Madison Avenue

“ Long rows of carriages surmounted by sleepy coachmen extend along Madison Avenue and into the neighboring street. The temporary awning from the front door to the curbstone serves only to shield the coming and departing guest from the gaze of heaven, for the moon and stars are shining brightly, as if they also would like to enter. But when the front door opens, which is frequent, it emits a blast of music, taunting and defiant, reminding the outside universe of its plebeian origin. ”

“ The commonness of effect in the street crowds is not absent from Fifth Avenue or from Madison Avenue any more than it is from First Avenue or Tenth Avenue; and the tide of wealth and fashion, that rolls up and down the better avenues in the splendid carriages, makes the shabbiness of the foot-passenger, when he is shabby, as he often is, the more apparent. ”

“ Though I live most of the time in the country, as I love best to do, sometimes I go to the city and find there much that is strange and amusing. I like to watch the inward flow of the human tide in the morning, and the ebb at evening, and sometimes in the slack tide of noon I drift in one of the eddies where the restless life of the city pauses a moment to refresh itself. One of the eddies I like best of all is near the corner of Madison Square, where the flood of Twenty-third Street swirls around the bulkhead of the Metropolitan tower to meet the transverse currents of Madison Avenue. ”

“ When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides and, as some would have us think, all the "nice" people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue, while all the rest go the left, up the Broadway Rialto and the typical part of the Tenderloin.
48 But when Madison Square is reached you have come to one of the Places of New York. It is the picture so many confirmed New Yorkers see when homesick, Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear, bracing October morning, the creamy Garden Tower over the trees, standing out clear-cut against the sky, Diana on top glistening in the sun ”

“ The streets are fluttering with beautiful women; light summer frocks are twinkling in the busy frolic air. Oh, to be turned loose at the corner of Broadway and Thirty-second Street at 6:15 o'clock of a June evening, with nothing to do but follow the smile of adventure to the utmost! Thirty-second, we might add, is our favourite street in New York. It saddens us to think that the old boarding house on the corner of Madison Avenue is vanished now and all those quaint and humorous persons dispersed. ”

“ Coaches began to go by, draped with one set of colors or the other, and filled with young men who split the air with explosive cheers, while waving blue pennants with white letters, or yellow pennants with black. The sun shone brightly, and the brisk breeze shivered the bare branches of the trees. It rippled the flags which projected from the vehicles gathering at Madison Square and streaming up the avenue in thick succession—coaches, private carriages, omnibuses, road-wagons of one kind or another. ”

“ Madison Square may be regarded as the social centre of modern New York. Far to the northward Fifth Avenue stretches, with its rows of palatial brownstone residences, and towards the north-northwest Broadway extends for two miles to Central Park, passing many hotels, theatres, and the tall "French flats" that have been devised for residences in the crowded city where the land surface is so scarce. ”

“ There was no red vista that Christmas Eve, for the sky was overcast and lowering, and there was a damp chill in the air, a premonition of approaching snow. It was about the edge of dusk as he skirted Madison Square and saw the electric-lights twinkle out suddenly up and down Fifth Avenue, and in the square here and there.
The young man crossed Broadway, skilfully avoiding a huge express wagon, and springing lightly out of the path of a clanging cable-car. ”

“ Then he suddenly drew up, with a whispered warning.
"You'd better go west, toward Broadway. Then walk north into Fifth Avenue again, toward Brentano's corner. I'll swing up Madison Avenue on the opposite side of him, and walk west on Twenty-sixth Street. Don't speak to me as we pass. But watch him, every moment. And if there's a second man, follow him!"
A moment later I was sauntering westward toward the old Hoffman House corner. As I approached the avenue curb I saw the unperturbed figure in blue stop beside the Farragut Monument on the northwest fringe of Madison Square. ”

