In King’s Photographic Views of New York, by Moses King (1895), Broadway has odd-numbered addresses on the west side of the street, even-numbered on the east. This seems to be opposite the present system. An example, on p. 375, is 271 Broadway – Broadway at Chambers St. This is today’s 270 Broadway (the tall white building).
All the Broadway addresses in the book follow this pattern. Does anyone have knowledge of the reason for this?
Two pages later, on p. 377, the actual address, 271 Broadway, is given in the caption to that page’s photograph. (The page needs to be rotated, which I do not know how to do in Google Books.)
Your image of 270 Broadway is taken from the East on Chambers street. That means the tall white building is actually on the East side of Broadway. At least, that’s the way I see it.
If I’m right, then the odd numbers are still on the West side of Broadway.
Looking at Google Maps, it appears there are both even and odd numbers on that stretch of Broadway, probably because the opposite side of the street is City Hall Park, rather than buildings.
And I’m not just going by Google Maps’ best-guess addresses (which place 271 on the NW corner), I searched a few business listings that I could pick out in street view. Washington Mutual is at 270, Bank of America is at 261, Strawberry is at 258, all on the same side of the street.
Looking at Manhattan Block By Block by John Tauranac, there are no street addresses on the other side. Looking at Google Maps, 270 Broadway and 271 Broadway are on the same side of the street. I’m going to agree and say that the fact that City Hall Park is on the other side is the reason.
I"m not convinced that 270/271 are on the same side of the street. But, of course, I’m not in NY.
You’re not convinced the old 271 and the current 270 are on the same side of the steet? I am, just based on the OP’s caption, which reads “Southwest Corner,” and the fact that the WaMu bank at 270 Broadway is definitely on the Southwest Corner. The passage of time and erection of new buildings won’t move that corner.
And I’ve already confirmed that that stretch of Broadway has both odd and even numbers.
But maybe it’d be a good excuse to get out of the house if I went down there to confirm. 
NYC Map Portal
At the top of the map you can click on the ‘select’ tool. This will enable you to click on a different property for information.
270 is on the southwest corner. On the northwest corner is 273 Broadway. Same side of the street. Some of NYC’s numbering system just doesn’t follow convention.
Neat find. I"m convinced. Wish I were in New York, Shroud. I envy you.
It never occurred to me odd and even may be on the same side of the street, but I see on NYC Map Portal site that 265 and 273 are indeed 270’s neighbors on the west side of Broadway.
I’m searching for another example of this occurrence in King’s Photographic Views of New York. Each example I looked at earlier this morning, to prepare and confirm my facts to write the OP, had odd numbers on the west side of Broadway, even on east.
I don’t know about this specific example, but I know that when some Manhattan streets run alongside parks (specifically, Fifth Avenue and Central Park West along Central Park), they switch from the usual 20 street numbers per block split odd and even to 10 street numbers per block, with all numbers on the side across from the park.
If this runs alongside City Hall Park, I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar thing were happening.
You’re right – the picture is taken from the east on Chambers St., but 270 Broadway is indeed on the west side of Broadway. That picture can be misleading. I selected it because it dramatically includes the Tweed Courthouse in the foreground, which is considered Broadway & Chambers St. even though it’s actually in the middle of the block on the south side of Chambers (north side of City Hall Park). Since there is no other building between it and Broadway it can be referred to as Chambers St. at Broadway, apparently. I would not personally refer to it that way, but I saw it so designated at a website (I forget which one).
Billdo and mobo85 agree, I see. But City Hall has been there since 1811. I rechecked, and am now sure that all addresses on Broadway’s west side in Moses King’s 1895 book are odd, and all addresses on Broadway’s east side are even, at least up to page 380 (#1 Broadway to Chambers St.). I’m also convinced now, from previous posts, there are indeed both odd and even addresses, today, on Broadway’s west side, at least in the vicinity of Chambers St.
There were not, in 1895, both odd and even addresses on the west side of Broadway. Today there are, so my question becomes: Why and when did the numbering system change (if it did) and what is the present system?
