I finished a draft of my introduction, hooray! In my head, I called this the “real estate” chapter, since it was all about how the Hippodrome got built and where. Here’s an insurance map that shows the block as it stood c.1910.
Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. "Manhattan, V. 4, Plate No. 40 [Map bounded by 6th Ave., W. 46th St., 5th Ave., W. 43rd St.]" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1910. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9f6f7780-c5ff-012f-6e6d-58d385a7bc34
One important thing I found out about the central street there, 44th between 5th and 6th Avenue, is that it was a really popular tourist spot at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead of the hop-on, hop-off double decker buses you might ride on today, people rode in these open-air electric coaches. They were run by the “Seeing New York Company,” more officially known as the American Sight-Seeing Coach Co., whose offices were in the Flatiron Building. For a one-dollar ticket, they could take a guided tour given by a man with a megaphone at the front of the coach.
Seeing New York coach in front of the Flatiron building in 1904, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/det.4a11803/
Their coaches passed down 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue twice a day. Since the block was so dense with famous buildings that kept the passengers looking back and forth, their tour guides dubbed it “Rubberneck Row.” As you can see from the insurance map, that stretch of 44th Street that housed many private clubs including the Harvard and Yale Clubs, as well as the New York Yacht Club. A fine dining restaurants, Sherry’s, sat on the other end of the block at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue. [ii] Whether seeing New York on a rubberneck coach or reading a series of urban sketches in a mass-circulation magazine, the turn of the century visitor was encouraged to treat the city as a series of sights. It makes so much sense to me that the Hippodrome ended up on this block!
A lot of the information on this tour company and their itineraries came from the book Greater Gotham by Mike Wallace, an absolutely encyclopedic volume that I return to constantly as I draft these chapters. Wallace was a titan of New York City history who passed away very recently. You can read more about his life and work here.