Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

A native of Gainesville, Florida, he teaches at the City College of New York and lives in Brooklyn. About the Author Fran Leadon is an architect and coauthor of the fifth edition of the AIA Guide to New York City.

A native of Gainesville, Florida, he teaches at the City College of New York and lives in Brooklyn. Fran Leadon is an architect and coauthor of the fifth edition of the AIA Guide to New York City.

An eye-opening history of Manhattan told through its most celebrated street.Broadway takes us on a mile-by-mile journey that traces the gradual evolution of the seventeenth-century’s Brede Wegh, a muddy cow path in a backwater Dutch settlement, to the twentieth century’s Great White Way. We learn why one side of the street was once considered more fashionable than the other; witness construction of the Ansonia Apartments, Trinity Church, and the Flatiron Building and the burning of P. Barnum’s American Museum; and discover that Columbia University was built on the site of an insane asylum. Along the way we meet Alexander Hamilton, Edgar Allan Poe, John James Audubon, Emma Goldman, “Bill the Butcher” Poole, “Texas” Guinan, and the assorted real estate speculators, impresarios, and politicians who helped turn Broadway into a living paradigm of American progre