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By Root 612 0

cigars—a roller, a header, a cutter, a device that molded twelve stogies at once. He was an incessant tinkerer and inventor. But he was also a cultured man with a real love, and a modest gift, for music, which he once demonstrated in characteristic fashion by composing an opera in twenty-four hours on a bet. Hammerstein seems to have plowed his entire fortune into Broadway without a second thought. In 1892 he built the Manhattan Opera House on 34th Street, a populist rival to the aristocratic Metropolitan Opera. He and his partners split after Hammerstein loudly booed a singer he hadn’t wanted to appear, and then got into a fistfight with the woman’s paramour, which landed them both in the precinct house. Hammerstein then cashed out of the opera house, spent $850,000, most of it borrowed, to buy the property along Broadway, and commenced to build his immense, portholed palace of culture.

The Olympia was situated squarely in terra incognita. At the time, the electric lights that ran up Broadway stopped at 42nd Street. The corner of 42nd and Broadway was already a bustling commercial area by the end of the century, thanks to the convergence of north–south and east–west trolley lines, as well as the Ninth Avenue el to the west; but the area north of 42nd consisted mostly of cheap boardinghouses, tenements, factories, whorehouses, and dance halls. The neighborhood would also have smelled very strongly of horse: with Central Park just to the north, the West Forties were full of stables and of shops that sold and repaired carriages. The area was popularly known as Longacre Square, after a similar district in London. The eastern side of Broadway, which then centered on the 71st Armory building, was known as the Thieves’ Lair.

Hammerstein’s Olympia—it was never just “the Olympia”—was a work of pharaonic ambition. The Music Hall had 124 boxes ascending in eleven tiers, while the Theatre had eighty-four boxes (more than the Metropolitan). The color schemes of the three houses were red and gold, blue and gold, and cream and gold. Hammerstein was said to have spent $600,000 on his folly. No theater opening had been so eagerly awaited in years, and that November night, Hammerstein had sold ten thousand tickets; unfortunately, the Olympia had only six thousand seats. So, half the crowd gained entrance, while the other half, in the first recorded fiasco in Times Square, “slid through the mud and slush of Longacre back into the ranks of Cosmopolis,” according to The New York Times. Later that evening, the crowd of swells, in crinoline and patent leather, formed themselves into a giant flying wedge and broke down the doors. It was not a good portent: Hammerstein had never really figured out how he could make back his immense investment, and within two years he had lost control of the Olympia; in 1898, he declared bankruptcy. But for Hammerstein, as for so many of the men who would come after him, disaster was a mere inconvenience; he bounced back almost as soon as he hit the pavement.

NEW YORK CITY in 1900 was, to a degree unimaginable today, the imperial capital of turn-of-the-century America. As J. P. Morgan and a handful of other New York financiers concentrated corporate power in their own hands, New York came to occupy the commanding heights of the emerging twentieth-century economy. By the early years of the century, 70 percent of corporate headquarters and 69 of the 185 trusts, or combines, being forged by Morgan and his colleagues were based in New York City; two-thirds of imports and two-fifths of exports flowed through its docks. Wall Street financed the growth of the nation’s railroads and industries—and, increasingly, those of other nations. New York became a city of millionaires as well as a magnet for the millionaires of the Chicago stockyards and the Colorado mines and the Texas oilfields.

At the same time, the city was undergoing a radical physical transformation. Immigrants had been pouring into New York since the early 1880s, filling lower Manhattan and pushing existing residents uptown and into Brooklyn. On December