“ Of all the monuments that have graced Madison Square that which first comes to mind is one that has gone. Twenty years ago a splendid white arch spanned the Avenue, with one pier close to the sidewalk in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the other touching the edge of the opposite Park. It was in direct line with Washington Arch seventeen blocks away. Under it, on September 30, 1898, passed the victor of Manila Bay, whose name it bore, bowing right and left to the city's riotous welcome. For months it remained there, and then disappeared. Why was the beautiful structure not made permanent? ”

“ There are descendants of the Knickerbockers who cling arrogantly to the corner facing the Washington Arch. Profound is the belief of the pleasure seeker in the lights, signs, theatres, and lobster palaces of Longacre Square. To others nothing counts as the trees and fountains of Madison Square and graceful Diana and the great clock in the Metropolitan Tower count. But in these stirring days of the spring and early summer of 1918, for the throb of the universe climb Murray Hill to a point on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk opposite the stone lions that guard the entrance to the Public Library. ”

“ At Twenty-third street, Broadway runs diagonally across Fifth avenue, touching the southwestern corner of Madison Square—not so very long since the most genteel locality in New York, but now, like Union Square, becoming occupied by hotels and business houses.
Fifth Avenue, the most splendid avenue in America, makes a beginning at Washington Square, a lovely public park embowered in trees, which was once Potters' Field, the pauper burying ground, and where one hundred thousand bodies lie buried. New York University and Dr. Hutton's Church face the square on the east. ”

“ The environment of the Square is a pleasanter environment. When Delmonico's was at the Twenty-sixth Street corner, the hero of one of Brander Matthews's "Vignettes of Manhattan" pointed out of one of its windows and confessed that, failure in life as he was, he would die out of sight of the tower of the Madison Square Garden. A reminiscent sign or two is all that is left of the old Hotel Brunswick, which, among the hostelries of other days, yielded precedence only to the Fifth Avenue and the Brevoort as a factor in fiction. ”

“ Its severe and classical building on a corner of Madison Avenue overlooking the Square, is but the outward presentment of an institution to be a member of which is a duty, but emphatically no great pleasure, to the sons of a New York family of any prominence. ”

“ I spent a week in New York, and boarded very near Madison Square. I was on Twenty-third Street, pretty near to Fifth Avenue, and Broadway streaks across the city right there, so I had a chance to see almost everything; because those who know anything about New York City know that if you see what is on those streets, why, you have seen a good deal. It is Broadway and Fifth Avenue going criss-cross that make Madison Square. There are lots of hotels around there. The park is just magnificent ”

“ Fifth Avenue, from Washington to Madison Square, was, in the opinion of the writer, one of the finest residence streets anywhere. At most hours of the day the people on the sidewalks were comparatively few and there was a very small proportion of business wagons and trucks that used the roadway as compared with the numbers that do so to-day. University Place was a street of nearly the same character, as was also Second Avenue from Seventh Street to Stuyvesant Square. ”

“ AN UPPER WEST SIDE STREET
"Business and pleasure occupy the people as usual!" When I reached my office I stood for a few minutes looking out at the crowded junction of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, where they cross Twenty-third Street. Here were the same hurrying crowds that I had seen there of old. Below me I saw the same policeman guarding the pedestrians across the crowded streets, and the same sleepy cab horses drowsing in the sun along the edge of Madison Square. ”

“ In the days when Otto Kling's shop-windows attracted collectors in search of curios and battered furniture, “The Avenue,” as its denizens always called Fourth Avenue between Madison Square Garden and the tunnel, was a little city in itself.
Almost all the needs of a greater one could be supplied by the stores fronting its sidewalks. If tea, coffee, sugar, and similar stimulating and soothing groceries were wanted, old Bundleton, on the corner above Kling's, in a white apron and paper cuffs, weighed them out. ”

“ Esterbrook being at the station to meet some friends, he counselled me. Carrying Poppea, for the streets were thronged, I went out to Madison Square and so down to Fifth Avenue. Black on every side, hanging from roof to street, black-banded flags, black bands on people's arms, the great clock shrouded in black. There were no public stages on the streets that I could see, so I walked down Fifth Avenue to Seventeenth Street, then eastward to Union Square, and so down to Fourteenth Street. ”

