Madison Square ca. 1900

The Seven-Acre Madison Square, bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenues, Broadway, 23rd and 26th Streets, opened on May 10, 1847. Having served as a paupers' burying ground and a military parade ground before its nineteenth-century metamorphosis into a gracious park, the tract became the object of extensive improvements. Between 1847 and 1851, the Common Council voted funds to supply Madison Square with new grading and lawn seeding, and gas-fired street lamps. In 1857 a granite monument honoring General William Jenkins Worth, by Henry Kirke Brown 91819-1886), was installed on a small plot on Fifth Avenue opposite Madison Square. In 1876 two bronze statues are dedicated; one, the work of Augustus St. Gardens (1818-1907), honoring Admiral David G. Farragut, and another, by Randolph Rogers (1825-1892), in memory of William H. Seward. In 1867 a fountain spraying water from the Croton Aqueduct system was moved from City Hall Park to Madison Square. The handsome area rapidly became a stylish locale for the homes of wealthy New Yorkers. As with most fashionable New York neighborhoods, the infiltration of commerce into Madison Square forced its residents to seek ever-more-northerly residential outposts. By the 1890s a multitude of shops along the side streets and Sixth Avenue encroached on the elegant homes around the square. Construction of the Metropolitan Life Building in 1890-1893 and Stanford White's Madison Square Garden in 1890 (the "Garden" is the twin-turreted white building visible above the trees at the extreme right of the square) gave the square an increasingly commercial aspect.