The Brill Building

From world war two on, the Brill building in New York was a beehive of American songwriting.

Beginning in the late fifties, the writers who worked for the building at 1619 Broadway created the top 40 for the better part of a decade.

The names - Mann and Weil. Sedaka and Greenfield, Goffin and King, Greenwich and Barry, Shuman and Pomus, Bacharach and David, and Phil Spector — are right next door to legendary. Their hits would fill a book.

But the sixties scene bloomed and with a social revolution underway, turgid mini-operas of teen romance began to sound frivolous. One by one, the writers drifted away.

The building is still there, of course, and like the part of Manhattan they once called “tin pan alley,” it’s a musical monument.