goldsmith a franchise to produce sets of designs printed upon government penny cards. Selling at ten for 25 cents or later 12 for 25 cents, these were the forerunners of privately printed cards. The great success of the Exposition cards, and their desirability as collectibles, led some entrepreneurs to offer their own souvenir cards. But if these held any written message they could be delivered only if the standard 2-cent letter rate was paid; only when forwarded as printed matter did the cards pay a penny. Americans could send a penny message only by purchasing the government card.

The outcry against such inequality led Congress to pass the Private Mailing Act (May 19, 1898). Manufacturers were permitted to offer Private Mailing Cards or Souvenir Cards which could be mailed for the same penny as a government card. Mostly printed in Germany or Austria-Hungary, the PMC’s were beautifully produced but their message space was limited to a small portion on the front of the card beneath of adjacent to the picture. The postal service permitted the back to contain only an address. Because of their foreign origin some of these lovely early cards contained errors in identification and printing, yet by 1905 over a billion were being sold annually, and collecting them was a hobby enjoyed by many. The modern postcard was only created on March 1, 1907 when postal authorities decided that a “split back,” offering half the back side for a message and the other for an address, was acceptable. A roll back of federal policy had been effected and collecting penny post cards escalated into a national mania. The American Souvenir Card Company offered sets of fifteen cities and when New York hosted the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in 1909 postcards were sold everywhere. Significantly, the first patent for a wire rack holding cards was issued in 1908, and in 1911 vending machines for cards were introduced to prevent consumer stealing from open racks. Only the outbreak of World War I, and the gradual halt of imports from the Central Powers, ended the postcard craze.

Deltiology is the collection and study of post cards, and today it remains the hobby of choice for millions. By 1917 the postcard was an accepted part of American life, but domestically produced cards were of inferior quality and often reproduced past images. Moreover, in order to save ink and reduce costs, most domestic cards from 1917-1930 had a narrow white border around the image. During the Depression improved technology and higher rag-content stock led to “linen” textured postcards with a cross-hatching feel. After 1945, the “chrome” finished cards familiar to our day became available. In succeeding decades costs escalated and by 2000, like many American staples, most contemporary postcards were manufactured overseas.

But whatever its format or origin, there is little doubt that the postcard transcends its form. It offers a glimpse of the unfamiliar, the sight of a place worthy of visiting and remembering, a medium for a voice that otherwise would not be heard. Postcards are quickly dispatched, cost less than a letter, convey a bit of someone on the move. Those who receive them have a memento, an inducement to travel, a pledge of affection. No city has been better represented in post cards than New York, the national metropolis, and because Times Square became a destination for most travelers we have a unique record of its development. In the following pages the images of Times Square and the reaction of its visitors provide insights into its history. More than five generations of tourists have come to Times Square, experienced its ambiance, been attracted or repelled by its gaudiness, and lived to tell the tale. Enter the boundaries of America’s common crossroads, and enjoy a trip through time.

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