Never Was

A 1913 or so postcard showing the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge, looking east towards Brooklyn:

If that looks a bit more Parisian than you remember Chinatown as being, you’re not wrong. This is a fantasy in part, and some pleasantly-misguided design optimism in part. The colonnade is real, designed by Carrère and Hastings (the architects of the New York Public Library) and still there. Here’s an early photo of it, from the center of the bridge approach off Canal Street:

It’s a bit much.

If you look at the postcard, you can see that vehicular traffic got the grand arch in the center of the colonnade, while the streetcars wend behind the columns to the outer portion of the bridge deck. The bridge opened in 1909, streetcars started crossing it in 1912, and the BMT subway began crossing in 1913. The trains depicted on the right side, beyond the cube trees, are not accurate in their location or elevation: the subway dives underground as soon as it’s off the bridge.

The growth of vehicular traffic, and the eventual removal of streetcars form the bridge, meant that there were now cars on both faces of the colonnade, swerving around it as it interrupts the straight line from Canal Street to the bridge. The calm scene shown here did not last. Meanwhile the big open square that was created during the bridge construction by demolishing everything in the area bounded by Bayard Street, Canal Street, Forsythe Street, and the Bowery remained bereft of cube trees. 1916:

As far as I can tell from the 1924 aerial survey, there were some turn-around or storage tracks for the streetcars and not much else:

In 1975, Confucius Plaza, a complex including a high-rise apartment house, a public school, and shopping, opened in the south half of the square, and the rest was given over to traffic improvements:

It’s worth remembering that the bridge was constructed at the height of the City Beautiful movement in the US, and it was not completely insane to think that maybe a piece of Manhattan could be made to look like Paris. It didn’t work at the bridge plaza, and nearly all of the movement’s plans in NYC fell apart, but it’s hard to argue that wasteland and some storage tracks were better than a French garden landscape would have been.