Strolling Up Broadway, The West Side's Spine

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THE Upper West Side, free of Lincoln Center's immediate cultural fallout, takes on its true character north of 70th Street. It is a complex character, one fashioned of a multiplicity of ethnic shadings, of buildings that range from ramshackle tenements to fine apartment houses, of age spans that embrace energetic young upwardly mobiles and quiescent elderly residents. And Broadway is its spine.

All of this becomes immediately apparent at 72d Street, where Broadway intersects Amsterdam Avenue. The square on its south is Sherman Square (for the Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman), and the one on its north, more popular, is Verdi Square, with its little triangular park dominated by a marble statue of the composer, erected by subscription of the city's Italian community. This was, a decade ago, the infamous ''Needle Park,'' where drugs were openly traded, but it, along with much of the West Side, has been undergoing a noticeable rehabilitation.

The most striking feature of the intersection, however, is the subway station in the middle of it: the 72d Street kiosk, now an official city landmark, the first IRT express station north of 42d Street. This one-story structure, in what has been called neo-Dutch style, has been in service since 1904, when the original subway line opened and became a catalyst for growth on the West Side.

Today Broadway in these latitudes is again on the move. As David W. Dunlap reported in The New York Times in August 1987: ''There is a conspicuously fresh crop of high rises on Upper Broadway: 10 buildings with almost 2,000 apartments.'' This activity has brought fears that new towers would immerse the neighborhood in a quiche of gentrification. Recent zoning laws require the new residences to be shaped in keeping with the look of the street and, importantly, to have commercial space on the Broadway side, so that the line of shops and restaurants along this venerable stroller's street will not be breached.

Broadway's B. C. (Before the Crash) swank erupts in the Central Savings Bank (now the Apple Bank for Savings), an Italian palazzo as backdrop to Verdi's statue in the park at its front. Replete with majestic devices such as this decorated clock, it opened in 1928, a year before the market crashed and Upper Broadway building went into its 30-year freeze.

The gems of Upper Broadway are not hard to spot. The great and ebullient apartment houses vie for the passing eye. This Broadway set its cap for the new New York bourgeoisie of the early 1900's, a new rich who saw life's final reward in a West Side residence whose architecture mimicked the homes of royalty and emphasized that here lived people who must be contended with. Many, but by no means all, were Jews who had worked themselves up from New York's poorer precincts and provided the material from which Herman Wouk wove his novel about a rich West Side girl, Marjorie Morningstar. One of the earliest to set the Broadway and Upper West Side tone was the Ansonia Hotel, at 73d Street. The fairy-tale turrets and towers of this 16-story, white-faced luxury establishment have commanded attention along Broadway since 1904, when it opened, looking like a French Riviera resort hotel but in an all-masonry fireproof version. It is honored not only for its effusive profile, but also for its soundproof partitions, installed by William Earl Dodge Stokes, a leading West Side developer.

The Ansonia may have lured more famous figures to hang their hats on the West Side than any other attraction in the area. Singers and show people, perhaps drawn to its soundproofing, were especially prominent on the guest roster. Among artists in residence were Florenz Ziegfeld, Giovanni Martinelli, Mischa Elman and the writer Theodore Dreiser. Not to mention the consummate diamond artist, Babe Ruth.

There was an air of greatness at hand in the early 1900's West Side. William Waldorf Astor invested in construction and built the Astor Apartments, luxury living at 75th Street. There are many architectural dreams patterning the Broadway skyline here, but if there is any linking motif, it may be the squat stolidity, the sturdy bodies to which endless variations of ornamentation have been applied. It is a formula that sums up what is meant when one says that a person with respectable funds is ''comfortable.''

The Broadway sidewalk showcases the democratic classlessness of the West Side as no Upper East Side street can. The merchants sell T-shirts and chic lingerie, dream books and intellectually challenging paperbacks. In addition to the usual mainline newspapers, the newsstands vend periodicals aimed at the aging German refugees who were once a significant group on the West Side, at the Dominicans, at the Haitians, and at all the other ethnics, incoming and outgoing. Small-D Democratic

Musicians and writers are in great number here, and so are newcomers to the city, who find rooms in the brownstones that are the Off-Broadway hallmark here. The Chinese, Cuban-Chinese, Middle Eastern (kosher and other) and Indian restaurants and the inevitable coffeeshops draw West Siders to Broadway. One of the few Off-Broadway theaters on Broadway is the Promenade and the Second Stage, at 76th Street, installed in the renovated 1930's Manhattan Towers Hotel, in premises that had once been a hall for churchgoers.

The 12-story block-square Apthorp Apartments, between 78th and 79th Streets, exemplify the curious West Side blend, its limestone Renaissance Broadway facade studded with shops, as a castle wall in the Middle Ages accommodated merchants. Built for the Astor Estates, it shelters an inside courtyard behind adorned gates that proclaim a proclivity for privacy even as the Apthorp has access to busy Broadway.

Broadway's bewildering array of styles of life, with its gourmets, horseplayers, art dilettantes and professionals, Reform Democrats and shoppers, makes as frequent reference to the godly, it seems, as it does to the ungodly. Many of the churches that had choice Broadway corners on the West Side are gone, but those that do remain are ornamentally essential to the street. The First Baptist Church, at 79th Street, is an eye-catching Romanesque Revival affair, with two intriguingly disparate towers; one a long, tapering, handsomely columned pencil and the other a short, round piece that might better be set in a rich garden. Alimentary Angles

The shrine of the stomach on Broadway is Zabar's, the store that has become synonymous with specialty foods in New York. Louis and Lillian Zabar brought their kosher deli from Brooklyn to 80th Street nearly 50 years ago. But it was not until the 1960's that their sons and an employee, Murray Klein, made this local establishment go network with their talent for detecting a fashionable market for lox, pickled herring, breads and cheeses that were merely the entering wedges for this merchandising empire. Zabar's now occupies the entire peculiarly suburban-type pretend-Tudor building in which it burgeoned.

