Give my regards

August 14th, 2008

The celebrated thoroughfare of Broadway has seen its share of firsts. Between Vesey and Murray Streets in the mid-1700s, Broadway featured New York’s first brick sidewalk. In 1793, it saw the first numbered houses. The first gas lighting debuted on Broadway in 1825 followed by the city’s first electric arc lights in 1882.

For an idea of what the storied street was like in the 1880s, it was claimed that you could “stand on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street and fire a shotgun in any direction without hitting an honest man.”

Today, you probably couldn’t do it without hitting a fashion model…or a tourist aiming a digital camera at the fashion model.

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