page_title: History of New York City (1898–1945)
section_title: Jazz Age
hierarchical_section_title: History of New York City (1898–1945) / 1920s to 1945 / Jazz Age
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of a Workman on the Framework of the Empire State Building. Many structural workers are above middle-age.
context_page_description: During the years of 1898–1945, New York City consolidated. New York City became the capital of national communications, trade, and finance, and of popular culture and high culture. More than one-fourth of the 300 largest corporations in 1920 were headquartered there.
  The era began with the formation of the consolidated city of the five boroughs in 1898, with a total population of 3.4 million. New transportation links, especially the New York City Subway, opened in 1904, bound together the new metropolis. Increased immigration of unskilled Catholic and Jewish workers from Southern and Eastern Europe expanded the labor force until the World War ended immigration in 1914. Labor shortages during the war attracted African Americans from the Southeast, who headed north as part of the Great Migration. They sponsored the Harlem Renaissance of literature and culture celebrating the black experience.
  The Roaring Twenties were years of glamour and wealth, highlighted by a construction boom, with skyscrapers built higher and higher in the famous skyline. New York's financial sector came to dominate the national and the world economies.
context_section_description: The Jazz Age featured celebrities, among the most notable in the city were Madame Polly Adler; jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald; dancer Martha Graham; speakeasy host Texas Guinan; publisher Henry Luce of Time magazine; writer Dorothy Parker and the pundits at the Algonquin Hotel; editor Harold Ross at The New Yorker magazine; and such nationally famous sports heroes as Babe Ruth and Bill Tilden.
  Fun-loving Tammany Mayor Jimmy Walker presided over a period of prosperity for the city, with the proliferation of the speakeasy during Prohibition.
  Tin Pan Alley developed toward Broadway, and the first modern musical, Jerome Kern's Show Boat, opened in 1927, as the theater district moved north of 42nd Street.
  During this time, New York City became known for its daring and impressive architecture, including notably the skyscrapers which transformed the skyline. The race to the sky culminated in the dueling spires of two Art Deco icons—the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building—during the late 1920s. These two skyscrapers were not topped off until their soaring heights seemed rather overoptimistic. The construction of the Rockefeller Center also occurred during this time, becoming one of the largest-ever private development projects at the time. The city grew outward, too, with residential development replacing most of the farmland of eastern Brooklyn, eastern Bronx, and much of Queens.
caption: A workman helps raise the Empire State Building 25 floors higher than the Chrysler Building (at right), as seen in 1931.
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