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paraded around the stage carrying parasols while their male partners did most of the dancing. A group of Yale men began coming to the theater in order to give the girls a standing ovation. Soon a cult developed over the “Floradora Sextette.” Diamond Jim Brady and Stanford White, boon companions and two of the leading celebrities of Broadway, ordered standing tickets for the show; within days, every playboy and clubman in town was gathering to worship before the altar of pulchritude. Broadway had never seen such a craze before. The Floradora Girls were inundated with flowers, gifts, and expensive dinners; each of them ultimately married a millionaire, the most famous match being that of Evelyn Nesbit to Harry K. Thaw. Six years later, Thaw murdered the man he believed was carrying on an affair with his wife: the casino’s architect, Stanford White. The Floradora Girls were the first chorines to go platinum, as it were. And yet these incarnations of the Platonic ideal of female beauty averaged five feet four inches in height, and 130 pounds. The Broadway ideal of female beauty was still evolving.

Something new was emerging as the city’s entertainment culture began to lap at the edges of 42nd Street—and yet it was still only a dim shadow of the place that would come to be called Times Square. The word “Broadway” didn’t conjure up anything like the magic, or the wickedness, that it soon would evoke. There are no novels of Broadway from this era; Sister Carrie, which does seek to anatomize this new world, was published just as Madison Square was giving way to Times Square (and, indeed, contains perhaps the first reference in literature to the gay life of 42nd Street). The cardinal points of New York’s literary geography in the 1880s and 1890s were Fifth Avenue; Washington Square, redoubt of old money; Wall Street, with its thrilling casino of speculation; and, for socially conscious writers like Stephen Crane, the Bowery, where misery raged. Winston Pierce, the main character of His Father’s Son: A New York Novel, written by the society author Brander Matthews in 1896, actually lives in a brownstone on Madison Square, yet neither Pierce nor any of his friends or family members takes the slightest note of the square or its environs. The only reference to theater occurs when the protagonist takes his wife, Mary, to 14th Street to see The Black Crook, a famous, if already venerable, production featuring an enormous troupe of scantily clad chorus girls. Mary is scandalized—and rightly so. Winston is tumbling rapidly down a moral slope that leads to adultery, drinking, gambling, and theft; his fascination with chorus girls in tights is a warning sign of his degeneracy.

2.

THE FOUR HUNDRED MEET THE FOUR MILLION

THE FIRST CROWD in the history of Times Square gathered on the east side of Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets on November 25, 1895. That night, Oscar Hammerstein’s Olympia Theatre was opening up, and Hammerstein, the first of Times Square’s masters of shameless hyperbole, was going only slightly overboard when he billed the Olympia as “the grandest amusement temple in the world.” Perhaps he used that quaint expression because no word had yet come into the language to describe the vast miscellany that was the Olympia—music hall, concert hall, and theater, all spread out over an entire city block. The entire range of culture, from the most popular to the most refined, would be housed under a single roof. The Olympia bore some resemblance to a Coney Island amusement park, and some resemblance to Madison Square Garden, the leviathan on 26th Street; but it is safe to say that the first theater ever built in Times Square looked like nothing the world had ever seen before. It was a bad idea on a monumental scale.

Hammerstein was himself as various and as contradictory as the Olympia: an orthodox Jew, a practical joker, a reckless plunger into dubious enterprises. He was a short, portly character who always waved a cigar and wore a silk hat tipped back on his head. Hammerstein earned his first fortune inventing gizmos for