building on the southeast corner of Twenty-third Street and Lexington
Avenue, the original site of the college.

The Madison Square Station, New York Post Office, 149 East
Twenty-third Street, opposite the school, is a significant example of an
evolving American style, a new classicism free of dependence on the works
of antiquity. It was built in 1937-after plans by Lorimer Rich.

Union Square District

Area: 14th St. on the south to 18th St. on the north; from 3d Ave. west to 6th
Ave. Map on page 193.

Union Square district belongs to the working people of New York.
It is an amusement center, but its ornate moving-picture theaters, glitter-
ing marquees, and gaily lighted buffets are fewer in number and less per-
suasive than those of Times Square. It is a shopping mart, but few of its
stores have the fine goods and appointments of the Fifth Avenue fashion
center: instead, their bare floors may be filled with racks holding scores
of garments, many models of a kind, and their show windows, in many
cases, are packed with cheap merchandise. The movie houses, likewise,
offer the most for the money—double features and "screeno"; the dining
places are cafeterias and lunchrooms, where large portions of plain food
are dispensed for nickels, dimes, and quarters.

Before these cheap stores, cheap movies, cheap restaurants passes a
ceaselessly moving crowd of men, women, and many children, of all na-
tionalities. Hawkers and pitchmen find this street easy pickings among
customers who can afford the little luxuries of Union Square—pretzels,
sliced cocoanut, gloves, scarves, neckties, and popular song sheets. They
buy magic "roots" which sprout fullblown artificial gladiolas, peonies, or
regal lilies; prophecies from a turbaned seer; risque cartoons; or a dozen
low-quality socks for fifty cents. Many beggars—legless beggars on roller-
skate platforms, footless, handless, or blind beggars; playing the saxo-
phone, the guitar, singing—move slower-paced through the crowd. The
poor, they know, give to the poor. Passers-by stop at the busy newsstands
for political literature, and along the curb newsboys hawk the Daily
Worker and other radical newspapers of every shade. Youths and girls
rattle collection boxes for the benefit of many causes—the Chinese people,
Jewish refugees, political prisoners, or workers on strike.

Touched with a bit of Coney Island, democratic, with a robust and lo-
quacious vitality, Union Square derives its peculiar identity from its in-