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 steel-framed buildings; switching from limelights and gaslights to electric arc lights and bulbs – so the old theaters weren’t just (gradually) in the wrong neighborhood, they were (less gradually) becoming functionally obsolete. In the 1910s, the theater district was still in the process of moving from Broadway in the west 30s to Broadway in the west 40s.

The daytime view also gives no hint as to that name. But the nighttime view does: there are plenty of electric lights in signs and elsewhere, but no color. The lit signs are made of groups of white-light incandescent bulbs. “The Great White Way” referred to exactly that: massive amounts of lit signs in the kind of showy we display we now associate with Times Square, but in monochrome. Here’s a photo from that era looking south past the Times building:

Neon, the gas, was discovered in 1898, the first commercial neon lights were displayed in 1910 in France, and the first US patent was in 1915. Neon gas creates a red light, and manufacturers pretty quickly figured out how to use other elements to get different colors. And the lit signs were off to the (color) races and the name referencing the white lights was obsolete.