Battery Park and Bowling Green at the Start of Broadway
By its very nature, as a meandering path growing out of the base of Manhattan, Broadway has been an authentic chronicle of the city’s history from its very beginning. It is a remarkable part of New York’s urban form – that a walking path evolved and integrated itself into the city as a major thoroughfare and morphed into a playful and organic counterpoint to the formalized artificial order of the city grid. As Broadway moves through the city, major open spaces – unique to the density of streets – have developed. These spaces are varied and dynamic, rich in history, and mark the city’s growth and changing form. Broadway is a main artery in our island’s topography, an essential part of Manhattan’s history, dotted with magnificent public spaces (nodes) that occur along the path. Significant events have occurred in these spaces where the collective memory of the city and its inhabitants are embedded.
Herald Square and Broadway slicing throughMaintaining and integrating Broadway into the city was a coordinated design effort – the legacy of city planners past – that created a winding thoroughfare that moves across the grid from Avenue to Avenue hitting major cross-town streets at critical nodes. This meandering has meaning that I wish to address in this blog. I will be spending one month at each randomly chosen site (node), 12 in all. I will look at not only what each site is today, but also what they once were.
As we view these spaces and their forms, we look to see what it tells us about the people who made it. What are the expressed intentions, aspirations of this city? Both as part of a long European tradition as well as an enthusiastic promoter of national pride, New York has always been the center of free markets. Implicit in this identity is an open and free society. How does New York formally express these views and how can we come to appreciate and understand them? These are also significant points of civic character and public identity. How these forms are displayed is a direct reflection of the times and nature of the collective. These are the interests of this blog.
Times Square / Father Duffy Square on Valentine’s Day 2009
The open spaces along Broadway are wondrous urban statements. Union Square, Madison Square and Times Square, to name just a few, are essential examples of the history and character of New York. The development of these spaces was significantly shaped by their unique locations and distinctive uses. The theater district, for instance, was for many years in the late 19th and early 20th century located downtown around City Hall. It moved up Broadway seeking cheaper rents and larger spaces in successive stages to where it presently resides in the midtown area. There was a moment of frenetic theater house designs and building in this district along Broadway. The theaters by leaving downtown gave way to new uses that reshaped the area, establishing a new neighborhood into what is now known as the Great White Way.
L: Union Square; R: Madison Square Park
Use and human activity are forever reshaping our environment and urban form. It is critical to perceive the stage of such development and understand how one design gesture is associated with a new defining moment or with refinement of an established urban form. While each might seek an evolutional design concept, the two are totally different in nature and tone. As a city ages, enriches itself and its environment, the strata of its history is revealed by the character of the design gestures and the way that it manifests the new and changing uses.
Columbus CircleThrough the course of time and as Broadway moved northward, the street went from two-way to one-way and one-way going south. Formalizing procedures obviously effects form; as in instituting the ‘Rules of the Road.” For example, William Eno, the original designer of Columbus Circle, had an indelible impact on the city’s formal development. For anyone who asks who came up with the idea of the stop sign, it was Mr. Eno. Such consequences are but one of many in which decisions made at a certain date change the nature of what something was and set into motion a new stage of development that would form the way to what it will become. These decisions, which may have been of a practical nature at the time, are significant to where the past and the future are interrupted in order to reorganize the present. Such moments can be tremendously important, evolutional in fact, or utterly banal and derailing in the outcome. Traveling along Broadway is as a slice through the body of the city, revealing it in cross section. It is a time line of history exposed and steeped in memories of times passed. We are fortunate to be able to relive and rediscover what remains.