Broadway traces the physical and social transformation of an avenue that has been both the 'Path of Progress' and a 'street of broken dreams,' home to both parades and riots, startling wealth and appalling destitution. Along the way we meet Alexander Hamilton, Emma Goldman, Edgar Allan Poe, John James Audubon, 'Bill the Butcher' Poole, and the assorted real-estate speculators, impresarios, and politicians who helped turn Broadway into New York's commercial and cultural spine. Barnum's American Museum and discover that Columbia University was built on the site of an insane asylum. Following their footsteps, we learn why one side of the street was once considered more fashionable than the other witness the construction of Trinity Church, the Flatiron Building, and the Ansonia Hotel the burning of P. Today, Broadway almost feels inevitable, but over the past four hundred years there have been thousands who have tried to draw and erase its path. From Bowling Green all the way up to Marble Hill, Broadway takes us on a mile-by-mile journey up America's most vibrant and complex thoroughfare, through the history at the heart of Manhattan. What was once New Amsterdam became New York, and farmlands gradually gave way to department stores, theaters, hotels, and, finally, the perpetual traffic of the twentieth century's Great White Way.

As the street grew longer, houses and taverns began to spring up alongside it. In the early seventeenth century, in a backwater Dutch colony, there was a wide, muddy cow path that the settlers called the Brede Wegh.

Broadway by Fran Leadon