NoMad ("North of Madison Square"), also known as Madison Square North,Landmarks Preservation Commission, LPC Designates Hotel Seville and The Emmet Building, Press Release, March 6, 2018 is a neighborhood centered on the Madison Square North Historic District in the borough of Manhattan in New York City.
The name NoMad, which has been in use since 1999,Feirstein, p.103 is derived from the area’s location north of Madison Square Park. The neighborhood is bordered by East 25th Street to the south, East 29th or East 30th Street to the north, Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) to the west and Madison or Lexington Avenue to the east.Hughes, C. J. (December 16, 2015) "Manhattan Condos Amid the Offices" The New York Times Quote: "By one popular definition, NoMad runs from 25th Street to 30th Street, and from the Avenue of the Americas to Lexington Avenue." The surrounding neighborhoods are Chelsea to the west, Midtown South to the northwest, Murray Hill to the northeast, Rose Hill to the east, and the Flatiron District to the south. NoMad is part of Manhattan Community District 5.Community Board 5 official site. Retrieved June 22, 2015. Archived from the original on April 30, 2015.
History
NoMad's early history is closely aligned with that of Madison Square Park, which has been a public space since 1686. The park extends from Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue between 23rd and 26th Streets. Formerly a military parade ground that to this day serves as the starting point for the city's annual Veterans Day Parade, Madison Square Park and the surrounding area have undergone a number of changes since pre-Revolutionary War days, serving at various times as a potter’s field, an army arsenal and a facility for juvenile delinquents.Feirstein, p.106
New Yorkers began establishing residences around the park in the mid-nineteenth century. Private brownstone dwellings and mansions springing up around the perimeter of the park soon boasted such respected, well-to-do families as the Haights, Stokeses, Scheifflins, Wolfes, and Barlows. Leonard and Clara Jerome, the grandparents of Winston Churchill, lived at 41 East 26th Street. The Jerome Mansion later became the clubhouse of the Union League Club of New York (its second location), the University Club and, finally, the Manhattan Club, birthplace of the Manhattan cocktail and congregating place of such famous Democrats as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland and Al Smith.Mendelsohn, p.26 The mansion was demolished in 1967Mendelsohn, p.15 and was replaced in 1974 by the New York Merchandise Mart, which also extends onto the site of the adjacent Madison Square Hotel, where actors Henry Fonda and James Stewart roomed in the 1930s.
The famous families in the area nurtured the spiritual life of the neighborhood, founding such landmark houses of worship as the Church of the Transfiguration (the "Little Church Around the Corner"), Trinity Chapel (site of the wedding between writer Edith Newbold Jones and Edward Wharton and now the home of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sava) and Marble Collegiate Church.
The area became a meeting place for the Gilded Age elite, and a late-nineteenth century mecca for shoppers, tourists and after-theater restaurant patrons. A list of celebrities who ate at Delmonico's is a who’s who of the day, including Diamond Jim Brady, Mark Twain, Jenny Lind, Lillian Russell, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, J.P. Morgan, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., Walter Scott, Edward VII of the United Kingdom (then the Prince of Wales), and Napoleon III of France.
A commercial boom followed with the growth of hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues and office buildings, many of which are still standing. By the late nineteenth century, business activity began to eclipse the residential scene around the park, and the area along Broadway above the park began to be subsumed into the Tenderloin, an entertainment-and-vice red-light district full of nightclubs, saloons, bordellos, gambling casinos, dance halls and "clip joints". At about this time, on August 14, 1894, the world's first kinetoscope parlor opened in a former shoe store at 1155 Broadway, on the corner of 27th Street. For 25 cents, patrons could stand and watch a short film through a shaded "peephole" on William Dickson's device. The store had 10 of these machines, and netted $120 for its opening day., p.130
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the area around 28th Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) was dubbed Tin Pan Alley thanks to the collection of music publishers and songwriters there who dominated the American commercial music world of the time. Around the same time, the 1913 Armory Show, which took place at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, was a seminal event in the history of Modern Art.
The neighborhood deteriorated somewhat during the mid- and late-twentieth century. Tee-shirt, luggage, perfume and jewelry wholesalers began lining the storefronts along Broadway from Madison Square to Herald Square, and wholesalers continue to dominate that stretch. By the second half of the twentieth century, Madison Square Park was suffering from neglect and petty crime. The massive 2001 park restoration project, spearheaded by the Madison Square Park ConservancyMadison Square Park Conservancy (official site). Retrieved on June 22, 2015. Archived from the original on May 22, 2015. spurred a transformation of the neighborhoods around the park—the Flatiron District, Rose Hill and NoMad—from primarily commercial to places attractive for residences, upscale businesses and trendy restaurants and nightspots, especially in the early 2010s.
