The Name Is A Hint

A name that you don’t hear used much anymore is “The Great White Way” for the showy part of Broadway, now at Times Square. It is a name that is unfortunately prone to an obvious but incorrect reading, and it’s hard to correct that reading because the original meaning is gone. First, a pair of postcards: The daytime view is from 1913 or so, the night view from 1917. Note that during those four years the Hotel Marlborough added a lit vertical sign on its street facade. Also note that, in the northern hemisphere, you’re not going to see the moon in the sky to the north. More importantly, we’re looking up Broadway from the streets in the west 30s towards Times Square. (The Times Building is the tower in mid-distance.) The theater district began on Broadway in and around Union Square, and then crept north to Madison Square, then Herald Square, before finally settling at Times Square. This was accompanied by real changes in theater technology – switching to partially-steel-framed and then…