The Library of Congress calls this “Madison Square as seen from the Flatiron Building” but, like my photo yesterday, the shot contains more than that. The picture was taken in 1905, when the Flatiron was two years old and still a marvel. (It was not, as some people seem to think, the tallest building in the city. It never was. But its shape and location visually isolate it and therefore it seems very tall, to this day.)
The park looks nice, although a little odd without its iron fence. The tower and not-quite-onion-domes of Madison Square Garden dominate the right side of the picture; the center, past the park, is a group of new loft buildings. The building to the right of MSG, partially blocking the lower part of the tower, is the Madison Square Apartments, and to its right the ornate marble facades and statuary of the New York State Appellate Division courthouse are just visible over the treetops. I suspect the line of carriages along the west edge of the park are a bunch of hansom cabs, waiting for fares. We’re looking north, right up Fifth Avenue on the left, and that’s where you can see just how much things have changed since 1905.
Church spires are no longer the tallest buildings on Fifth, but they’re among the tallest, and easily identifiable. For example, the first big spire on the left, right next to the flag, is the Marble Collegiate Church at 29th Street. The tall, dark building just past the church is the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The only really big building seen on Fifth is the 23-story Gotham Hotel, way off in the distance, visible as the last building on the right of the buildings to the left of the street. (Beyond that we can just barely make out the beginning of Central Park, over a mile and half away.) In 1905, there were no office skyscrapers on Fifth Avenue: the future site of Rockefeller Center, for example, was a bunch of nondescript low-rise buildings; the Empire State Building would be constructed on the Waldorf-Astoria site. There were some mid-rise apartment houses and hotels, but they were low enough that the spires still competed on the skyline. This was going to change very soon, as Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to Central Park lost most of its private residences to more hotels and offices.
