In the early seventeenth century, in a backwater Dutch colony,
there was a wide, muddy cow path that the settlers called the Brede
Wegh. As the street grew longer, houses and taverns began to spring
up alongside it. What was once New Amsterdam became New York, and
farmlands gradually gave way to department stores, theaters,
hotels, and, finally, the perpetual traffic of the twentieth
century's Great White Way. From Bowling Green all the way up to
Marble Hill, Broadway takes us on a mile-by-mile journey up
America's most vibrant and complex thoroughfare, through the
history at the heart of Manhattan. Today, Broadway almost feels
inevitable, but over the past four hundred years there have been
thousands who have tried to draw and erase its path. Following
their footsteps, we learn why one side of the street was once
considered more fashionable than the other; witness the
construction of Trinity Church, the Flatiron Building, and the
Ansonia Hotel; the burning of P. T. Barnum's American Museum; and
discover that Columbia University was built on the site of an
insane asylum. Along the way we meet Alexander Hamilton, Emma
Goldman, Edgar Allan Poe, John James Audubon, "Bill the Butcher"
Poole, and the assorted real-estate speculators, impresarios, and
politicians who helped turn Broadway into New York's commercial and
cultural spine. Broadway traces the physical and social
transformation of an avenue that has been both the "Path of
Progress" and a "street of broken dreams," home to both parades and
riots, startling wealth and appalling destitution. Glamorous,
complex, and sometimes troubling, the evolution of an oft-flooded
dead end to a canyon of steel and glass is the story of American
progress.
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