Ah, but there were. Maybe Moses King didn’t think they were worthy of inclusion, but they were there.
To answer your question, I perused the New York Public Library’s wonderful online collection of real estate maps. This one, from 1885 shows a smattering of even-numbered addresses on the west side of Broadway, but only across from the park. (The blocks in question are in the bottom right-hand corner of the map; the park itself is on the subsequent map.)
To save you the trouble of NYPL’s horrible pan and zoom feature, here are the addresses in question:
251 Herring & Co Safes
254 Unlabeled
257 Unlabeled
259 Devlin & Co
261/264 Unlabeled (1 building, 2 addresses)
265 Marvin Safe Co
270 Chemical Bank
271 Shoe & Leather Bank (the one in King’s Book)
So, as you can see, 270 was there, along with a few others.
The first one I checked was 1911 , which of course also had even numbers, but not entirely the same ones:
253 Postal Tel Building
256 Home Life Ins. Co
258/259 Rogers,Peet & Co (1 building, 2 addresses)
261 Smith, Gray Building
267 Unlabeled
271 Shoe & Leather Bank
Whew, between this New York question and my own , I haven’t done this much historical research since college. 
Going back even further, to 1852, there were even more even-numbered addresses to be had. Still only across from the park. Most buildings unlabeled:
239
240
241
243
245
247
251
252
253
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
268 (Yes, this one was out of order)
265
266
267
269 (Chemical Bank)
271
Okay, I’m going to stop looking at old maps for tonight. I think.
I am fully convinced of the above, now that I see a map from that era with both odd and even numbers on the west side of the street. Thanks for all the footwork, The Shroud.
I don’t mind the unwieldyness of the pan and zoom – I’m just thrilled to know about those maps, especially to see the El’s of the time are included.
Present day 270 Broadway, I found out while Googling, was the original home of the Manhattan Project, in 1943. Wikipedia says:
By the way, this Wikipedia article is full of typos and grammar and punctuation errors, so I will need to confirm the information elsewhere. My father worked on the 18th floor of 270 Broadway, in 1946, with the Army Corps of Engineers, and was totally unaware until yesterday the Manhattan Project had been there.
City Hall itself may only date from 1811, what is now known as City Hall Park, formerly the New York City Commons, has existed as public land since the early 1700s at least. Indeed, it was preserved as public land as the City expanded from the lower tip of Manhattan up to what is now the City Hall area and beyond. It figured significantly in the build-up to the American Revolution as the site of many major gatherings in opposition to British rule, and perhaps most significantly, it is where the Sons of Liberty erected their liberty pole in 1766 and defended it over the next decade until the British took New York as their headquarters in 1776.
I have no idea when they started numbering buildings on Broadway, but it is likely that they when they did so they omitted numbers on the east side as that was a then-highly significant public park.
Here is an account of possibly the most famous of those gatherings of the Sons of Liberty on the grassy Common that was to become City Hall Park, the one at which Alexander Hamilton, 19-year-old student at King’s College (present-day Columbia University, just a block west of City Hall Park at the time), first made his name on the afternoon of July 6, 1774, speaking to the assembled crowd. (From first full paragraph p. 55 to break on p. 56).
I’ll just point out that streets in Boston do similar things around Boston Common. Tremont St., Park St., and Beacon St. all have both even and odd numbers opposite the park. Boylston St., for some reason only has even numbers opposite the park, while Charles St. has no numbers on that section as it runs between two parks.
Curiously, Beacon St. switches from odd numbers on the right as you travel from 1 to 21 (with the State House having, as far as I’ve ever heard, no numeric address), to odd numbers on the left after you pass the park somewhere around number 100. It’s the only street I’ve seen that does that, and one of only very few in Boston to have odd numbers on the left as you head toward ascending numbers.
I lived in an even-numbered building on Riverside Drive (ending in zero), and the buildings on both sides were odd-numbered (ending in 5). Not sure if it works that way on the whole drive.
