1.9 - Times Square in 1905
Astaires Arrive at Turning Point in City Life
Just eight blocks north on Broadway and visible from Herald Square was the Times Building, which had opened on January 1, 1905, a few days before the Astaires’ arrival in New York. Just as the movement of the New York Herald had led the city to name the triangular park at 34th and Broadway Herald Square, the city had changed the name of the section at 42nd and Broadway from Longacre Square to Times Square, on April 8, 1904, less than two months after the cornerstone for the new home of the New York Times was laid. Designed by Cyrus L.W. Edlitz and Andrew C. MacKenzie (Dunlap 167), the tower was constructed by Paul Starrett, who had already overseen construction of the Flatiron Building and Macy’s and would soon be working on Pennsylvania Station, the Commodore Hotel and the Plaza (Wallace 154). On January 1, 1905, what was then the second tallest structure in New York City officially opened. A full-page ad in the New York Tribune sponsored by rental agents L.J. Phillips & Co. touted the building’s features: 25 stories above ground, biggest and deepest hole for building purposes ever made in the city, highest electric elevator rise in the world (326 feet), a greater number and variety of electrical uses than any other building in the world (NY Tribune 1 January 1905:11). Special emphasis was given to the newly opened subway passing obliquely through the building’s basement but with sand cushions under subway columns to stop all vibrations from passing trains. The building would be home to the New York Times for even less time than the Herald Building was home to its newspaper. By 1913, operations were moved to the Times Annex Building at 229 W. 43rd St., which eventually expanded to 44th Street, after the 1945 demolition of the theater at 219 W. 44th St., where the Astaires made their Broadway debut in 1917’s Over the Top.[1]
When the Austerlitzes first arrived in New York in 1905, the migration of Manhattan’s theater district north from Union Square toward Longacre Square, which had begun in the 1890s, was well under way. There were still a few old venues scattered around 14th Street near Union Square, 23rd Street near Madison Square, and 34th Street near Herald Square, but almost every new theater was being built near 42nd Street at Times Square. In January 1905, the newspapers were advertising shows at the old Princess Theatre (29th & Broadway), the Casino (39th & Broadway), the Lyric and the New Amsterdam (42nd Street) and the Lyceum (45th Street). The reigning stars were Maude Adams (in James Barrie’s The Little Minister), Ethel Barrymore (in Sunday) and Lillian Russell (in Lady Teazle). The papers were also filled with articles and advertisements touting the new American tour of the young Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler in concerts through January at Carnegie Hall and Mendelssohn Hall. The 30-year-old violinist had first performed in the United States as a 13-year-old prodigy in 1888 and later returned for tours in 1901 and 1903. In 14 years, he would write the music for the operetta Apple Blossoms in which Fred and Adele would star in 1919.
Since Fritz had lived briefly in New York City, he would have shown his wife and children a few familiar spots. They dined at Lüchow’s, a restaurant founded in 1882 at 110 E. 14th St. near Union Square (Astaire 23). Fritz would have loved not only the German food but also the café’s reputation as a hangout for famous musicians and artists. Near the Academy of Music, once the city’s elite opera house, and Steinway Hall, named for the German piano manufacturer, Lüchow’s featured live music and walls decorated with trophies and murals from Wagnerian operas (Reiss 130). Much had changed since Fritz lived in New York in the early 1890s. Manhattan was now one of five boroughs in greater Gotham, after the consolidation that occurred in 1898. Above the sidewalks, skyscrapers were rising ever higher, and below them the new subways were rumbling, and even in a frigid January they would have found warm delights in the department stores, museums and variety theaters crowded around Herald Square.
[1]The Times sold the Times Tower in 1961 to Douglas Leigh, who in turn sold it to Allied Chemical Corporation in 1963, who began to modernize the building by stripping it down to its steel skeleton. The original stone façade was dumped into the Jersey meadows. Today the mostly unoccupied building is used mainly as a massive electronic billboard and as the annual spot for the famed Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop, a tradition which Albert Ochs, the owner of the Times, began on December 31, 1907 (Feuer).
SOURCES
Astaire, Fred. Steps in Time. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.
Dunlap, David. On Broadway: A Journey Uptown Over Time. New York: Rizzolli International Publications, 1990.
Reiss, Marcia. Lost New York. London: Pavilion Books, 2011.
Wallace, Mike. Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.