By the 1920s more than a dozen theaters stood scattered on the "subway circuit" – Broadway up through 97th Street's Shubert-Riviera Theatre. The St. Nicholas Rink, at 66th street off Central Park West, opened in 1896 with the nation's first indoor ice skating, but was soon converged Into a boxing arena where heavy hitters from Jack Johnson to Mohammed Ali fought until 1962.

Folks out for a night on the town could partake of fine wine and wild game at Tom Healy's Golden Glades Cafe, around the corner on Columbus. The sudden popularity of Broadway above Columbus Circle brought a concentration of stores offering that new plaything of the leisured class - the automobile. By 1912, Broadway was "Automobile Row," where dealers hawked such long-lost lines as Whites, Packards, Gerfords and Premiers, along with everything else from brand-new Cadillacs to second-hand Fords, with huge billboards shouting their wares from ornamental rooftops.

The trend toward fashionability led to a spectacular miscalculation – the "New Theater," which opened at Central Park West and 82d Street in 1909.

Designed to appeal to Old Guard bluebloods, the big marble palace vastly overshot the West Side market, which was mostly made up of young, carefree aristocrats and the growing professional middle class.

Probably the most extravagant theater in the City's history, the New Theater – later called the Century – never got the red ink out of its balance sheets. Despite a takeover by an opera company anxious to compete with the Metropolitan downtown, the building was demolished in 1929 to make way for the Century Apartments.

In 1913, a real estate agent, Harry Hall, summed up the area's booming popularity this way: "Theatres on upper Broadway! Who would have expected or dreamed of such a thing fifteen years ago'? And yet today we find large playhouses, finely appointed, and the passer-by at night sees lines of people extending for a block waiting or an opportunity to purchase seats at the box office...Accompanying the theater, its natural running mate, the best class of restaurant, is well represented, and to-day, with the taxi and the privately owned motor-car, the theater party goes to supper uptown, near home. Retail shops of the daintiest description are here to be found, appealing to the feminine mind and the needs of a discriminating class."

By World War I the farmer Somerindyck estate had split into two halves on either side of Broadway.

The east side – toward Central Park – had been transformed into the focus for high life on the West Side.

The land west of Broadway was to follow quite another route.