THE SUBWAYS and How They Transformed NEW YORK

- ·f.. •. 000 THE BUILDING OF THE SUBWAYS and How They Transformed NEW YORK CLIFTON HOOD Square. The square's movie houses and theaters depended on the subway to carry huge volumes of passengers to their ticket booths. Perhaps equally important were the IRT's hours of operation. Open twenty-four hours a day soon after its inauguration, the IRT helped give Times Square-and New York City itself-a reputation as a place that never closed, a city where anything was always possible.29 ,ti The Upper West Side Born on October 19, 1895, Walter Mack spent his childhood at 312 West Seventy-first Street on a prosperous upper-middle-class block between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. At the time the neighborhood was a suburban haven far removed from the noise and confusion of downtown Manhattan. Writing his autobiography years later after he retired as president of Pepsi-Cola, Mack recalled how quiet his street had been at the turn of the century: On some summer days the only disturbance was a horse-drawn cart clattering while delivering milk, ice, bread, or coal from door to door. With so little traffic to worry about, parents let their children play stickball and tag in the middle of the street. In Mack's eyes the Upper West Side was hardly part of the city at all. "Each block of brownstones was more like a small village unto itself than part of a thriving, prosper• ous, driving city going through growing pains," Mack wrote, "and everyone had the time for neighborly pleasantries:" 30 What Walter Mack recalled about his block was true of the approximately two hundred other blocks that comprised the Upper West Side. As late as 1900 this sprawling district=-which went from Fifty-ninth Street to 110th Street and from Central Park West to the Hudson River-was not fully developed. Because the Ninth Avenue elevated was the only rapid transit railway, most of the Upper West Side's buildings were located along its Columbus Avenue route (above Fifty-ninth Street, Ninth Avenue became Columbus Avenue) or on the two nearest boulevards, Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue. When urban boosters such as C. T. Hill, who promoted the area in an 1896 Harper's Weekly article, pointed to "the rapid and notable improvements" going up on the Upper West Side or to "the armies of people" who were swarming there, it was this stretch from fences, usually covered with unsightly posters, and the small build• 34 Amsterdam to Central Park West that they had in mind.31 The near ings were anything but architectural monuments." west side had grown rapidly during the 1880s and 1890s; builders Urban philosopher Lewis Mumford, who grew up on West Six• such as Edward S. Clark, Bernard S. Levy, and Edward Kilpatrick ty-fifth Street around the turn of the century, vividly recalled the erected upper-middle-class row houses on the side streets below boulevard's raw and tattered appearance. "From Sixty-fifth Street Seventy-ninth Street and elegant apartment houses such as the Endi• up," Mumford wrote in his autobiography, "Broadway was still full cott, Nebraska, and Lyndhurst on Columbus Avenue. In addition to of vacant lots, with visible ~pickens and market gardens, genuine 35 this housing for the affluent, many tenements arose on Amsterdam beer gardens like Unter den Linden, and even more rural areas." A venue and on the side streets above Seventy-ninth Street. Young Mumford often took long walks through the Upper West Side By contrast the western avenues-Broadway, West End, and with his grandfather, and its open spaces and leafy promenades made Riverside-were largely neglected due to poor transport. Loath to a deep impression on him. In particular Mumford remembered an walk ten or fifteen minutes to the nearest Ninth A venue el station empty plot on the old Astor estate in the lower Nineties where squat• or to endure the slow, unreliable Broadway streetcars, homebuyers ters lived in tumbledown shacks and tended thriving market gardens. generally avoided this section. To be sure a number of private homes Indeed, Mumford claimed that his happy boyhood memories influ• did go up on the far west side after 1885. For instance, in 1893-94 enced his design preference for cities such as Rome, Paris, and Lon• 36 the speculative contractors J. and D. Dunn erected eleven one-family don that had low population densities and broad vistas. brownstones in the three hundred block of West Eighty-fourth With the arrival of the subway, the Upper West Side began to Street. Sold for about $16,000 apiece, these homes provided upper• change. A construction boom began that raised the assessed value middle-class families with comfortable