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Six to Celebrate: Madison Square North

Today’s Madison Square North neighborhood reflects successive waves of development, the earliest dating to the year Madison Square Park was created—1847. Until very recently, the neighborhood comprised almost exclusively buildings that pre-date 1930. From the park’s opening through the 1920s, Madison Square North evolved from being a fashionable residential enclave to an entertainment district of hotels, clubs, restaurants and theaters, to a commercial hub of offices and mercantile loft buildings. Examples of each are still prominent today, often in startling juxtaposition. The 19th century saw a northward development trend, as new residential neighborhoods were established in response to growing commerce to the south. This pattern repeated itself numerous times up the length of Manhattan. From roughly 1850 to 1865, Madison Square North was fashionable with the city’s elite. Such boldface families as the Stokes, Livingstons, Vanderbilts, and Stewarts (of A.T. Stewart department store fame) were residents. Rowhouse construction, largely built in the popular Italianate style, began first along Broadway and spread to the side streets. Extant rowhouses from this period include two on West 24th Street and four on West 29th Street.

After the Civil War, the neighborhood became host to a number of theaters, restaurants, men’s clubs and hotels. The trailblazer in the latter category was the Fifth Avenue Hotel, completed in 1858 on the northwest corner of 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue. The hotel was a social, cultural and political hub until its closure in 1908, at which point it was replaced by the commercial structure at 200 Fifth Avenue. Many hotels also functioned as “bachelor flats” or “apartment hotels” for extended stays. One of the city’s first apartment houses, constructed in 1872 after designs by the noted New York architect George B. Post, still stands at 251 Fifth Avenue. The prevalence of entertainment and commercial ventures on Broadway made it a bustling night-life district. Thus, beginning in the 1890s, Broadway from about 13th to 45th Street became one of the first thoroughfares to be illuminated by electric street lamps and billboards, leading to its lasting moniker “The Great White Way.”

By the 1890s and early 1900s, industries including photography, architecture, construction and banking planted roots in the area, constructing commercial high-rises designed in styles such as Gothic Revival, Beaux-Arts and Art Deco. Many of these buildings were also constructed for the wholesale garment industry to initially support the Ladies’ Mile shopping district to the south, which, until they moved to Herald Square in the early 1900s, was home to the R. H. Macy & Co. and B. Altman & Co. department stores. The neighborhood’s growth was spurred on by nationwide industrial trends for ready-to-wear clothing, and later, wholesale household décor. This period of prolific development left a lasting impact, as mercantile loft buildings remain the area’s architectural hallmark. In 2001, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Madison Square North Historic District, 96 buildings from roughly 25th to 29th Streets between Sixth and Madison Avenues. Community members and preservationists are advocating for an extension to the district, to encompass roughly 374 buildings from 23rd to 34th Streets and Sixth to Park Avenues. This area includes the surviving buildings of Tin Pan Alley on West 28th Street, where the American popular music publishing industry was headquartered from roughly 1890 to 1910.

ByHistoric Districts Council logoHistoric Districts Council
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Madison Square icon

Madison Square

Madison Square Park (1847; redesigned by Ignatz Pilat and William Grant, 1870) Designated a public space in the first city charter of 1686, the area of Madison Square Park was enlarged and changed hands several times throughout the 18th century for use as farmland. In 1780, the city reacquired 37 of its acres, which it then subdivided. Within the current confines of the park, the city constructed an arsenal in 1807 and designated a 44-block area, from the present day 23rd to 34th Streets and Third to Seventh Avenues, as a military parade ground. (It was later reduced in size.) The arsenal and parade provided a key military post for maneuvers and drills during the War of 1812. In 1814, the parade ground was renamed Madison Square in honor of James Madison, the then President of the United States. After the park’s opening in 1847, magnificent residences and hotels cropped up along the park and the neighborhood became the city’s most elite address. Just west of the park, a small triangular parcel was created between 24th and 25th Streets where Broadway and Fifth Avenue intersect. The lot became an extension of Madison Square Park, and in 1857, a 51-foot granite obelisk designed by James Goodwin Batterson was erected to honor General William Jenkins Worth, for whom Fort Worth, Texas, and Worth Street in Lower Manhattan are named. Statues of several other notable men can be found within the park: William H. Seward (Randolph Rogers, 1876), Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White, 1881), Roscoe Conkling (John Quincey Adams Ward, 1893) and Chester Alan Arthur (George Bissell, 1898). When the city’s first Department of Public Parks was established in 1870, the park was redesigned with formal and picturesque components, including walkways, open lawns and a large circular fountain at the south end. The park retains this general layout today, after a comprehensive restoration of the park was completed in 2001. Immediately outside the park, on the southwest corner of 26th Street and Madison Avenue, once sat one of the city’s most dazzling entertainment venues—Madison Square Garden. The site was initially developed in 1845 as a passenger depot for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York and Harlem Railroad. After the construction of the first Grand Central Depot uptown in 1870, P. T. Barnum leased the space and converted it into his famous “Hippodrome,” the site of his first circus performances beginning in 1873. In 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son William inherited the property and resumed its operation under the name “Madison Square Garden.” Vanderbilt expanded the complex with a grand new structure designed in the Spanish Revival style by McKim, Mead and White (1889- 90). Stanford White, who designed the new Madison Square Garden and had an apartment in its tower, was murdered by millionaire Harry Thaw during a theatrical performance on the building’s roof garden theater on June 25, 1906. White, a society man and famous architect, once had an affair with Thaw’s wife, the actress and showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. Thaw’s murder trial was covered sensationally in the press, and was dubbed the “Trial of the Century.” Due to financial deficits, Madison Square Garden moved uptown (first to 50th Street and Eighth Avenue and then to its present home at 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue), and the building was razed in 1925. In 1928, Cass Gilbert’s New York Life Insurance Building was constructed on the site.
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41 WEST 28 STREET icon

