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MADISON SQUARE Madison Square, discarded
image On November 27, 1935, Abbott stood on an upper floor of the Flatiron Building to photograph the Madison Avenue skyscrapers bordering Madison Square. The giant insurance companies--Metropolitan Life, with its 1909 clock tower at 23rd Street (right), and New York Life (1928), with its massive base and birthday-cake crown at 27th Street (left)--frame the scene. Only a few years earlier this view would have shown two of Stanford White's greatest buildings--Madison Square Garden (1888) and Madison Square Presbyterian Church (1906)--which were replaced in 1919 by the Metropolitan Life annex. Abbot later discarded this image. In 1936, Metropolitan Life was again expanding its annex, and Abbott rephotographed the scene from the ground. Standing at the Madison Square Park entrance and using a short lens, she was able to combine the same office buildings with the park's sculpture, walkways, trees, and passersby. To accommodate the many office workers headed from subways, buses, and trolleys to the insurance companies, the park had been recently renovated. The Randoph Rogers 1876 bronze statue of William Seward--New York governor, U.S. senator, and Abraham Lincoln's secretary of state during the Civil War--injects the nineteenth century into the scene. Today the park's pathways have been reconfigured again; after the completion of the even larger Metropolitan Life annex, the buildings along Madison Avenue have remained largely the same. Return to the Middle East Side |
