Broadway Vistas

Visitors to the United States in the 1850s often visited New York City, and narratives of these travels often focused on Broadway:

"Were there any thing like uniformity in the design of its long lines of buildings, Broadway would be one of the three or four most magnificent streets in the world. Even without any general design – for each man builds exactly as he pleases – the street, in its details, surpasses any single street that England or the British Isles can show. From the Battery facing the sea, where Broadway has a very ignoble commencement, to Trinity Church, there is nothing remarkable about it; but from Trinity Church, of brown stone, with its elegant spire, to Grace Church, built entirely of white marble, a distance in a straight line of nearly three miles, and thence on to Union Square, and the statue of Washington, Broadway offers one grand succession of commercial palaces. Formerly – and perhaps when Sydney Smith wrote – the houses were for the most part of brick gayly colored, with here and there a house of brown stone or granite. But the brick is in gradual process of extirpation; and white marble – pure, glittering, brilliant, without speck or flaw – is rapidly taking its place. The St. Nicholas Hotel, one of the most sumptuous buildings in New York, is a palace of white marble, with upward of one hundred windows fronting Broadway. To the right, and to the left, and in front, are other palaces of the same material, pure as Parian – larger than the largest warehouse in St. Paul's Church-yard, and devoted to the same or similar purposes; some for the wholesale, but the great majority for the retail trade. 'Dry-goods' or linen-drapers' stores compete with each other in the use of this costly stone; and such has been, and is, the rage for it, that in a few years hence a house of any other material than marble, granite, or iron will be the exception to the rule in Broadway, and in the main thoroughfares leading from it to the east and the west. Most of these buildings, taken separately, are fine specimens of architecture, but the general effect is not striking, from the total absence of plan and method, already alluded to, and which seems to be inevitable in a country where every man is a portion of the government and of the sovereignty, and considers himself bound to consult nobody's taste but his own. But this peculiarity is not confined to America, or St. Paul's Church-yard would not be what it is, and the noble proportions of the Cathedral would not be marred as they are by the too close proximity of the hideous warehouses that have been gradually piled up around it – monuments alike of commercial pride and bad taste. Brown stone edifices rank next in size and number to the marble palaces; and a few of cast iron, with elegant Corinthian pillars, add to the variety of architecture in the Broadway. Conspicuous among the edifices that give its most imposing character to this busy and beautiful street are Stewart's dry-goods store, the iron palace of Messrs. Haughwout and Co., such hotels as the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, the Lafarge House, the St. Denis, the Clarendon, the New York, and the Astor House. The last-mentioned was some years ago the boast and pride of New York, and the wonder of strangers; but the city has outgrown its southern limits, and stretched itself far away into the north and northwest, and new hotels like the St. Nicholas and the Metropolitan have dwarfed the Astor House in size and eclipsed it in splendor. The St. Nicholas makes up from 500 to 700 beds, and the Metropolitan nearly as many. Both of these, as well as the others mentioned, represent the magnificent scale on which the New Yorkers do business, as well as the more than Parisian publicity with which families eat and drink and pass the day.

"Enough for the present on the street architecture of Broadway. A few words on its physical and moral aspects are necessary to complete the picture. On each side of the street are rows of American elm, with here and there a willow or a mountain ash. At this date all the trees are leafless, except the willows, which still droop in green beauty, though somewhat shriveled in their leaves by the frosts of the last three nights. The roadway is excellently paved with granite, and the foot pavements are equally good. But let not the traveler be deceived into the idea that the part is a specimen of the whole. Broadway monopolizes nearly all the good pavement as well as cleanness of New York; and the streets that branch off from it on each side are uneven, dirty, and full of deep holes and ruts, through which carriage-driving is far from being agreeable. If there be any exception, it is in the Fifth Avenue – the Tyburnia or Belgravia of New York – where the richest people live in marble and stone palaces, not quite so large as the business palaces of Broadway, but sufficiently luxurious and imposing. The street swarms with omnibuses, somewhat smaller and more inconvenient than the omnibuses of London. Nearly the whole of them are painted white."