Madison Square District

Area: 18th St. on the south to 27th St. on the north; from 6th Ave. east to 4th
Ave. Map on page 193.

The "Flatiron" Building, whose very name has to be explained to a
younger generation, is the only tangible evidence that there ever was a
Madison Square—a glamorous Madison Square. Here Ward McAllister's
"Four Hundred" dined and danced at Delmonico's, and the old aristoc-
racy, including the Roosevelts, lived in brownstone mansions following
a pattern of life preserved only in the pages of novels about "little old
New York."

Here, too, were some of Stanford White's most beautiful buildings: the
Madison Square Presbyterian Church, with its pillared portico, columns of
green granite, and Pantheon-like dome; old Madison Square Garden,
with its copy of the Giralda tower of Seville surmounted by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens' statue of the glorious Diana.

On the site of the old Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street,
rises the New York Life Insurance Building. Two blocks south, on the
east side of the park, is the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building. The
paths that crisscross the park seem to have been expressly laid out for
the convenience of the thousands of office workers hurrying from subways
and busses to these great skyscrapers. Lesser buildings flank the Broadway
side. Factories and sales rooms of the toy, novelty, silk, woolen, and men's
clothing industries and headquarters of benevolent and welfare organiza-
tions are scrambled throughout the Madison Square district; on Fourth
Avenue, a block east of the park, many of the nation's well-known pub-
lishers have their offices.

In the acute-angled triangle made by the scissors-like intersection of
Broadway and Fifth Avenue, at Twenty-third Street, is the old twenty-
one-story Flatiron Building, completed in 1902 from plans by D. H.
Burnham and Company. Its exterior walls as well as floors are supported
at each story by the steel frame. This was a logical advance over the struc-
tural system used in the World Building on Park Row. Previously, the area
of the base and the thickness of the exterior walls were the main technical
factors in determining the height of a building; the development of the
new principle made possible greater heights.

It was christened the Fuller Building, but because of its shape became
known as the "Flatiron." Pictured on postcards, stamped on souvenirs, its
image was familiar to American minds, young and old. Standing on what