It was first heard on film in the 1929 short Makers Of Melody, a tribute to Rodgers and Hart sung by Ruth Tester and Allan Gould. Early hits in 1925 were by Ben Selvin and Paul Whiteman. Since its debut, it has regularly appeared in popular culture. In later stanzas, other places they will go to are likewise free – Central Park, "the Bronx Zoo", Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and to view the much-criticized statue of " Civic Virtue". In the fourth stanza, it is revealed that the only rural retreat they can afford to go to is " Yonkers", and the only restaurant they can afford is to "starve together in Childs'" – a restaurant chain serving inexpensive meals, popular with middle- and working-class people. In the third stanza, they plan to go to Greenwich Village, to watch "Modern men itch to be free". In the second stanza, they go for a walk down Delancey Street, which was in the 1920s a boisterous commercial strip, part of the working-class Lower East Side. In the first stanza, the couple is obviously too poor to afford a honeymoon to the popular summertime destinations of " Niag'ra" or " other places", so they claim to be happy to "save our fares". A particular Hart delight is the use of New York dialect to rhyme "spoil" with "boy and goil". The joke is that these "delights" are really some of the worst, or cheapest, sights that New York has to offer for example, the stifling, humid stench of the subway in summertime is described as "balmy breezes", while the noisy, grating pushcarts on Mott Street are "gently gliding by". The song describes, in several choruses, the simple delights of Manhattan for a young couple in love. Within a year they had three shows on Broadway simultaneously. It ran for 211 performances with both getting $50 a week in royalties and Rodgers an additional $83 a week for conducting. When these performances were all standing–room only, Rodgers convinced the Guild to close its current production and replace it with Garrick Gaieties. They convinced the Guild to present matinees during the next week, before the evening performances of the Guild's current production. Rodgers and Hart knew they had a hit, but there was only one more scheduled performance. They sang two encores, using all the lyrics they had. Halfway through the matinee's second act, Holloway and Cochran performed Manhattan in front of a plain curtain. Rodgers also conducted the eleven member orchestra. Given the Theater Guild’s reputation, they accepted. Called Garrick Gaieties, it was to raise money for curtains for the Theater Guild's new theater. Rodgers was so discouraged he briefly considered going into a business when they got an offer from the prestigious Theater Guild to contribute all the songs for a two–performance benefit musical review on Sunday, May 17, 1925. They continued writing but were only able to donate songs to a long list of amateur or benefit shows. (Inserting new songs into running musicals was a common practice at that period.) On August 26, 1919, he inserted it into his current musical, A Lonely Romeo, at the Casino Theater. In 1925, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had been song-writing partners for six years but only sold one song to be put in a Broadway show, "Any Old Place with You," that was bought by former vaudeville performer, now a producer, Lew Fields. It was introduced by Sterling Holloway (later the voice of the animated Winnie the Pooh) and June Cochran. The music was written by Richard Rodgers and the lyrics by Lorenz Hart for the 1925 revue Garrick Gaieties. It is often known as "We'll Have Manhattan" based on the opening line.
It has been performed by the Supremes, Lee Wiley, Oscar Peterson, Blossom Dearie, Tony Martin, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme, among many others. " Manhattan" is a popular song and part of the Great American Songbook.
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