With its graffiti-covered storefronts, crumbling cornices and vendor-clogged sidewalks, the block of 28th Street between Avenue of the Americas and Broadway does not necessarily look like a place that would produce some of the catchiest melodies and most poetic lyrics of the last 120 years.
That was decades ago, in the first years of the 20th century, when the strip was part of the two-block stretch of music publishing companies known as Tin Pan Alley. The interesting thing is, in spite of the pretty music the district produced, it wasn’t a pretty place then, either.
Five buildings on the street, Nos. 47, 49, 51, 53 and 55 West 28th Street, are up for sale, it was reported last week,
presumably to someone who would tear them down and build something taller. The news has drawn the ire of the buildings’ tenants, and of preservationists who
hope to secure city landmark status for the buildings, preventing such a demolition.
The block’s history is the subject of the Dispatches feature in this week’s City section.
Whatever else can be said about the Tin Pan Alley of the buildings’ heyday, it is remarkable that so much pleasant music could be
written in such a harsh environment.
The way things worked then, said David Freeland, a music writer who devotes a section to Tin Pan Alley in a coming book, is that the companies, where songs were written, would compete to lure performers in to hear them played by house musicians called pluggers. The music companies had a symbiotic relationship with nearby theaters, along Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where the songs were performed, said Mr. Freeland, whose book, due out next year, is called “Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure.” At the time, he said, the theaters’ musicians needed material, and the song companies needed customers, so they grew together.
Similarly, he said, Harry Von Tilzer, a songwriter whose company was based at 42 West 28th Street, would occasionally try out new songs in the brothels that also populated the area.
It was a competitive time, Mr. Freeland said, adding: “That’s New York history, too. It was a place where people really struggled to make it, to make this place their own, to carve out an identity for themselves that was not really within the prevailing standards of respectability.”
Considering all that, “I always feel that Tin Pan Alley was so brilliant because in turning out this product that was suitable for men, women and children of all kinds, it obscured the actual origins of the songs,” he said. “Part of the reason Tin Pan Alley survived so well is that it actually hid its own origins within a family-friendly veneer.”
It is one way in which the music industry then resembled the music industry today. Indeed, Mr. Freeland said, the very idea of commodifying music, of categorizing it, marketing it and selling it, can in many ways — for good and ill — be traced back to West 28th Street.
Among the good things that emerged from the district — besides songs like “In the Good Old Summertime,” “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” — were the careers of writers like Irving Berlin, Scott Joplin and George Gershwin, who worked as a teenage song plugger for a company at 45 West 28th Street. (Mr. Freeland, however, believes Gershwin did not work at the company until after it had moved uptown.)
Then, even after the publishing business began to move north, away from 28th Street, following theaters that had moved to the Times Square area, the name Tin Pan Alley survived, standing for an era and a style of music. Jonathan Schwartz, the radio host (who is the son of the songwriter Arthur Schwartz), told me this week that there are good reasons why so many of the songs of these later years are still beloved.
“It’s the great passion of the music, the great beauty of the melodies,” he said. And the lyrics, he added, quoting a passage from Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern’s 1939 song “All the Things You Are”:
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.
You are the angel glow that lights a star,
The dearest things I know are what you are.
Some day my happy arms will hold you,
And some day I’ll know that moment divine,
When all the things you are, are mine!
Song lyrics like these, today, are hard to find. Mr. Schwartz said many great songs have been written over the years since then, of course, but these kinds of pure rhymes are rarer.
“ ‘Home’ and ‘alone’ do not rhyme,” he said. “ ‘Home’ and ‘alone’ — that’s what we’ve come up with now.”
But that, in part, is why songs from the later songwriters of the Tin Pan Alley era, people like Cole Porter, Jimmy Van Heusen, Richard Rogers, Dorothy Fields and Harold Arlen, are now considered beloved standards, Mr. Schwartz said.
“As we listen to Mozart and Beethoven and Bach and Haydn today,” he said, “so will the future world find great meaning and help — emotional help, as life is difficult — in the songs that I’m speaking of.”
The sharp elbows of 28th Street may have become gentler as the songwriters and the business moved away from 28th Street, by the way. When they had all grown old, Mr. Schwartz said, Van Heusen, Arlen and Berlin used to stay in touch with regular long-distance telephone conversations.
“There was a great comradeship amongst the hierarchy,” he said. “They so much respected each other. I think the competition of the street was more with people who were writing less-than-top-rate songs.”
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