living arrangements that ri• of taxable land west of Amsterdam Avenue 33 percent from 1905 to 37 valed anything in downtown Manhattan. But modern dwellings like 1913, compared to only 11 percent east of Amsterdam. The dis• the Dunns' row houses were the exception rather than the rule. As trict's three main thoroughfares acquired distinctive personalities. A late as 1900 over half of the far west side lots were a collection of phalanx of huge, multistory apartment buildings rose on West End empty rock-strewn earth, farm gardens, and shanties, together with above Seventy-second Street, turning it into a solidly middle-class the ruins of a few dilapidated colonial-era mansions.32 avenue with shade trees, empty sidewalks, and blank windows that Broadway was in particularly bad shape. For decades observers communicated an air of bourgeois respectability. More impressive predicted that this elm-lined boulevard would become a grand resi• edifices went up on Riverside Drive. A winding, dipping road that dential thoroughfare like the Champs Elysees, with finer mansions hugs Manhattan's western ridge line for almost seven miles from than Fifth Avenue's. But precisely because of Broadway's excep• Seventy-second Street to Dyckman Street, Riverside Drive com• tional promise, speculators gained control of most of its frontage. mands spectacular views of the Hudson River and the Palisades. These speculators were attracted to the possibility of windfall profits, Over the years bicyclists and carriage drivers made this heavily and they refused to sell or improve their property until land values wooded promenade a favorite leisure ground, and splendid public doubled or tripled. As a result Broadway stagnated. More than one• memorials, such as the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument to the third of the street corners from Seventy-sixth to Ninety-sixth streets Union War dead at Eighty-ninth Street, were put there. Sloping were empty in 1898; others were occupied by ugly coal yards and gently from Riverside Drive to the Hudson was Frederick Law lumberyards.33 "Broadway presented anything but an attractive Olmsted's Riverside Park, where trees, shrubs, and flowers were view," the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide recalled. "The planted in the pattern of an English garden. As a result of these vacant property was in most instances surrounded with broad scenic amenities, unusually fine apartment buildings went up on Riv- 108 722 Miles erside Drive, offering luxurious suites of five to ten rooms and plenty of space for servants. Beyond question the ritziest flat was newspa• per publisher William Randolph Hearst's penthouse, which occupied the three top floors of the Clarendon at Eighty-sixth Street and River• side Drive. It included over thirty rooms and totaled more than three• quarters of an acre of living space.38 But no street changed more than Broadway. With the nine IRT stations located between Fifty-ninth and 110th streets discharging tens of thousands of passengers onto its sidewalks every single day, Broadway quickly replaced Columbus Avenue as the Upper West Side's chief artery. 39 After 1904 big ten- to fourteen-story elevator• equipped apartments sprouted on Broadway, their ground floors housing retail businesses that catered to the heavy pedestrian traffic, their upper floors reserved for apartments. The Belnord at Broadway and Eighty-sixth Street was fairly typical. Built around a spacious, well-landscaped courtyard, the thirteen-story Belnord occupied an entire city block and ranked as the largest apartment building in the world when it was completed in 1909. Its 175 flats, ranging in size from seven to fourteen rooms, were ornamented with elaborate touches like mahogany doors and wainscoting. At a time when work• ing-class families paid from $7 .00 to $20.00 monthly for their spartan accommodations, rents at the posh Belnord began at an incredible $175.40 The IRT made the Upper West Side a densely populated, heav• ily built-up urban center. According to one longtime resident who missed the more relaxed, personal life of the 1890s, by 1921 the traffic on Broadway was so thick that police officers had to be sta• tioned on the corners of Seventy-second and Eighty-sixth streets to help pedestrians cross the street. For better or for worse, the Upper West Side was now part of the metropolis.41 "' The Bronx ,~ A photograph taken in 1910 captured a critical moment in the Bronx's history. The picture reveals open fields in the Soundview section of the eastern Bronx where the streets department had laid out ribbons outlining the roads and avenues it planned to build. Just .

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