The Times Square/Theatre District ~ Intro to the Architectural History ~ By Joe Zito

The architectural transformation of New York’s Theatre District adjoining Hell’s Kitchen/Clinton from a middle and working-class neighborhood to the largest concentration of legitimate theatres in the world will be described in a series of articles. A block-by-block survey will include not only theatres but also other buildings in an area that extends from 42nd-57th Streets and from 6th-8th Avenues.

In the 1840’s the early Industrial Revolution led by the invention of the steam engine that had fired the economy attracted streams of immigrants (and in-migrants, too, from New England, the South and the Middle West) looking for jobs in New York.

To provide shelter for a rapidly increasing population, farm lands and vacant lots in the then upper West Side above 42nd Street were developed into streets lined by urban homes that were mostly in uniform rows of single-family, four-story “Brownstones” owned by the middle and skilled working classes. Pre-Old Law brick tenements were also built for the ordinary laborer throughout the District.

In the 1850’s adequate transportation to job sites in Lower Manhattan was provided by cars pulled by horses on railway tracks that were laid in the middle of the urban streets. Two horse-car lines that ran on 6th and 9th Avenues served the people who had moved to the new residential district.

The predominant type of dwellings in the new residential district were the single family owned, high stooped “brownstone” houses that lined the streets from 42nd to 52nd Streets. Uniform rows of brownstones also lined the neighboring Hell’s Kitchen district from 8th to 9th Avenues. In fact, the best example of how today’s Theatre District looked in the 1850’s are the rows of surviving but radically altered brownstone houses still standing on both sides of West 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues (now called Restaurant Row).

In the next article these brownstone houses, theatres, tenements, and other buildings will be described in architectural detail.

By Joe Zito, copyrighted, all rights reserved, originally published in the Clinton Chronicles, August 2002.