“ Van Rennselaer's fancy, but Franconi's Hippodrome was an historical fact, and the tavern that she remembers was Corporal Thompson's Madison Cottage, where, at the "Sign of the Buck-horn," trotting men gathered. When Fifth Avenue was in its infancy Madison Square still recalled the name of Tieman's, and in the centre there was a House of Refuge for sinful boys. At the Square the old Boston Post Road for a moment touched what was afterwards to be the Avenue before it twisted off in a northeasterly direction. ”

“ No other structure in the city is so many different things to so many different people as the Madison Square Garden. To the old-time New Yorker, who likes to babble reminiscently of the past, the site recalls the railway terminus of the sixties, when the outgoing trains were drawn by horses through the tunnel as far north as the present Grand Central. To one artistically inclined the creamy tower, modelled on that of the Giralda in Seville, suggests the collaboration of St. Gaudens and White, and the surmounting Diana the early work of the former inspired by Houdon's Diana of the Louvre. ”

“ The establishment had all the privacy of isolation 138 and seclusion and was a charming spot. The gardens were very large and spacious, and fragrant with the blossoms from the magnolia groves. The avenue to the house was shaded with orange trees that later would be redolent with perfume and beautiful beyond description. Fruit trees were everywhere. Pomegranate, peach, banana, fig, pear interspersed with rose trees and jasmine whose odors ravished the senses.
The cab swept in an extensive circle round the courtyard to the carriage step before the broad doorway. ”

“ The avenues are all one hundred feet wide, excepting Lexington and Madison, which are seventy-five, and Fourth Avenue, above Thirty-fourth street, which is one hundred and forty feet wide.
The numerical streets are all sixty feet wide, excepting Fourteenth, Twenty-third, Thirty-fourth, Forty-second, and eleven others, north of these, which are one hundred feet wide.
There are twelve fine avenues at parallel distances apart of about eight hundred feet. They begin about First or Fourth street, and run to the end of the island. ”

“ Beyond Madison Square the novelists of earlier generations seldom went. It is to the men of today, above all to those who have been specializing in what may be called the New York "novel à la mode" that we must turn in order to follow farther the trail. ”

“ The project was not a success, and in 1860 the Rutgers Female College, incidentally the first institution for the higher education of young women in the city, moved from its downtown home and occupied the neglected buildings. Then there is the story of the great square opposite, running from Fifth to Sixth Avenues, between Fortieth and Forty-second Streets. The Public Library holds the eastern half of it now and Bryant Park the western. Like Washington Square and Madison Square the land once served as a burial place for the poor and the nameless dead. ”

“ Street, and Washington (30th) Street, all named for Generals of the Revo [Pg 41] lution. Running the other way were Gay, Dunbarton, Beall, West, Stoddert, this, for a long time was known as Back Street. West of High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) the streets became First, Second, Third, etc. Twenty-seventh Street, after being New Street for one block and Mill Street for another, finally was named for President Monroe. Madison had a street named for him too, but it was so far out, about 9th, in the far western corner, that it never amounted to much.
But the street that intrigues me most is Gay. ”

“ New York has some fine streets, such as Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Madison Square, Twenty-third Street, Fourteenth Street, etc. Broadway is the main business street and begins at Bowling Green and runs up to Central Park and thence beyond. It is several miles long, its lower portion from Bowling Green to Fourteenth Street being lined on either side by many sky-scrapers and massive wholesale business establishments, and from Fourteenth Street up, by retail stores. Rents are high on this street and the buildings fine. ”

“ Beyond spreads the city, every ugly outline hidden and lost in a waving sea of greenery rippling and tossing above it. The great avenues run and radiate in all directions. Pennsylvania Avenue stretches straight on between its border of shade trees to its acropolis one mile distant, the great Treasury gleaming in the sun, and the white chimneys of the Executive Mansion peering above the trees; and still on, till it joins the primitive streets of Georgetown. Massachusetts Avenue, broad, straight, 108magnificent, spans the city from end to end unbroken. ”