Among other West Side purveyors is Endicott Meats, at 81st Street, whose sign puns on brains and obviously is inspired by the chewy chic of the Zabar influence.

The core that binds the sides of Broadway together is the center strip, a not particularly attractive length of ''park,'' bounded at each block by benches where the weary or the convivial congregate to talk or watch the crossers at each turn of the traffic light. Yet this nondescript feature gives Broadway its breadth and also affords a vantage point from which to absorb the Broadway skyline as one can rarely do in the narrow lower reaches of the street. Housing of All Eras

At 86th Street there is a rare view of the mating of new and old in Broadway habitats. First, the Belnord apartments - the handiwork of H. Hobart Weekes - which fronts on Broadway at 86th Street, was described in this way, shortly after it opened in 1908: ''It contains 176 apartments, with from seven to 11 rooms each, and a corresponding number of bathrooms. It is said to be the largest apartment house in the world and contains a population of upwards of a thousand.''

Just upstreet is the twin-towered Montana at 87th Street, a new presence with 155 apartments for rent. In its courtyard you can see Bruno Lucchesi's bronze ''Park Bench,'' a work that mirrors the flesh-and-blood groupings on mid-Broadway benches. The benches are especially sought by Broadway's elderly who are unable to walk as far as Central Park or Riverside Drive. For them, even as it is, laced with fumes from buses, trucks and cars, it is their fresh air and great outdoors.

Sometimes, of course, there is the walk-and-schmooze of Broadway, the amble of the elderly, often well-dressed Jewish strollers, perhaps on a Sabbath just out of synagogue. There is always something to catch the wandering eye, whether the stolid massiveness of the 80-year-old Advent Lutheran Church, or the perpetual curbside attractions, such as a book sale at 94th Street, near Symphony Space. The Space was originally a movie house, one of many that dotted upper Broadway, but a survivor that has made itself into a hall for live high-caliber concerts, readings and other performances. Carriages and Snuff

Art often enough follows life, but in New York, life can also follow art. Take the case of Pomander Walk, as unlikely an enclave as can be found on the West Side. Pomander Walk is a double row of enticing town houses that has somehow insinuated itself into the block between 94th and 95th Streets, just west of Broadway. The walk and its houses evoke an earlier New York of snuffboxes and carriage trade.

Actually, it was built in 1922. Its architects drew from the design of the stage sets of the American production of a popular British 1911 stage play, ''Pomander Walk.'' The walk in the play represented a mews in a London suburb, and this is what caught the imagination of those whose idea of the good West Side life was not tethered to an apartment lease.

To get to Pomander Walk, you will probably pass what used to be the Thalia theater just off of Broadway at 95th Street. There is not much to see now, just a small nondescript theater front. But the Thalia is a monument, as much as any that has been sculptured, for West Side film enthusiasts. The most potent time machine on the West Side, it was where one snuggled into a seat and relished the best of classic film, with an occasional foray into the contemporary. Across its screens marched ''Aleksandr Nevsky,'' ''The Big Parade,'' ''The Gold Rush'' and others of similar longevity.

Of the three West Side Broadway theaters that more or less concentrated on vintage films, none are still at it. The Regency, at 67th Street, which had a distinguished career with its historic film series, has been converted for more routine first-run features, and the Metro, in its Art Deco home near 100th Street, has also returned to projecting a more general schedule. The changes, dictated by radical increases in costs and by competition from videotapes, follow in the Broadway tradition that nothing is forever, that the street will at one time or another tear itself down to clear the way for something new. Broadway Boundless

Movies have always been important on Broadway, from the palaces of Times Square to the neighborhood houses farther north. Along the West Side, to 110th Street, there were nearly a dozen theaters in business until television came along in the 1950's. Some have been converted into supermarkets, others have been razed. The Beacon, at 74th Street, a large and lavish 60-year-old house that no longer shows films, has recently been a platform for concerts. Its interior has now been named a landmark and so will remain in show business rather than being diverted to a new career.

The foreign films of yesteryear ran heavily to French. Nowadays Spanish is a common Upper Broadway dialect, but the constant changes, reflecting ebbing and cresting tides of ethnicity and economic class, are nowhere better reflected than in the case of the Edison, at 103d Street. The Edison originally ran films in English, then converted to Spanish and now is back unreeling in English under the name Columbia Cinema.

Here in the low 100's, Broadway is reaching the end of its run on the Upper West Side, the region that parallels Central Park. The shopping bag lady, camped in the center strip of the street, underlines the extremes among the people along its way. There is opulence and poverty. Some of the side streets have been immaculately gentrified, while others, with the same sort of brownstones or tenements, are still home to those one step away from being homeless.

No other area of New York has precisely the same sort of diversity that the West Side boasts. In other sections there is a predominant group or coloration. But the West Side and the Broadway that is its main artery present a picture that cannot be duplicated elsewhere. You could be taken there blindfolded and turned loose on 96th Street. By just looking at the people, without seeing a building, you would know where you were. It is one of the most exciting neighborhoods in New York.