Six acres opposite the Flatiron, with rotating public sculpture, the original Shake Shack, and the arm of the Statue of Liberty once parked on the lawn for six years.
Liberty’s arm
Between 1876 and 1882 the torch-bearing right arm of the Statue of Liberty stood in this park, on its own, as a fundraising exhibit. For fifty cents you could climb a ladder inside it and stand on the balcony around the torch. It did not raise enough. The arm went back to Paris and the money was eventually found by Pulitzer’s newspaper campaign instead.
The first two buildings called Madison Square Garden stood on the north-east corner of the square, which is why the arena now sitting on top of Penn Station, thirty blocks away and not on any square, is called that. Stanford White designed the second one and was shot dead on its roof garden in 1906 by the husband of a woman he had assaulted years earlier, in what the papers of the day called the crime of the century.
Baseball was played here in the 1840s, before the rules were settled.
Now
The park was restored in the early 2000s and is run by a conservancy that puts serious money into two things: the horticulture, which is unusually good for a small city park, and the public art programme, which commissions a major outdoor work each year. Past commissions have been genuinely ambitious — a full-scale reconstruction of a house, a field of chimes, enormous figurative sculpture. It is free and it changes, so it is worth checking what is up.
Shake Shack began here in 2001 as a hot dog cart to support one of those art installations, stayed as a kiosk, and became a chain of several hundred restaurants. The original is still in the south-east corner and it is still good.
The lawns are open in the growing season and closed to rest in winter. The dog run is one of the busiest in the city.
Where it sits
The Flatiron Building closes the south-west corner and the park is the right place to photograph it from.
Eataly is on the north-west corner across Fifth. The Met Life Tower on the east side was briefly the tallest building in the world in 1909, and the Appellate Division Courthouse on the north-east corner is worth looking at for the row of statues along its roofline.
Union Square is eight blocks south, the Empire State Building eleven blocks north.
More Parks & Green Space
Central Park
Not a surviving piece of wilderness but a landscape built from nothing over sixteen years, including the streams, the hills and the woods. Free, and larger than you think.
The High Line
A freight viaduct that was going to be demolished, replanted as a mile-and-a-half elevated park thirty feet above the West Side. Free, and busier than you expect.
Bryant Park
Nine acres of lawn behind the Public Library that were a no-go area in the 1980s and are now the most heavily used park per square foot in the city. Free chairs, free events, free wifi.