Madison Square Garden

“ 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 ”

“ Black masses were pouring toward the subways. Life! New York was the epitome of life. He enjoyed forcing his way through those moving masses, but it interested him even more to feel above, aloof, as he did this evening. Those tides swept on as unconscious of the watchers so high above them as of the soaring beauty of the Metropolitan Tower. Ground hogs, most of them, but part of the ever changing, ever fascinating, metropolitan pageant.
The arcade of Madison Square Garden was already packed with men and he knew that a triple line reached down Twenty-sixth Street to Fourth Avenue. ”

“ Two miles north, at Union Square and Broadway, is the center of the publishing business. A half mile farther, at Broadway and 23d, the famous "flat-iron" building and the tower of Madison Square Garden dominate the region of hotels and theaters. This business section is about 21⁄2 miles long by one wide. The entire harbor frontage of Manhattan, from West 70th Street on the Hudson to East 40th Street on East River, is lined with docks and slips, backed by great warehouses of exporting companies.
“The City,” where money is made, could expand only in two directions — northward or skyward. ”

“ A system based on similar principles is in actual use at the Madison Square Garden, in New York, where part of the roof consists of sliding skylights which in summer time can be made to open or close during the performance. ”

“ All round the other side of the broad pathway are the rows of benches and private boxes where are seated the great mass of the spectators who do not care to stand. The only objection to Gilmore's, now Madison Square Garden, as a place for pedestrian contests, is the fact that the building is cheaply constructed, with a large number of wooden pillars which interrupt the view of portions of the track ”

“ The papers delivered to the top floor of the apartment house—the midtown-Manhattan hideout of Gov Allison, alias Mr. Avery, and his small band of anti-Monolithian guerrillas—were full of ads:
"Giant Rally at Madison Square Garden Tomorrow Night! Come One, Come All! Admission Free! Entertainment! Music! Souvenirs! Master of Ceremonies: Spookie Masters, Star of Stage, Screen and Television! Sponsored by the Monolithian-American Friendship Society." ”

“ Three fine squares alone break the monotony of all these parallelograms of streets: Washington Square, Union Square, and Madison Square.
On the north, Central Park, with its fine avenues, its hillocks, its valleys, its lakes, and its magnificent terrace over the Hudson, is a very lovely pleasure ground. It is the only place where one can see trees, turf, and flowers. New York does not possess a single garden, public or private, if one excepts the three squares I named just now.
That which strikes the visitor to New York is not the city itself, but the feverish activity that reigns there. ”

“ Morris said. "Take, for [Pg 209] instance, these here foreign-born Reds which they held a meeting in Madison Square Garden the other evening, and if they said in any other country about the government what they said in Madison Square Garden, y'understand, the owner of Madison Square Garden would of pocketed thousands of dollars for the moving-picture rights of the bayoneting alone. But we don't do business that way. There ain't no satisfaction in bayoneting a lot of people for being fresh and not knowing how to behave. ”

“ A truly edifying sight is that of the noisy, dirty, blaspheming crowd collected on a Sunday evening outside Madison Square Gardens, New York, on the eve of a "six days' go-as-you-please walking match." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Stretches of the Avenue—Fourteenth to Madison Square—From Brevoort to Spingler—The Story of Sir Peter Warren—The First City Hospital—The Paternoster Row of New-York—Former Homes and Birthplaces—Lower Fifth Avenue Residents in the Fifties—Blocks of Departed Glories—The Centre of the Universe—Madison Square in Colonial Days—Franconi's Hippodrome—The Opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel—A Thanksgiving Day of the Nineties—Monuments of the Square—The Garden, the Presbyterian Church, and the Metropolitan Tower—The Face of the Clock. ”

“ After this, scarcely a break in the line of dazzling shops, until we reach the vicinity of Union Square, a pretty oval park, with a noble fountain in the midst, and lofty and handsome houses all round, situated on perhaps the highest ground on this part of the island. Half a mile beyond is Madison Square, a green expanse, about which wealthy citizens are now building elegant residences of brown freestone, with some attempt at architectural display. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Parenthetically, I may remark that this city is, if anything, rather worse than London in the way of placards that scar the face of it. The goblin-like advertisements that spit soap and other things at unoffending eyes at night in Trafalgar Square are bad enough, but the advertisements in New York are worse still. There is a fine square here called Madison, in the centre of which trees rise from fountain-watered grass, and statued figures of people who were men in their day and did things, palatial buildings, dignifying commerce, form the square. ”

“ Northward from Madison Square the great street stretches up the aristocratic grade of Murray Hill, with its rows of stately buildings. Parallel and a short distance eastward is Madison Avenue, also a street of fashionable residence, and second only to Fifth Avenue in grandeur. At Twenty-ninth Street is the plain and substantial granite Dutch Reformed Church, and to the eastward is an odd-looking little church that has attained a wide reputation. ”

“ This Square is the great centre of elaborate civic and military displays, and has, with its surroundings and the light stone of the adjacent buildings, an air that is decidedly Parisian, it occupying much the same position for New York as the Place de la Concorde in Paris, or Trafalgar Square in London. In Madison Square are statues of Admiral Farragut (the finest statue in New York) , William H. Seward, President Arthur and Roscoe Conkling. At the northwest corner of the Square was for many years Delmonico's famous restaurant, since moved farther up town. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A little wisp of white steam may suggest humanity, but not these bleak cliffs themselves. At night, however, they become human. They look out on the black moving river with marigold eyes. And Madison Square at nightfall has the same, or even a more ætherial, radiance. From the hurried streets the walls of light seem like a deluge of fairy splendor. This is always a gay transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those streets between Union and Madison Squares are, for the most part, given over to boarding-houses and lodging-houses of dull respectability, and although they are not much traversed, they lie in lines that anyone might follow who would pass from Murray Hill to—say, for a fine old-fashioned quarter, Stuyvesant Square. ”

“ They were dazed, fascinated by the splendor of that sunset over a world devoid of human life, for the moment giving up all efforts to judge or understand.
Stern and his mate peered closer, down at the interwoven jungles of Union Square, the leafy frond-masses that marked the one-time course of Twenty-Third Street, the forest in Madison Square, and the truncated column of the tower where no longer Diana turned her huntress bow to every varying breeze. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I've money and beauty and college-bred brains;
Though my 'scutcheon's not spotless, who'll mind a few stains?
To caper I wish in the chorus of style,
And wed an aristocrat after a while
So please tell me truly, and please tell me fair,
Just how many miles it's from Madison Square.
It's here, it's there,
Is Vanity Fair.
It's not like a labyrinth, not like a lair.
It's North and it's South, and it's East and it's West;
You can see it, oh, anywhere, quite at its best.
Dame Fashion is queen, Ready Money is king,
You can join it, provided you don't know a thing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now this last lap of the walk—from green Madison Square and the new Martin's up the sparkling avenue to the broad, bright Plaza at the Park entrance, where the brightly polished hotels look down at the driving, with their awnings flapping and flags out straight—makes the most popular part of all the walk.
This is the land of liveried servants and jangling harness, far away, or pretending to be, from work and worry; this is where enjoyment is sought and vanity let loose—and that, with the accompanying glitter and glamour, is always more interesting to the great bulk of humanity. ”