Architect and scholar Fran Leadon offers an eye-opening history of Broadway, Manhattan’s most famous street. Once a cow path in the seventeenth-century Dutch colony, “Brede Wegh” transformed across time and space into the Great White Way. Leadon shows us, mile by mile, from Bowling Green to Marble Hill, how small taverns and farmland gradually grew into department stores, theaters, hotels, apartments, and skyscrapers to become one of America’s most vibrant, complex, and storied thoroughfares.

Fran Leadon is an architect and professor at the City College of New York. In addition to Broadway, he is the co-author of the AIA Guide to New York City (fifth edition).