We have a detailed history of Tin Pan Alley thanks to invaluable information from the Historic Districts Council in their “Brief-ish History of Tin Pan Alley” written in 2008, and Michael Minn in his piece “Tin Pan Alley”, part of his “New York City” photography collection project. As both accounts cover both overlapping and different information, we present them both below. Many thanks to them both for their thorough and dogged research and insightful presentation.
The History
We have a detailed history of Tin Pan Alley thanks to invaluable information from the Historic Districts Council in their “Brief-ish History of Tin Pan Alley” written in 2008, and Michael Minn in his piece “Tin Pan Alley”, part of his “New York City” photography collection project. As both accounts cover both overlapping and different information, we present them both below. Many thanks to them both for their thorough and dogged research and insightful presentation.
In the late 19th century, 28th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue was the nexus of hundreds of sheet music publishers, songwriters, and performers. Through the early 20th century, icons such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and George M. Cohan, among many, many others, worked, wrote, and created what would become known as American popular music. Though never officially named such, in 1934, the New York Evening Journal wrote,
“Tin Pan Alley! A street that doesn’t actually exist and yet the most famous,
even the most important street in the world!”
At the turn of the 20th century, the area around Broadway from 23rd Street to Herald Square was the entertainment and cultural center of New York City with many theaters, music halls, hotels, and other venues, including the original Madison Square Garden, Delmonico’s restaurant, and the Fifth Avenue Hotel (“the most luxurious hotel in world”) as well as brothels and less auspicious recreational facilities. In this period before recorded sound, all of these venues required acoustically produced music—at a minimum, an upright piano, a piano player, and lots and lots of sheet music.
The significance of Tin Pan Alley as a cultural landmark cannot be overstated. 28th Street is where American popular music and the modern music industry were created (largely by innovative Jewish immigrants and Black Americans). Their unprecedented creative output changed the nation’s cultural history and legacy.
Here they laid the foundation for what would become known as the Great American Songbook. This one block of 28th Street offers a glimpse into what became a worldwide cultural force—pop music—at its specific place of creation.
The first music publisher to move to the block was M. Witmark and Sons, which relocated from 14th Street to 49-51 West 28th Street in 1893, becoming the first publisher to establish a presence in the block.
For a time during the 1890s, Thomas Edison’s New York office for moving pictures was located at number 43. It has been reported that Edison shot early films on the roof. In addition to the American Mutoscope studio on 13th and Broadway, this would have been one of the first locations in New York City used for shooting motion pictures.
By 1900, Twenty-eighth Street had become the largest concentration of popular-music publishers any single street had known up to that time, 14th Street not excluded.
Music publishers occupied buildings on both sides of West 28th Street, and some could be found in offices around the corner on Broadway, or just west of Sixth Avenue. At one time or another, between 1893 and 1910, the following publishers were located on the Alley (note that several moved from one address to another). The source for these addresses is David A. Jasen’s Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song (Taylor & Francis, 2003), as well as copies of sheet music covers on file at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, in the “Brill Building” research file. A search through Manhattan phone books confirms most of these listings.
West 28th Street, between Broadway and 6th Avenue, is the block where the popular music industry as we now know it began. The business practices initiated here are still in use, in modified form, today. This was where, for the first time, music companies learned to go out to the public, rather than let the public come to them.
The concept of song promotion had its roots in the "plugging" methods devised by Tin Pan Alley publishers and writers. Plugging functioned much like today's marketing—the object was to get a song heard by as many people as possible. Each night, songwriters made the rounds to dozens of cafés, music halls, saloons, and theaters. They pitched songs, got them sung by performers, and devised creative methods for song recognition (what we would today refer to as promotion).
Sing-alongs, free sheet music distribution, and staged events (whereby a songwriter pretended to be part of an onstage act)—these were a few of the marketing techniques initiated in the Alley. The music of Tin Pan Alley influenced many aspects of entertainment in America and around the world.
Advertisements for new songs were often featured on the back covers of printed music, including excerpted sheet music for the new songs. "Try This on Your Piano" was a famous slogan used in these advertisements, linking the Tin Pan Alley music industry to American home and family entertainment.
A novelty foxtrot, “In Honeysuckle Time,” was a popular song by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake from their musical comedy Shuffle Along. For marketing the sheet music as a song in a Broadway show, it was published with a cover promoting Shuffle Along, not the individual song or featured vocalist. The design promotes the dance content of the show.