Book excerpt: “Part lively social history, part architectural survey, here is the story of Broadway—from 17th-century cow path to Great White Way.”—Geoff Wisner, Wall Street Journal From Bowling Green all the way to Marble Hill, Fran Leadon takes us on a mile-by-mile journey up America’s most vibrant and complex thoroughfare, through the history at the heart of Manhattan. Broadway traces the physical and social transformation of an avenue that has been both the “Path of Progress” and a “street of broken dreams,” home to both parades and riots, startling wealth and appalling destitution. Glamorous, complex, and sometimes troubling, the evolution of an oft-flooded dead end to a canyon of steel and glass is the story of American progress.