• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

OF THE TWO YEARS it took me to write this book, I spent about half in and around Times Square, and the other half in libraries. Virtually everyone I approached for an interview—real estate moguls, theater producers, street performers, former city officials, architects, sign makers, homeless people, corporate executives, waiters—gave me their time, whether they had a lot of it or very little of it. As for the indoor portion of my research, Madeline Kent, librarian of the Seymour Durst Old York Library at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was bottomlessly patient and endlessly helpful. I also could not have written this book without the intellectual guidance provided by two prior studies of Times Square: Lynn Sagalyn’s Times Square Roulette and the collection of essays contained in Inventing Times Square.

I would not have written this book at all but for my agent, Andrew Wylie, who urged me to write a book about the city where I have lived for my entire adult life, and to which I have devoted much of my journalistic work. Nor would the book read quite the way it does without my editor, Jonathan Karp, who arrived in medias res and reminded me to tell stories about people, and to climb down off my high horse.

My friends David Scobey, Susan Margolis, and Giovanna Borradori read portions of the manuscript and made thoughtful comments. My wife, Elizabeth Easton, read the entire manuscript and asked the questions that I should have been asking myself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SOURCES

CHAPTER ONE

Gouverneur Morris, Simeon DeWitt, and John Rutherford, “Commissioners’ Remarks,” in David T. Valentine, A Compilation of the Laws of the State of New York Relating Particularly to the City of New York (New York: E. Jones, 1862); Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Rebecca Read Shanor, The City That Never Was (New York: Viking Press, 1988); David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Miriam Berman, Madison Square (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith, 2001); David C. Hammack, “Developing for Commercial Culture,” in William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Penguin, 2001); Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre (Clifton, N.J.: James T. White and Co., 1973); Parson Zellers, Tony Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage (Ypsilanti, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1971); Tony Pastor Clip File, New York Public Library; Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Monthly, Electra Magazine, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated; Martha J. Lamb, History of the City of New York: Its Ori gin, Rise and Progress, vol. 2 (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1880); James Miller, Miller’s Stranger’s Guide to New York City (New York: James Miller, 1876); George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. XII (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940); Marvin Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly: An Account of the Late Nineteenth Century American Stage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956); Stephen Burge Johnson, The Roof Gardens of Broadway Theaters, 1883–1942 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985); Rudolph Aronson, Theatrical and Musical Memoirs (New York: McBride, Nast, 1913); Casino Clip File, New York Public Library; E. Ideall Zeisloft, ed., The New Metropolis (New York: D. Appleton, 1899); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Signet Classics, 2000); Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Brander Matthews, His Father’s Son: A Novel of New York (New York: