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Ghosts of 42nd Street
A History of America's Most Infamous Block
Fathers of Times Square
By all rights, Times Square should have been called Oscar Hammerstein Square. Hammerstein opened the first theater in what would become Times Square -- the magnificent, doomed Olympia -- in 1895, a full nine years before the New York Times moved into the neighborhood and bestowed its name upon it. In fact, by the time that the newspaper occupied its slender tower on 42nd Street in 1904, Hammerstein had completed two more theaters in the area, the Theatre Republic and the hugely successful Victoria. Times Square would have become the new theater center of America even if Hammerstein had never left Berlin; geography is destiny. But the fact is that the German-born impresario got there first, years ahead of his rivals, and planted the flag of glamorous fun in a part of Midtown Manhattan that had been defined by its many odiferous horse stables and brazen pickpockets and prostitutes. The mad brilliance of Hammerstein's genre-spanning pioneering went a long way toward establishing 42nd Street's intersection with Seventh Avenue and Broadway as the hub of the liveliest and most celebrated entertainment district the world has ever known. Hammerstein was hailed during his lifetime as the "Father of Times Square," but awareness of his seminal contribution faded after his death in 1919, and today he has been all but forgotten. He not only was denied the immortality that "Hammerstein Square" would have vouchsafed him, but he even lost pride of place within his own family as his fame was eclipsed by that of his grandson and namesake, Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote the lyrics to many of the greatest Broadway musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.
That Oscar the elder could ever have been consigned to anonymity would have astounded his contemporaries. "In his heyday," wrote one biographer, "he was perhaps the best known man in the United States after the President." This has the ring of hyperbole, but coverage of Hammerstein's exploits was indeed a front-page staple of journalism in New York City for three decades. Hammerstein was not a modern celebrity, which is to say that his fame was solidly grounded in accomplishment. In his day, he was far and away the city's leading theater builder. Between 1888 and 1914, Hammerstein constructed ten theaters in Manhattan, most of which were spectacularly grand, yet all but one were located on the outer edge of established entertainment districts. Hammerstein also was New York's most daring and versatile impresario during this span. At a time of increasing segregation between high and low culture, he ranged across the full spectrum of entertainment, flouting category and classification with impunity while providing performers of all sorts with their proverbial big break. Hammerstein's passion -- his obsession, really -- was grand opera, and yet he also was acclaimed as the greatest vaudeville promoter of the 1890s. A more polished and family-friendly version of the ribald variety shows that had long been staged in saloons, vaudeville emerged in the 1870s and 1880s as America's most popular form of entertainment until the advent of the Hollywood movie in the 1920s.
In contrast to most rival impresarios, who were businessmen first, last, and always, Hammerstein was a polymath who put profit second. Conservatory-trained in violin and piano, he was a prolific if undistinguished composer, adept in many different musical genres. On a bet, he once wrote a three-act comic opera -- The Kohinoor -- in forty-eight hours and presented it onstage to hilarious effect. The opening-night audience "laughed themselves blue in the face" at the opening chorus, which consumed a third of the first act, one critic observed. "Two comic Jews, alternatively for half an hour, sang 'Good morning, Mr. Morganstern, Good morning, Mr. Isaacstein,' while the orchestra shifted harmonics to avoid too much monotony." Hammerstein collected on his $100 wager but happily lost $10,000 on the production. Although Hammerstein had no training in architecture, he designed all of the theaters that he built, displaying a particular talent for the nuances of acoustics. He also was a prolific mechanical inventor who seemed able to devise some clever new contraption at will -- or at least whenever he needed a big chunk of money. In 1895, an exceptionally fruitful year, Hammerstein was awarded thirty-eight patents, most of them related to the construction of the Olympia theater complex.
In business, Hammerstein had the Midas touch. He was an instant success both as trade journal publisher and real estate speculator, as well as vaudeville promoter. But money per se meant nothing to Hammerstein. Three times he made his fortune, three times he blew it on impossibly ambitious opera schemes, dying penniless at seventy-three. When Oscar II, who was born in 1895, was a boy he rarely saw his grandfather but felt his influence hanging heavily. "Members of the family had referred to him always as 'the old man.' They spoke of his predilection for grand opera as if it were a sickness. They told funny stories about him," the lyricist recalled. "To my child's ear, sensitive more to inflections than to the specific meaning of words, it was evident that my father, my aunts and uncles, and my stepgrandmother, his second wife, were all afraid of him. That made me afraid of him, too. It was equally evident to me that in a shy and guarded way they loved him."
Hammerstein endeared himself to the New York masses by adopting egalitarian admission and seating policies at many of his venues and by pricing his attractions to the working-class budget. He also did flamboyant battle with many of New York City's most powerful and elitist cultural institutions, refusing most notably to pay truck either to the Metropolitan Opera or the Theatrical Syndicate, which was to entertainment at the turn of the century what Standard Oil was to petroleum. In sum, Hammerstein vividly personified the American dream for several generations of European immigrants ...
Ghosts of 42nd Street
A History of America's Most Infamous Block. Copyright © by Anthony Bianco. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
