I’ve been re-reading the book by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace called Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

It’s massive—over 1200 pages, but you can pretty much open it anywhere and find amazing facts. Here are some things about New York that I hadn’t known:

In 1821, a new hospital for “maniacs” and “lunatics” called the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum was built several miles north of Manhattan, on a rustic seventy-seven-acre plot. It could be reached by way of Old Bloomingdale Road, a thoroughfare connecting lower Manhattan south of Canal Street to northerly areas.The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum is the site of present-day Columbia University. (504) Today Old Bloomingdale Road is called Broadway.

It was thanks to Edison’s installation of incandescent lighting that Broadway became famous for its theaters. The Lyceum Theater was the first Broadway playhouse to be lighted with electricity (1885), a huge innovation over gaslight. Gas lighting consumed oxygen in the air and produced heat. With incandescent lighting, theater-going suddenly became a more pleasant experience.

By the early 1890s, Broadway was ablaze with electric lights—one of the first streets to be illuminated—and it was dubbed the Great White Way.

Broadway 1885 looking north from Cortlandt and Mainden Lane via Wikimedia

Electric lights, Fifth Avenue, Scientific American 1894 courtesy of http://www.maggieblanck.com/NewYork/SU.html