Odology
While Hine explored various phenomena – architectural, social, or even botanical – along Broadway, he also treated the route itself as a historical artifact. This album was, in fact, the first in a series of studies of historic thoroughfares that he pursued over more than a decade. In tracing how a road evolved over time, and how it was shaped – and shaped by – those who used them, Hine was effectively practicing what the landscape historian J. B. Jackson would later call “odology” – from the Greek hodos, meaning road or journey.
In his introduction, Hine drew on the research of his friend Reginald Pelham Bolton to assert the Native American origins of portions of Broadway. The street, he wrote, followed a Lenape trail for its first ten blocks along “the ridge which overlooked the waters on either hand,” and again for thirty-five blocks in Upper Manhattan — “in its latter end, . . . as it was in the beginning.” (Click on “Indigenous Trails” to view this on the map).
Hine then traced Broadway’s subsequent history: its slow evolution under Dutch then British colonial rule, when it lagged behind certain other streets; its rapid northward advance toward the Bloomingdale Road in the Early Republic, followed by its truncation at 23rd Street by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811; and, finally, its piecemeal reinstatement over the subsequent decades, culminating in its extension – via the old Kingsbridge Road – to the top of the island. The transformation of a muddy “cow path” into a city-spanning icon was neither inevitable nor planned. It was the contingent outcome of accidents, compromises, and acts of acquiescence involving both civic officials and private citizens.
When Broadway was extended from 71st to 155th Street, planners allowed it to deviate from the winding course of the old Bloomingdale Road. “The fostering hand of the Aldermen,” complained Hine, “has done away with all this crookedness.” Straying off the new boulevard, he photographed remnants that once lined the former highway (and its offshoots): stone walls, fences, houses, and trees. Now stranded in the middle of city blocks, they stood as the last traces of a ghost street.
Hine’s survey also reveals how the 1867 vision of Upper West Side Broadway as a “Grand Boulevard” failed to materialize. As late as 1905, it remained a hodge-podge of shopfronts, empty lots, coal and lumber yards, and market gardens – alongside the occasional new apartment building. Development on Broadway did not proceed step by step, but in a “leapfrog manner,” sometimes skipping several blocks. Likewise, speculators who had bought up land along upper Broadway during the subway boom of 1897-1905 often refused to build or sell, holding out for higher land values.
Finally, Hine’s odology encompassed the physical surface of Broadway itself: the varieties of “street architecture” that populated it – benches, pedestrian bridges, hitching posts, etc. – and the changing materials used to pave it.