A Block in Time: A New York City History at the Corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street

by Christiane Bird

Overview

Gotham meets The Island at the Center of the World in this dazzling history of a single block in Manhattan from the Age of Exploration to the present.

This is the story of New York City, told through the prism of one block, bordered by Twenty-third Street to the south, Twenty-fourth Street to the north, Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the east, and Sixth Avenue to the west. It's a story of forest and cement, bird cries and taxi horns, theaters and factories, gambling dens and gourmet foods. It's also the story of high life and low life, immigrants and tourists, farmers and aristocrats, crooked cops and moral reformers, toy stores and social climbers—from Solomon Pieters, a former slave who was the first owner of the block, to Alexander “Clubber” Williams, the notorious police officer of the 1870s who accepted bribes and wielded his club with equal impunity, to Marietta Stevens, whose Sunday-night socials and scheming became the stuff of legend. Greed and generosity, guilt and innocence, extravagance and degradation—all have flourished on this one Manhattan block, emblematic of the city as a whole.

Venturing from the opulent halls of the Fifth Avenue Hotel to grimy Sixth Avenue brothels, from the era of the Lenape to that of the Dutch, from the Gilded Age to the twentieth century, when the block and the city were transformed into something closely resembling the Manhattan we know today, A Block in Time takes us on a dynamic, exhilarating tour of history. Welcome to New York, past and present, and hear all the sordid and edifying stories this small patch of land has to tell.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632867421
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	263,425
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Christiane Bird is the author of The Sultan's Shadow; A Thousand Sighs, a Thousand Revolts; and Neither East Nor West, among other titles. She has worked on staff for the New York Daily News and has written for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Miami Herald, among other publications. She holds a BA in literature from Yale University and an MALS in American Studies from Columbia University. She lives in New York City with her family.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 In the Land of the Real People 1

2 Half Freedom 13

3 The John Home Farm 26

4 The Making of Block 825 36

5 From Pigs to Ostriches 50

6 Eno's Folly 63

7 War 78

8 Cracks in the Vault 93

9 Hotel Living 107

10 Death Onstage and Off 123

11 Ladies of the Night 137

12 At the End of the Nightstick 153

13 Is She a Lady or Is She Not? 169

14 Betrayal 184

15 Roundsmen of the Lord 202

16 American Beauty 219

17 Modern Times 238

18 On the West Side 254

19 Toys, Toys, Toys! 267

20 Dark Days 278

21 Time Awaits 291

Acknowledgments 307

Image Plate Credits 309

Notes 311

Bibliography 331

Index 345

Editorial Reviews

01/17/2022

Journalist Bird (The Sultan’s Shadow) sheds light on the evolution of Manhattan from the 17th century to today in this colorful history of “the block between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth streets, Fifth and Sixth avenues.” She sketches the island’s natural history before introducing the block’s human inhabitants, including Solomon Pieters, who, in 1680, was awarded “the largest land grant ever given to a Black man,” 30 acres on which the block later developed. A chapter focusing on real estate tycoon Amos Eno, who opened the Fifth Avenue Hotel at the corner of 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue in 1859, gives insights into the early days of the city’s hospitality industry. Perhaps the most intriguing story is that of surveyor John Randel Jr., “a young, inexperienced, dark-haired man with a temper and a passion for details and math,” who spent three years making measurements and pounding 1,600 bolts and markers into the ground in order to create the 1811 grid that formed the basis for the current layout of Manhattan’s streets. Elsewhere, better-known historical figures including financier James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk and architect Stanford White, who kept a “love nest” on the block and was shot and killed in the rooftop theater of the nearby Madison Square Garden, make appearances. Enriched by Bird’s brisk character sketches and copious research, this is an entertaining and eye-opening snapshot of New York history. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Enriched by Bird's brisk character sketches and copious research, this is an entertaining and eye-opening snapshot of New York history.” —Publishers Weekly

“A lively account packed with memorable NYC characters . . . Students of an ever changing Gotham will take pleasure in Bird's well-researched narrative.” —Kirkus Reviews

“By deftly uncovering layer after layer of the history of just one city block in New York, Christiane Bird has created something altogether new: a kind of literary archaeology, rich with characters, incidents, and stories, from the Ice Age to the Covid-19 pandemic. I loved it.” —Bill Hayes, author of INSOMNIAC CITY

“Introducing readers to a remarkable cast of characters, Christiane Bird traces the extraordinary story of a single New York City neighborhood from the Age of Discovery to our own era of hypergentrification. More than a micro history, A Block in Time offers a splendid portrait of the personalities and architecture, the fevered dreams and erratic energy that shaped a nation.” —David S. Brown, author of THE LAST AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT: THE BRILLIANT LIFE AND IMPROBABLE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

“A Block in Time is ostensibly about a very small plot of land, but it's the most comprehensive and fascinating book I've ever read about New York City History. Bird takes the city's ugly, wild past and weaves it into the modern landscape in such a unique and thrilling way. Everyone should be required to read this book before being allowed to move to New York.” —Julia Wertz, author of Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City.