41 WEST 28 STREET

Tin Pan Alley 41-55 West 28th Street From the 1890s to around 1910, this row of structures, which mostly date to the 1850s through the 1870s, was home to influential music publishers and songwriters’ studios. The row is known as the birthplace of the modern music industry, where sheet music was first developed, categorized into genres and marketed as a commodity for mass distribution. Publishers also hired piano players to demo songs for high-profile performers, launching the careers of many American songwriters, such as Scott Joplin, George M. Cohan, and Irving Berlin. Famous tunes originally published here include Albert Von Tilzer’s “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (1908) and one of the first ragtime compositions, Ben Harney’s “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon, But You’ve Done Broke Down” (1896), now a Blues standard. The origin of the name “Tin Pan Alley” is not clear, though many attribute it to the tinny sound of pianos emanating from rehearsal rooms. Tin Pan Alley emerged here because of the nearby theaters (the New Fifth Avenue Theater was right next door) and its location in the Tenderloin District; saloons and vaudeville halls were excellent places for show business networking and testing out new songs. By 1911, however, the industry had moved uptown. Plans to demolish the buildings never came to fruition, in part due to the Great Depression, and the area was spared from urban renewal initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s. With the area’s rise in desirability, the demand for hotel sites has threatened small buildings. In 2013, Tin Pan Alley’s remaining buildings were sold to a developer. In 2019, the buildings were designated NYC Landmarks.
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9 WEST 29 STREET icon

9 WEST 29 STREET

9 West 29th Street (c. 1857; altered: John B. Snook & Sons, 1900-01) 11 West 29th Street (c. 1859; altered: John B. Snook & Sons, 1902) 13-15 West 29th Street (c. 1859) The Italianate rowhouses at numbers 11, 13 and 15 West 29th Street were developed together in the mid-19th century. In 1900, numbers 13 and 15 were joined into one structure. Number 11, which was altered with stores and show windows in 1902, was the first home of the American Geographical Society. Number 9 was originally constructed as a rowhouse, but subsequently functioned as a clubhouse and meeting place for members of the Bar Association. The structure was altered with the present Renaissance Revival style cast-iron façade in 1900 by John B. Snook, an important architect of his day who was responsible for the design of the original 1846 A. T. Stewart Department Store on Broadway and Chambers Street. A prolific builder, Snook was well known for working with cast-iron.
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Church of the Transfiguration icon

Church of the Transfiguration

(Church: 1849; Guildhall, Transept and Tower: 1852; Lych-gate: Frederick C. Withers, 1896; Lady Chapel: 1906; Mortuary Chapel: 1908; Rectory: c. 1849-50) – NYC IL and NR-P Church of the Transfiguration, known since the 1870s as “The Little Church Around the Corner,” is made up of several Gothic Revival style buildings, all of red brick with brownstone trim. The church is accessible through a small lych-gate, one of the site’s most striking features, and a gift from Mrs. Franklin Hughes Delano (great aunt of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) in 1896. The lych-gate, a common feature of English churches, was originally meant to provide a covered place for pallbearers to rest coffins ahead of funeral services (“lych” is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning body or corpse). The church’s main entrance is within the tower, which features Gothic arches and a peaked roof with dormer windows and a cross at its crown. To the west of the tower is the rectory building, a five-story, Gothic Revival structure with a mansard roof and an octagonal extension with a full-height, projecting window bay and a cast-iron balcony. The church is noted for its ties to the theater community, a group once viewed as social outcasts by other religious institutions.
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Madison Belmont Building icon

Madison Belmont Building

Like Madison Square Park, Madison Avenue was named after James Madison, the fourth President of the United States. The Avenue begins at 23rd Street and extends to the Madison Avenue Bridge at 138th Street. When the Manhattan street grid was mandated in 1811, there was no avenue between Fourth (now Park) and Fifth Avenues. Madison Avenue was carved out in the 1840s to address the wide distance between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. This southern section of Madison Avenue is characterized by its fine assortment of large-scale hotels, lofts and office buildings. The Madison Belmont Building at number 181 (Warren & Wetmore, 1924) was constructed for the Cheney Brothers Silk Company, the country’s largest silk mill at the time, when this area was briefly known as the Silk District. Its overall Renaissance Revival style is accented by prominent Art Deco elements, and it was one of the first buildings in the United States to incorporate such motifs. Its elegant iron and bronze framing at the lower three floors and entrances was designed by Edgar Brandt, a pioneer of the Art Deco style in Paris. The building was designated both an Individual and Interior Landmark in 2011.
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22 EAST 29TH STREET icon

22 EAST 29TH STREET

The former Hotel Seville (currently the Carlton Hotel) at number 90 (Harry Allen Jacobs, 1901-03; annex: c. 1905) replaced the former Scottish Rite Hall, and is on the National Register of Historic Places. After 1900, area hotels grew in size to accommodate customers desiring close proximity to Ladies’ Mile and entertainment such as that offered at Madison Square Garden. This elegant Beaux-Arts hotel, whose architect was a prominent proponent of the style in America, was one such large hotel. Its red brick and limestone façades are graced with a rusticated base, alternating bandcourses at the second and third stories, decorative cornices, rounded copper bays from the fourth to the tenth stories and a limestone-clad chamfered corner, all mixed with Modern French ornamentation, such as lion head cartouches. An annex between 28th and 29th Streets was added a few years after its construction.
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