ASTOR PLACE

Back in the day, when Downtown was Uptown, nowhere in New York was grander than Astor Place—the enclave stretching between Broadway and Third Avenue, and floating between 14th and Houston Streets. Here, where much of the land was owned by the early 19th century fur-trading philanthropist John Jacob Astor, were situated the city’s greatest theaters, a row of colonnaded Greek Revival townhouses to rival Regent Park’s in London, the hallowed neo Romanesque Great Hall of Cooper Union, the Renaissance-Revival Astor Library (now the Public Theater), and the neo-Renaissance shopping emporium John Wanamaker.  Even the intersecting traffic thoroughfares added to the swirl of energy.  Every street that enters the Astor Place energy field disappears and morphs into another street when it exits.  (Eighth Street becomes St. Marks Place … Lafayette Street becomes Fourth Avenue…the Bowery becomes Third Avenue.) Clearly magic is at work here.