Broadway reaches Madison Square at Twenty-third Street, another wide
highway crossing the city, and also intersects Fifth Avenue, which is
the western side of the Square. This junction has a park of about six
acres, surrounded by large hotels and noted buildings, and alongside
the triangular intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue is a handsome
granite monument to General Worth, a hero of the War with Mexico. The
plateau on which it stands is usually availed of as the site for the
official reviewing stage for processions. This Square is the great
centre of elaborate civic and military displays, and has, with its
surroundings and the light stone of the adjacent buildings, an air
that is decidedly Parisian, it occupying much the same position for
New York as the Place de la Concorde in Paris, or Trafalgar Square in
London. In Madison Square are statues of Admiral Farragut (the finest
statue in New York), William H. Seward, President Arthur and Roscoe
Conkling. At the northwest corner of the Square was for many years
Delmonico's famous restaurant, since moved farther up town. Its owner,
after feeding wealthy New Yorkers on the choicest viands for several
decades, finally lost his mind, and in a fit of aberration wandered
over into the wilderness in New Jersey, and becoming lost in the
woods, actually died of starvation. The new Appellate Court of New
York is on the eastern side of the Square; at the northeast corner is
the Madison Square Garden, and at the southeast corner the Madison
Square Presbyterian Church, where the great clerical censor of New
York, Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, occupies the pulpit. Madison Square may be
regarded as the social centre of modern New York. Far to the northward
Fifth Avenue stretches, with its rows of palatial brownstone
residences, and towards the north-northwest Broadway extends for two
miles to Central Park, passing many hotels, theatres, and the tall
"French flats" that have been devised for residences in the crowded
city where the land surface is so scarce. It also passes, at the
intersection of Sixth Avenue, the Greeley and Herald Squares, with
statues of Horace Greeley and William E. Dodge, and the _New York
Herald_ Building. A short distance beyond is the Metropolitan Opera
House, the finest theatre in the city, rebuilt after a fire in 1893.
Broadway at Fifty-ninth Street reaches the southwest corner of Central
Park and intersects Eighth Avenue, and here is the Columbus Monument,
a tall shaft surmounted by a marble statue, erected in 1892. Broadway
then becomes the magnificent "Grand Broadway Boulevard," with rows of
trees, prolonged far northward.