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85 5 If You Can Make ’Em Cry There aren’t many songs about it And what’s even more strange to me Not a map has a dot, to distinguish the spot Where that hurly-burly song street used to be. “Tin Pan Alley,” by Cy Coleman and Joseph McCarthy D E S P I t E t h E C h A N g E S overtaking what is left of the old Tenderloin , one pocket, 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, has remained largely the same. When visitors leave Sixth and walk eastward along the north side of 28th, they pass a white brick building on the corner (once, around 1900, home to a combined saloon, hotel, and brothel) and encounter a group of five 19th-century houses, covered with fire escapes and painted dark green. Just beyond, three additional houses announce themselves using more conventional colors (light blue and white) before the entire suite terminates at a larger, newer structure dating from 1910. In a city forever growing skyward, the older buildings suggest compactness and low-rise simplicity. Most retain their original second-story doorways, along with decorative features such as the molding visible inside several of the vestibules. Taken as a group they present a smooth line running up 28th Street, broken only by the peaked cornice that caps number 49. That this address should stand out architecturally seems fitting, given its history : along with number 51 next door, it housed the first song publisher here on the block that became known, during the years before and after 1900, as Tin Pan Alley—the heart of the American popular-music industry . In a manner similar to the American Mutoscope roof, it offers a view of a cultural force at its specific place of invention. The physical creation of Tin Pan Alley—two rows of former residences lining both sides of a Tenderloin block—led eventually to the formation of a larger concept related to music as popular culture: the “Tin Pan Alley” 86 Chapter 5 of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and the tried-and-true brand of popular songs still being revived today. Tin Pan Alley as idea has therefore survived Tin Pan Alley as place. But perhaps this was foreordained: indeed, if there was one concept that most exemplified the inner workings of Tin Pan Alley, it was the building of identity through a creative process that succeeded in obscuring the reality of its own origin. The hearts-and-flowers romanticism characterizing many Tin Pan Alley songs was, as we shall see, a falsehood, designed to fit in with prevailing American standards of domesticity and behavior. Tin Pan Alley songwriters were, in reflection, characters of their own devising; they wrote their lives to the extent that they wrote their songs. Those within their ranks specialized in personal and professional invention, and included at least one, the enigmatic Harry Von Tilzer, who could be said to have mastered it. As a site of music publishing, Tin Pan Alley had been in existence for close to a decade before it acquired its distinctive name. For a peek into the block’s etymological origins, visitors can cross to the south side of 28th Street, where the architectural effect is less continuous and more jumbled. Whereas the building at number 40, with its tall, columned windows, appears much as it did in the early 20th century, its companion at 42 does not: the original exterior was replaced, in 1927, with the unadorned fa- çade it bears today. Nonetheless, official city records indicate that this is indeed the same building where, according to music industry legend, “Tin Pan Alley” was coined. One afternoon in the spring of 1902 Monroe H. Rosenfeld, journalist, songwriter, and all-around sporting man, dropped by music writer and publisher Harry Von Tilzer’s office, here at 42 West 28th Street, seeking material for his next story. Rosenfeld was a classic Tenderloin figure: it was once noted that, if he had made $75,000 selling his songs, he had lost $74,500 of it at the racetrack. “Rosie’s” gambling debts were so oppressive that even the royalties from his biggest hits, which included “With All Her Faults I Love Her Still” (written in 1888 and reputed to have sold a then astounding 280,000 copies), could not salve them. As a result he was always writing, always pitching new songs, newspaper articles, poems —anything that could get him a cash advance, half of...

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