“There are 30,000 square blocks in New York. Christiane Bird vividly captures four centuries in microcosm by focusing on Madison Square's metamorphosis from the vice-infested Tenderloin and theater district to the Flatiron and Silicon Alley. Her biography of the block, inspired by Columbia historian Ken Jackson's urban history course, percolated for twenty-five years. It was worth the wait.” —Sam Roberts, author of A HISTORY OF NEW YORK IN 27 BUILDINGS

“Just as some writers have captured the history and character of a country or era by focusing on a single day, Christiane Bird has captured the hurly-burly sweep of the city's history and its quirky, resilient character by zooming in on a single block. It is a work of prodigious research and zestful writing that is a must for any aficionado of the great cities.” —Joseph Berger, author of THE WORLD IN A CITY: TRAVELING THE GLOBE THROUGH THE NEIGHBORHOODS OF THE NEW NEW YORK

“A delightful, vivid grand tour through the life, times, and people of one Manhattan block.” —Gerard Koeppel, author of CITY ON A GRID: HOW NEW YORK BECAME NEW YORK

“An engaging panoramic history of the neighborhood that gave us both Edith Wharton and Shake Shack.” —Fran Leadon, author of BROADWAY: A HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY IN THIRTEEN MILES

“Enticing and extraordinary . . .” —New York Times on THE SULTAN'S SHADOW

“Popular history at its best . . . [Bird] treats the past as a destination beckoning with a hundred tempting, unexplored corners . . . Like absorbing history through your skin.” —Laura Miller, Salon on THE SULTAN'S SHADOW

“Bird has brought keen observation, great personal courage, and an obviously empathetic personality to the story of her adventures among the Kurds.” —The Washington Post on A THOUSAND SIGHS, A THOUSAND REVOLTS

“I cannot recommend too highly this brilliantly evocative portrait of a people.” —Noam Chomsky on A THOUSAND SIGHS, A THOUSAND REVOLTS

“Splendidly conveys 'the suspicion, the kindness, the absurdity, the generosity, the repression, the tolerance, the occasional danger and the constant wonder of life in the Islamic Republic.'” —New York Times on NEITHER EAST NOR WEST

From the Publisher

2021-12-15
A native New Yorker recounts the history of the city by way of a microcosmic block.

“Bordered by Twenty-third Street to the south, Twenty-fourth Street to the north, Sixth Avenue to the west, and Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the east, the block once lay far north of the settled city, then at its epicenter, and then on its cultural periphery once again,” writes Bird in the preface. At the center of this urban world stood a hotel that was the scene of political glad-handing, deal-making, prostitution, and other such activities. Perhaps the most famous of the characters inhabiting these pages is the doomed architect Stanford White, gunned down during an affair with a woman whose husband suspected him of “blackballing him from New York’s elite clubs.” The woman in question slipped away into the shadows of the demimonde, at first commanding the tabloids for her “drunken brawls, arrests, evictions, unpaid bills, suspected abortions,” and then largely falling into oblivion. Other of Bird’s subjects are better-heeled, including Marietta Stevens, a social climber who amassed a fortune sufficient to have made her the model for Mrs. Lemuel Struthers in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. She owned much of the aforementioned hotel and plenty of other chunks of downtown, having acquired through various means a treasury of about $86 million in today’s dollars, albeit mostly administered through a trust. Stevens made enough of a stir in life that “at a time when few newspapers ran obituaries for women, all the major New York papers ran one for Marietta, a testament to her hard-earned social status.” Not so for the grifters, drifters, and other lowlier denizens of the block. Bird offers a lively account packed with memorable NYC characters, though it’s less useful in sussing out the tribes of modern New York and a touch less well written than Ada Calhoun’s St. Mark’s Is Dead, based on a similar conceit.

Students of an ever changing Gotham will take pleasure in Bird’s well-researched narrative.

Kirkus Reviews