Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

This is a lovely history of New York City, focused down to a single street. It follows Broadway north from the southern tip of Manhattan, mile by mile, and talks about the history of the city as the street moved northward. Along the way, it has random vignettes of things that happened on the street.

(Sidenote: Broadway is a weird street, because it cuts diagonally across the otherwise grid-like streets of Manhattan. It was the first main street, so it existed, and then the city filled in around it. Along its path north, it “cuts off” little triangles from the grid. These triangles are called – weirdly – “squares.”)

I didn’t know quite what to do with this book, because it got very detailed. I eventually just treated it like entertainment. It was a fun little history of the city. A lot of the chapters are standalone anecdotes about P.T. Barnam or some crazy guy who sued everyone because some punctuation in a document made him think all the land belonged to him or about the very last farm at the northern tip of the island.

All the stories are interesting, and you get a feel for the history of the country itself as you watch the city develop through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Industrial Revolution, and so on. All along the way, there’s family drama and civil rights drama and class struggle drama.

The street is such an institution, and occupies such a central place in a central city, that it has basically existed while the country filled in about it. It has weathered every era, every crisis, every war, every generation. I enjoyed the concept of using a physical thing as an excuse to really describe the development of an entire country and culture.

Visually, I envisioned it as the street as a static image in the foreground, and the history of the country in fast-forward in the background.

Come to think of it, this book reminds me of The Seine: The River that Made Paris. Same idea – take a landmark that’s “long,” so it stretches through a bunch of physical locations and history, and use that as a framework to explore history.

I read this after coming back from a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California. I think someone could write history using this same format with the PCH or the El Camino Real.

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