West Side Story: The Play and the City

Many of West Side Story’s sets drew inspiration from tenement neighbourhoods. New York City’s tenements were crowded apartment buildings that were constructed to house ever-growing immigrant populations.

In the early 20th century, most immigrants came from Eastern Europe. In the 1950s, Latin immigrants began displacing whites in some neighbourhoods, leading to the ethnic tensions captured in the play.

Chinese immigrants have been a stable presence throughout the city’s history. Today’s Chinatown retains some of the insular, crowded character of earlier immigrant enclaves.

Smith’s enclosed sets, lined with brick walls and fences and strung with laundry, evoked the tense and crowded nature of the city’s immigrant neighbourhoods. Businesses of all kinds, housing, transportation, services, and recreation all existed shoulder to shoulder.

In West Side Story’s 1950s setting, the car culture that was taking over the United States had yet to make its way into the interior of New York. The action of the play takes place on foot and face-to-face. 

A consistent theme in New York’s immigrant ghettos was ‘foreign-ness.’ In the early 20th century, tenements rang with German, Italian, Polish, and Slavic languages. In the 1950s, Spanish and Caribbean dialects became prominent. 

Washing machines and driers have eliminated most of the iconic hanging laundry, but immigrant neighbourhoods often retain a sense of public intimacy. Crowding means that people’s private lives take place in public, often increasing conflict and tension. 

New York’s constant construction and complex infrastructure inevitably lead to empty spaces scattered across the city. These vacant lots—sometimes temporary, sometimes unintentionally permanent—can become the domains of the homeless, criminal gangs and others on the fringes of society.

Chain-link fences, the signature of these spaces, figure prominently in Oliver Smith’s set designs for West Side Story.

New York City’s massive infrastructure requires space for vehicle and equipment storage, repairs, spare parts, parking, pumping and power stations, and other spaces that seem vacant or un-used to many residents.

Throughout its history, New York has continually torn down the old and built anew. When West Side Story was first running on Broadway, poor neighbourhoods were being razed and redeveloped as upscale residential and commercial districts.

Evocative of the city, chain-link fencing is an incredibly versatile material for stagecraft. It is a transparent barrier. It can block movement or serve as a ladder. And it can represent restriction and confinement, feelings that feature prominently in West Side Story.

 In the 1950s, car culture dramatically changed the structure and scale of American cities. Highways and bridges created unintentional barriers and open spaces, such as underpasses.

These dark, confined, and neglected areas often became the settings for criminal activity, and they served as inspiration for Oliver Smith.

This part of the Triborough Bridge links Harlem in Manhattan to Randall’s Island in the East River. Completed in the 1930s, it is one of many massive bridges that link the island of Manhattan to other islands and the mainland.

The areas abutting and under elevated roadways are often loud, dirty, and otherwise unfriendly to people. When these road works go up, neighborhoods nearby lose property value and become home to low-income people with few other choices.

As building codes became stricter in the 19th and early 20th centuries, external metal fire escapes became an essential part of multi-story apartment buildings. 

Intended as safety features, they also became balconies and hangout spaces for people living in confined, crowded apartments without air-conditioning. 

Fire escapes became a quintessential visual element of New York City architecture and an important element of Oliver Smith’s set designs for West Side Story.

New York City’s Tenement House Act of 1867 made fire escapes on tenement houses a legal requirement. Most were narrow, open, and sometimes flimsy, as they were never meant for non-emergency use.

The lowest level of a fire escape is often either a ladder that can be lowered, or a hinged section that will drop when a person steps on it. This gap at ground level is vital for preventing burglaries via the fire escape.

With space, light, and air at a premium in pre-air-conditioning tenements, many residents used flimsy fire escapes to hang laundry, catch the breeze, or even sleep on hot nights.

As youth crime and gang activity rose in New York City in the 20th century, so did the prevalence of graffiti. 

The painted scrawls on the West Side Story sets were early hints of a spray-painted explosion that covered the city’s buildings, bridges, subways, and even cars and buses in the 1970s through the 1990s. 

Over those decades, graffiti evolved from simple personal and gang signs—tags—to complex works of public art. 

A tag, lettering that forms a name, serves as both art and signature. Early tags were names, initials or gang symbols. Today’s tags are often elaborate and nearly abstract.

With its origins in the same poor but artistically fertile parts of New York City that gave birth to hip-hop, some of the best of today’s graffiti comes from established street artists and enlivens rather than degrades neighborhoods.

In the 1950s, graffiti did not yet have the hip, artistic connotations of recent decades. The scrawled walls of Oliver Smith’s set, with their stains and torn posters, were simply a sign of neglect and criminality. 

In West Side Story, the Jets’ hangout is Doc’s Drugstore. A ‘drugstore’ in the 1950s was far more than a pharmacy—it was an all-in-one convenience store that offered candy, newspapers, cigarettes, and magazines. 

Many drugstores had lunch counters and served ice cream. Today’s urban bodegas serve much the same purpose, offering cheap, convenient food, sometimes 24 hours a day.

Many of New York City’s bodegas, delis and convenience stores are owned by immigrants or the children of immigrants and serve immigrant communities.

Bodegas and drugstores became teenage hangouts for the same reason they became popular with adults and business owners: they were inexpensive and convenient.

Like the drugstores of the 1950s, today’s bodegas do not just sell drugs, domestic supplies and groceries. They offer prepared foods ready to eat and sometimes a small counter to sit at.