The same shoddy shiftlessness, the broken windows, the missing light bulbs, the plaster cracking from the walls, the pilfered hardware, the cold, drafty corridors, the doors on sagging hinges, the acid smell of sweat and cabbage, the ragged children, the plaintive women, the playgrounds that are seas of muddy clay. One observer likened the dwellings in New York’s slums to shoddy apartment houses he had seen in Moscow: Yet rent control measures crowded poorer citizens into the less desirable neighborhoods where the buildings were often neglected and even dangerous. New laws allowed for voluntary increases, and tenants in more affluent sections of the city were able and willing to pay the higher rents in order to maintain their neighborhood. Rent control measures enacted during the 1940s were often cited as a reason why old residential buildings had fallen into disrepair and why new ones were scarce. ![]() Landlords tried to compensate by subdividing buildings and rooms in order to collect rent from more people. ![]() The gulf between the rich and the poor became even more apparent as the white middle class began to withdraw to newly built suburbs in a mass migration later called “white flight.” As many of them left, the West Side lost the revenue that had come from their taxes, consumer spending, and rent. These residents were far outnumbered, however, by the people crowded into rooming houses and inadequately maintained housing projects. On the streets West End Avenue, Riverside Drive, and Central Park West, wealthier New Yorkers inhabited spacious apartments and elegant private homes. It is in an economically depressed neighborhood in this primarily residential area that West Side Story takes place. Within these boundaries, a visitor to New York City in the mid-1950s would have encountered staggering contrasts in housing, wealth, and ethnicity. Roughly two hundred blocks make up Manhattan’s West Side, which stretches from Central Park West to the Hudson River and from 59th Street north to 110th. Events in History at the Time of the Musical The West Side Finally these three collaborators relied on screenwriter and playwright Arthur Laurents (1917-) to supply the rest of the text and to model the work as a whole on Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. The idea for the story line belonged to Jerome Robbins (1918-), also the show’s director and choreographer. ![]() He delegated the writing of the lyrics to Stephen Sondheim (1930-). Conductor, pianist, and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was already a remarkable success when he agreed to write the music for the show. Rival street gangs engage in relatively harmless activities until one fight spells tragedy for two young lovers.Įvents in History at the Time of the Musicalįour gifted New York artists collaborated to create the musical West Side Story. By Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard BernsteinĪ musical set on the West Side of New York City around 1957 written 1955-57, first performed in 1957.
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