Broadway, famous thoroughfare in New York City. It extends from Bowling Green near the foot of Manhattan island N to 262d St. in the Bronx. Throughout its length Broadway is chiefly a commercial street. In lower Manhattan it runs through the financial center of the country; N of Union Square (14th St.) it passes a merchandising section; further N around Herald Square there are large department stores; finally around Times Square (42d St.), which has undergone significant redevelopment, it enters the theater district, or the "Great White Way," the most storied portion of Broadway. Points of interest along Broadway include Trinity Church (Wall St.); St. Paul's Chapel, built 1766 (near City Hall); the Woolworth Building (at Barclay St.); the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (64th-66th streets); Columbia Univ. (113th-121st streets); the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (168th St.); and Van Cortlandt Park (at the north end of the city). Broadway was laid out by the Dutch and was the principal street of New Amsterdam; its northern stretches in Manhattan were formerly called Bloomingdale Road.

Theatre district in New York City. It is named for the avenue that runs through the Times Square area in central Manhattan, where most of the larger theatres are located. Broadway attracted theatre producers and impresarios from the mid-19th century. The number and size of the theatres grew with New York's increasing prosperity, and by the 1890s the brightly lit street was called “the Great White Way.” By 1925, the height of theatrical activity in New York, about 80 theatres were located on or near Broadway; by 1980 only about 40 remained. In the 1990s the revitalization of the seedy Times Square neighbourhood attracted larger audiences, though high production costs limited the viability of serious plays in Broadway theatres, which often chose to mount big musicals and other crowd-pleasing commercial ventures. Seealso Off-Broadway.

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