Madison Square

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 flung myself wearily down on a bench in Madison Square, facing the slowly spurting fountain that had so often seemed to me a sort of visible pulse of the sleeping city. I sat peering idly up at the Flatiron Building, where like an eternal plowshare it threw its eternal cross furrows of Fifth Avenue and Broadway along the city's tangled stubble of steel and stone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We were now approaching Madison Square, and I looked around with interest at the lively scene; at the big buildings; the people hurrying about in every direction; the tinkling tram-cars on all sides; the large, lumbering "four-wheelers" jolting over the uneven pavements ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The men and women, who come together in this night lodging of a Russian city, are of the emancipated kind that one sees on the benches in Madison Square. They are recruited from the casual worker and the non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the criminals and the broken and the déclassé. On the first evening when one hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement, one realizes that their anarchism is bitter. ”

“ The Madison Square Theater was also an important factor in New York dramatic life and began to rival the prestige of the Wallack, Palmer, and Daly institutions. Its fame, due to the record-breaking "Hazel Kirke" success, became nation-wide.
Now began an activity under its auspices that established a whole new era in the conduct of the theater. It was the dawn of a "big business" development that sent the Madison Square successes throughout the country, and Charles Frohman was one of its sponsors.
Gustave Frohman had been engaged as director of the traveling companies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Arsenal in Madison Square
In 1797 was built, where the burying-ground had been, an arsenal which extended from Twenty-fourth Street and over the site of the Worth Monument.
In the City Plan, completed in 1811, provision was made for a parade-ground to extend from Twenty-third to Thirty-fourth Streets, and Seventh to Third Avenue. The Commissioners decided that such a space was needed for military exercises, and where, in case of necessity, there [Pg 182] could be assembled a force to defend the city. ”

“ 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." ”