1850s

Depictions of this intersection reached an international audience when German-born immigrant Augustus Köllner chose Broadway for one of the series of North American cities that he lithographed in Paris. Here Barnum’s American Museum (left), Trinity Church (center background), Brady’s Daguerreian Miniature Gallery (distant right), St. Paul’s Chapel (middle right), and finally the Astor House (far right) frame the frenzied street scene that defined the intersection in the 1850s. This busy yet orderly depiction of traffic and crowds contradicts a contemporaneous account given by an enthusiastic tourist: 

See what an amount of moving matter. The white tops of the omnibuses resemble the waves of the ocean—and it looks like we might walk from one end of Broadway to the other upon them, without the slightest difficulty…
– William Bobo, Glimpses of New York, 1852