1901 – 1929: Turn of the century and jazz age
| This period starts with the dawn of the 20th century, brings roaring 20th, aka Jazz Age and ends with the 1929 Wall Street crash |
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| 1901 Theodore Roosevelt becomes president. |
| Theodore “T.R.” Roosevelt, Jr. was an American author, naturalist, explorer, historian, and politician who served as the 26th President of the United States. He was the first American president born in New York City. |
| 1902 Flatiron Building is built. Macy’s becomes “largest store on Earth”. Met Museum moves to present location. |
| The Flatiron Building, designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, fills the wedge-shaped area at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The Flatiron, one of the most recognizable buildings in New York, is the city’s first skyscraper. Macy’s, which started as a humble dry goods store on the corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue in 1858, in 1902 moved to its present location on Herald Square and became “the largest store on earth”. |
| 1900-15 Early Bohemia in Greenwich Village. |
| The Village at the turn of the 20th century was quaint, picturesque, and ethnically diverse. By the start of World War I it was widely known as a bohemian enclave with secluded side streets, low rents, and a tolerance for radicalism and nonconformity. |
| 1904 Subway opens. Times Square gets named. General Slocum disaster |
| On Thursday afternoon, October 27, 1904, the mayor of New York City, George B. McClellan, officially opened the New York City subway system. The first subway train left City Hall station with the mayor at the controls, and 26 minutes later arrived at 145th Street. The subway opened to the general public at 7 p.m. that evening, and before the night was over, more than 150,000 passengers had ridden the trains through the underground tunnels. General Slocum disaster. The deadliest disaster in New York before 9/11 killed over 1,000 people, mainly women and children, and ultimately erased a German community from the map of Manhattan. |
| 1906 Stanford White killed |
| 1906 saw one of the greatest social scandals of the century when renowned architect Stanford White, a flamboyant figure and a known womanizer, was shot and killed by Harry Thaw, a millionaire husband of Evelyn Nesbit, a show girl and White’s ex-lover. |
| 1909 Manhattan Bridge. Met Life Tower |
| In the wild race to be the tallest in the world, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower achieved that distinction in 1909. It was the tallest structure in the world for 4 years, until the Woolworth Building was erected. Manhattan Bridge The Manhattan Bridge was the last of the three suspension bridges built across the lower East River. Because it was conceived after the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges, it was called Bridge No. 3 in its planning phase. |
| 1911 New York Public Library |
| The NYPL, with its 75 miles of shelves of books, is one of the most important research libraries in the world. It was used by Isaac Bashevis Singer, E.L. Doctorow, Somerset Maugham, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, etc. Research for the Xerox copier, the Polaroid camera, and the atomic bomb were all conducted at its desks. The New York Public Library was NOT created by a government statute, but by a philanthropist. New York governor and presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden, John Jacob Astor, and James Lenox left their libraries, along with large sums of money, for the establishment of the Library. |
| 1913 Woolworth Building. Grand Central Terminal |
| Woolworth BuildingThe venerable Cathedral of Commerce, otherwise known as the Woolworth Building, became the tallest in the world in 1913. At 60 stories, and almost 800 feet tall, it stood as the tallest building in the world for 17 years. 100 years after its construction, amazingly, it’s still one of the twenty tallest buildings in New York City. Grand Central Terminal The Grand Central Terminal was built to house Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad network, consolidated in the late 19th century as New York Central. It was envisioned as a gateway to the city, which at the time was mostly located to the station’s south. |
| 1916 Zoning Resolution passed. |
| The New York City 1916 Zoning Resolution was a measure adopted primarily to stop massive buildings from preventing light and air from reaching the streets below. According to the zoning law the higher the building went the skinnier it had to become. The law was usually interpreted as a series of setbacks. Such design was referred to as ‘wedding cake’. |
| 1920 Wall Street Bombing. Start of Prohibition. |
| At noon on September 16, 1920, a horse drawn buggy loaded with 100 pounds of dynamite exploded across the street from the J.P. Morgan bank headquarters in downtown Manhattan. The explosion blew out windows for blocks around, killed 30 immediately, injured hundreds of others and completely destroyed the interior of the Morgan building. Those responsible were never found, but evidence—in the form of a warning note received at a nearby office building—suggested anarchists. Start of Prohibition. Prohibition became the law of the land in 1920. Prohibition was a period of nearly fourteen years of U.S. history in which the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor was made illegal. It led to the first and only time an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was repealed. |
| 1923 Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age |
| The 1920s were labeled the Jazz Age but the music was only a part of it: Social rules were being rewritten, and in Manhattan, downtown was going up as white society and dollars poured into Harlem every night. While the Cotton Club (opened in 1923 by the gangster Owney Madden) was Harlem’s most glamorous nightclub, the community’s biggest and most beautiful ballroom was the Savoy. It covered a whole city block on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets, employed two bands at once so that the music need never stop, and was so popular with dancers that its maple-and-mahogany floor had to be replaced every three years. Just 50 cents on weeknights — 75 cents on Sundays — the Savoy billed itself as “the Home of Happy Feet.” |
| 1926 James Walker becomes mayor. |
| Dapper Jimmy Walker presided over New York during the great age of Gatsby and perfectly embodied that moment of indulgence: the public servant who favored short workdays and long afternoons at Yankee Stadium, who left his wife and their Greenwich Village apartment for a chorus girl and a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. While the roaring 20s were still roaring, he easily won his re-election over Fiorello LaGuardia. However, after Stock Market Crash of 1929, when the nation had a collective hangover, Walker, under pressure from then Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, resigned. |
| 1929 Wall Street crash. |
| 1929 Wall Street Crash was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States. |