Through a Glass, Nostalgically: The Death and Life of Broadway

Broadway is not necessarily geographic; it's not a physical locale. It's an idea.

Roy Somlyo, producer¹

Broadway is a wide New York City avenue bisecting Manhattan. It begins at the base of the island and continues northerly for its entire length. For many consumers of American cultural production, though, Broadway in the past century is better known as the Great White Way, the Main Stem, the Big Street—synonymous with diversion, entertainment, stardom. This Broadway, the one that created and sustains American myths surrounding celebrity, has little to do with the wide street that once led to the northern gate of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam.

The "idea" of Broadway, as Roy Somlyo put it, began to coalesce as a term of art when an extravaganza, Broadway to Tokio, opened on 23 January 1900 at the New York Theatre in what is now known as Times Square. Although spectacles with women in revealing costumes appeared on New York stages at least as far back as The Black Crook in 1866, it was Broadway to Tokio with its "gracefully executed saltatorial divertisements" that codified the Broadway appellation as a signal of a theatrical ideal ("Dramatic"). The production was also celebrated by an anonymous reviewer from the New York Times for Fay Templeton's winning performance "especially of an American 'coon' song" and "a new darky ditty" ("Dramatic"). The audience pleasure taken in the performance of minstrel songs—whether performed in blackface or not—was a tradition spanning more than six decades by the beginning of the twentieth century, and it would continue for several more. Two members of the team that created Broadway to Tokio, composer A. Baldwin Sloane and lyricist George V. Hobart, later employed a familiar turn of phrase when they premiered The Belle of Broadway in 1902—a production that did not enjoy the success of their earlier "Broadway" collaboration.²

As the nascent century evolved, it was not long before "Broadway" became shorthand for the locus of cultural production as other theater artists employed it more frequently in production titles and as subject matter. Since 1900, at least 80 Broadway productions have included the term in their titles—a relatively small percentage, to be sure—but beyond the title the "idea" recurs frequently as theater artists reflexively celebrate the sporting world, the theatrical lifestyle, and the lives of artists. George M. Cohan's iconic Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway appeared in 1906 and others followed with From Broadway to the Bowery (1907), Broadway After Dark (1907), Mr. Hamlet of Broadway (1908), The Man Who Owns Broadway (1909) and Up and Down Broadway (1910). Although these are but a few of the hundreds of productions in the five-year span of 1906–10, they demonstrate a growing affinity—in title and subject matter—with a lively theatrical demimonde that would later be exported nationally through the writing of columnists such as Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell, and in film representations of show business.

1

Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie.

Jocko, a small-time gangster³

Recent books by Jerome Charyn and Daniel R. Schwarz examine New York's Jazz-Age culture macroscopically and microscopically, respectively. Both authors recount the cultural milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, with Charyn tending toward imaginative leaps linking literature to actual events. Schwarz, however, grounds his argument in historical context and a close reading of a particular subject: the sportswriter and columnist Damon Runyon. Charyn's Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway (2005) is a tale of the Times Square area as it gradually evolved from the seamy Tenderloin into the glittering Great White Way. The author of more than 30 other books, Charyn is a journalistic writer with a facility for pulling pithy quotes from other works to help construct his narrative. Although he credits underlying sources in the scantest of endnotes, there is nothing in the text to point the reader to...