26
 

FIFTH    AVENUE
 

Why the

Flatiron

Building

has an Apex
 

Madison

Square,

formerly the

Parade

Ground
 

From an old print, Charles Magnus, publisher.                                  Collection of J. Clarence Davies.

MADISON SQUARE IN THE EARLY GO's.

that if he could borrow a pistol he would turn back the rioters. He
met them at the corner of 25th Street and succeeded in diverting them
up Broadway.    At 27th Street they burned the draft offices."

Emperor Dom Pedro, of Brazil, and the Empress, stayed at the
hotel in 1876. Presidents Lincoln and Grant, senators, congressmen,
governors, judges, generals, admirals, ambassadors, actors and
actresses stopped at the Fifth Avenue. Here for years lived General
W. T. Sherman, William J. Florence, the actor, and ex-Senator
Thomas C. Piatt, the Republican boss. Senator Piatt's "Amen
Corner," where weekly political conferences were held in a corner
of the corridor, made and unmade presidents, governors, senators,
and congressmen, as well as lesser political officials. The old hostelry
was razed in 1908 to make room for the present Fifth Avenue Building,
occupied by stores and offices, and the Aldine Club, an organization
of advertising men, publishers, authors and artists.

When Fifth Avenue was carried through to 23rd Street, where it
intersects Broadway there was formed a triangular plot with a base
of eighty-five feet on 22nd Street and an apex at 23rd Street. On
the 22nd Street side of the plot formerly stood the St. Germaine
Hotel. The Fuller Building, popularly called the Flatiron Building,
now occupies the entire triangle.

As originally laid down on the Commissioners' Map of 1811, the
Parade Ground, extending from 23rd to 34th Streets, and bounded
on the east by the Eastern Post-Road and on the west by the
Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway), was largely common land be¬
longing to the City. Fifth Avenue, as at first planned, did not bisect
the Parade  Ground but was continued northward  at 34th  Street.