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By Root 603 0

31, 1897, at midnight, Greater New York was born—a new city joining Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. In the wake of “consolidation,” as this process was called, the population of New York, which until that moment had consisted only of Manhattan, more than doubled, to 3.4 million. New York was now three times the size of Chicago, its nearest American rival, bigger than Paris, and gaining rapidly on London for the title of the world’s largest city. New York was suddenly every bit as great in fact as its citizens had always thought it to be.

The astonishing array of public works and private projects unleashed by consolidation forged the new city into a single great metropolis and bound it far more tightly to the larger world. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the city built the Queensboro, Williamsburg, and Manhattan Bridges to link Manhattan with Brooklyn and Queens; financiers built Penn Station as well as the colossal tunnel under the Hudson that brought trains directly from New Jersey. (Travelers until then had had to dismount and board a ferry.) Beginning in 1907, a new and grandiose version of Grand Central Terminal began to bring commuters to the heart of Manhattan; by 1913 the trains and the terminal had been converted from steam to the far cleaner and more efficient electrical power. And, most important of all, in 1904 the city completed the first stage of its monumental subway system, which enabled New Yorkers to go from one end of the city to the other in scarcely more than an hour.

City planners had talked about building an underground rail line almost from the time of the advent of elevated trains, in the late 1860s. By the time the idea had become practicable, in the mid-nineties, it was clear that the new transit system would have to link the downtown business district with Grand Central, and then carry passengers to the new residential areas of the Upper East and West Sides. Since Grand Central was already on the East Side, the subways would need a transverse line to serve the West. Thanks to an 1857 municipal ordinance forbidding the use of steam power below 42nd, Commodore Vanderbilt had located his original commuter rail terminal, built in 1869, just north of that street. What’s more, 42nd Street was one of the broad crosstown streets designated by the 1811 plan, so it already served mass transportation, with a trolley line running east and west. For these reasons, the transverse line would run across 42nd to Broadway before heading uptown. And that is why, in October 1904, when the underground system began to operate, the new subway station at 42nd and Broadway became one of the twin pivots or junctions at the heart of the subway system—indeed, of the much larger system of bridges, tunnels, train stations, and roadways that was just then beginning to allow millions of people to move swiftly and efficiently into, out of, and around New York.

Urban geography, real estate dynamics, and public transportation all worked together to make Times Square the city’s latest rialto; but the fact that it became so much more probably has a fair amount to do with The New York Times. In 1902, Adolph Ochs, the Times’s owner and publisher, purchased the tiny triangular plot of land at the point where Seventh Avenue and Broadway cross at 42nd Street. He bought the property from his friend and financial backer August Belmont, who was then in the midst of building the subway under contract to the city. Ochs’s decision to locate a burgeoning enterprise inside such a skinny structure was almost as absurd as Hammerstein’s—the Times would be forced to move again in 1913— but Ochs may well have understood that the new subway system would turn 42nd and Broadway into the center of town. The Times Tower was the second-tallest building in New York, a 375-foot marble-and-limestone needle based on Giotto’s campanile for the Duomo in Florence. The building was said to be visible from eight miles away—an “X” that marked the center from which the great, growing city radiated. As the building was going