Madison Square Park looms large in the history of New York City. Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz immortalized the Park and environs at the turn of the century in their work. Steichen’s photographic views of the Flatiron Building and the Park are Iconic of the city. This time in the city’s history was a moment personified by the lives of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, a mythic American Romance that is synonymous with a transformative point in American Art. Truly a time of great hope and aspiration, when technology and design were poised to break new ground and propel the nation into the modern era.
Many years ago, I lived in an apartment overlooking Madison Square. It was in the back of a building on 22nd St on a high floor with exposure to the north and west. The view was the best thing about the place. It was panoramic. With the Metropolitan Clock Tower virtually in the living room and the Empire State Building changing colors for every holiday and city event, I was always aware of the time and celebrations, citywide. Many a weekend morning, I would wake up to the milling sound of a crowd to find one event or another happening below in the Park. A seasonal gathering, an ethnic or national celebration, once in rare while a political demonstration, the Park was an epicenter of current events, and I was ensconced in the front row. When out of town, I would quickly come to miss that larger rhythm. I came to recognize these happenings as an essential part of being in the city and even as a non-participant, an essential part of my own identity as a New Yorker.
From my apartment, I could see Madison Square Park as a complete object spread out to the north; a mass of green trees amidst the blocks of buildings bounded by Fifth and Madison, 23rd to 26th Streets. To the West, Broadway crossed Fifth Avenue worming its way upward to Herald Square and beyond. From my perspective, the Worth Monument erected in 1957 over the tomb of General Williams Jenkins Worth to commemorate the Seminole and Mexican Wars stood as a lonely sentinel from times past to that passage. Madison Avenue, which originates right at 23rd St., shot straight uptown like an arrow, past the location on 26th where Harry Thaw fatally wounded Sanford White at the fabled Madison Square Garden. The spectacle of a trial that followed the shooting in 1906 was labeled the “Trial of the Century”, a first in tabloid fodder.
At Fifth Avenue, which forms the western edge of the park where brownstones long gone would have proudly stood – such as the birthplace and childhood homes of Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Wharton, a testament to its time as a vibrant residential neighborhood of the 1870’s. The Avenue continued south until it got to Broadway, cutting straight through leaving the Flatiron Building in its wake. The Flatiron Building screened most of the view from my bedroom windows and served like a billowing curtain to the western light. It was a wonderful still life to have outside my window and a living historical marker to all that came before.
Looking down from my window at such a defined urban form, it was hard to imagine, yet important to remember, that 23rd Street was for a time the northern edge of the city and a point of transition in and out of the city fabric.
At the time when I lived nearby in the early to mid 80’s, Madison Square Park was again a place in transition. SRO’s were still an ongoing operation just north of the Park in and around Madison Avenue. Prostitutes wandered the northern edge at night along 26th Street often taunted by young boys, despite their viscous discouragement. It could be unsafe at times, and one had to be cautious where and how one moved around at night. Crack was not as wide spread, as it would be in later years when the area was so littered with glass vials that they would break under your feet. The Park had a despondent character, and it felt like many other parts of the City at that time that robust times had passed – leaving behind a sense of abandonment and purposeless. All this was soon to change.
Certainly by the time of my arrival, a generational shift was taking place; living in a converted manufacturing building was testament to a new life that was starting again in the neighborhood. ‘Live Bait’, a local bar, located on 23rd Street just east of Fifth Avenue was one of the first new places that came into the neighborhood. It was an instant magnet for a younger crowd. Clubs sprung up throughout the district since – being predominating empty at night – it was ideal for late night partying. Noise pollution was only later to be an issue. ‘MK’s’ was a favorite nightspot located on the West side of the Park along Fifth Avenue. It was a distinctive five story commercial building with a large open banking floor. The club occupied the entire building and branded itself ‘Party Central’. Many years later when the momentum of the neighborhood had swung even further, Pentagram, a known design and branding firm, took the building over and repackaged it, clearly a sign of the growing respectability of the area. In my tenure in the apartment overlooking the Park, the district had moved from an underutilized and dilapidated neighborhood to one that was vital and diversified with an evidence of growth and prosperity that reflected the condition in the City as a whole.
The history of events and people that defines Madison Square is, in itself, an essential character of New York: self determined reinvention. From my own experience, the district transformed itself seemingly overnight from a burnout fringe to a vibrant center of activity. As I look back into its history, I see this pattern repeated over and over again.
It is not without some excitement that I discovered William Eno’s father; Amos Eno was a prominent landowner in Madison Square. He developed the Fifth Avenue Hotel in 1859 that was considered to be a risky venture at the time along with various theaters that foresaw a more developed and vital center. In fact, it is Amos Eno’s real estate investments including property around Columbus Circle that facilitated a path for his son, William, to the design of Columbus Circle and later into a life of traffic safety.
Looking at views of the Flatiron Building soon after it was completed in 1902, there is the startling realization that building design possessed more technical expertise than the cars on the street. It is the level of sophistication in Burnham’s building design, a culmination of skill and expertise that the automobile didn’t yet possess. When compared today, automobile design has propelled itself well beyond that of contemporary building design. It continues to be resilient and vital, a symbol of social relevance and validation that technical ability avidly supports. While buildings have long made use of computer aided controls, it is the introduction of the computer into the car that draws excitement. In this comparison, buildings have lost their seriousness and validity as social and cultural markers. Even now the car is being beaten back as a viable social symbol on issues of global warming and sustainability. The iPod as representative of the digital age has become the defining instrument of our times.
While no one would necessarily take note of a connection, there is a recent DOT policy along Broadway to temporarily narrow the traffic and take over one to two lanes for pedestrians that has started to change people’s patterns of use and behavior. A recognition of the importance of usable Public space, It is in step with the changing times and redefines the street, its tempo and the ambiance that is surprisingly new and vibrant. Public Space is being reinvented. Slowing down traffic twenty years ago would have been unthinkable. Today, it has traction, and while it is not design, it sets the stage in the very near future for a serious reevaluation of the design of these public spaces on a more permanent basis.