Notable people
Buried under Worth Square at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and West 24th and 25th Streets is Mexican War hero Major General William Jenkins Worth, for whom Fort Worth, the city in Texas, was named. Roscoe Conkling, whose statue stands at the southeast corner of Madison Square Park, was a kingmaker in the Republican Party in the last half of the nineteenth century and is closely associated with the Fifth Avenue Hotel and political scandals during the James A. Garfield and Chester Alan Arthur administrations. Stanford White, partner in the respected architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White, designed the magnificent Madison Square Garden, which stood from 1890 to 1925 between 26th and 27th Streets at Madison Avenue on the northeast corner of Madison Square Park. Featuring the largest amphitheater in the US, the building’s tower contained White’s apartment and love nest topped by a scantily draped statue of Diana. There, he entertained Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, one of the Garden’s rooftop Florodora Girls. In a jealous rage, her husband, Harry Thaw, fatally shot White in the middle of a musical production on the roof. Six years into the twentieth century, the media was touting the trial of the murderer of Stanford White, one of the country’s most prolific architects and womanizers, as "The Trial of the Century." Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American electrical engineer and inventor, moved into what was then the Gerlach Hotel at 49-55 West 27th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue in 1892.Carlson, W. Bernard (2015) Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p.158. Tesla disliked the Gerlach and would move to the Waldorf–Astoria in 1899.Cheney, Margaret (2001) Tesla: Man Out of Time. New York: Simon and Schuster. p.114. The Yugoslav-American Bicentennial Committee added a plaque to the building in 1977 commemorating Tesla's stay there. The building is sometimes called the "Radio Wave" or "Radiowave" building.Postal, Matthew A. and Presa, Donald G. (June 26, 2001) "Madison Square North Historic District Designation Report" p.117. New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of U.S. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as her husband Marc Mezvinsky and their children, lived in NoMad for 18 months in 2014–2016 before moving to another apartment building within the Flatiron District. Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports sports blog and conglomerate, original Barstool office was founded in the area, and is still run out of the same office to this day. Home office of Pardon My Take and many other popular web blogs and podcasts.
Buildings
Among the notable buildings in the area are New York Life Building, the headquarters of the New York Life Insurance Company; the Gift Building, which has been converted to a luxury condominium; and the Toy Center, which has been converted to an office complex.
Designed in 1904 by Stanford White as the prestigious Colony Club for socialites, the building at 120 Madison Avenue has been occupied since 1963 by the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Long before the Academy began training its young hopefuls in the NoMad area, the Madison Square Theater opened in 1880. Boasting the first electric footlights and a backstage double-decker elevator, the theater also provided an early air-conditioning system.
Along Broadway, the Townsend (1896) and St. James (1896) were the tallest buildings in New York for a short while, and remain historic landmarks. Slightly up the street, the Baudouine Building at 28th Street was heavily decorated with escutcheons of anthemions with lion heads over many windows. At the same corner, the Johnston Building (now the Hotel NoMad) was built in 1900 and faced in all limestone with beautiful exterior decoration. One block up, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s grandfather built a classically designed loft building, next to the Breslin.
Although a number of old buildings in the neighborhood have been renovated, there have been few new construction starts in the area. One of the first is 241 Fifth Avenue between 27th and 28th Streets. Construction began on the 46-unit condominium building in November 2011, and it was open to sales in April 2013; by April of the next year it was sold out.Satow, Julie. "‘Historic’ Doesn’t Rule Out ‘New’" The New York Times (May 9, 2013)Budin, Jeremiah. "One Museum Mile, 241 Fifth Ave. Sell Out; Metrocard Panel" Curbed New York (April 30, 2014) Elsewhere in the neighborhood, old building are undergoing conversion to residences.
In 2014, the Kaufman Organization announced it was developing four underutilized NoMad commercial buildings previously owned by F. M. Ring Associates: 119 West 24th Street near Sixth Avenue, 19 West 24th Street near Fifth Avenue, 45 West 27th Street, and 13 West 27th Street. The buildings will be renovated to make them more attractive to technology firms, and the street level spaces made suitable for use by retail outlets and restaurants.
Hotels past and present
NoMad was once home to some of New York’s most luxurious hotels. Completed in 1859 by Amos R. Eno, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, whose gleaming white-marble housed 100 apartment suites, was the first American hotel with an elevator and private bathrooms, as well as a fourth meal, or "late supper", and was a popular meeting place for politicians, brokers and speculators. Because of its opulence, as well as its location at the far uptown edge of the city, it was dubbed "Eno's Folly". The site previously had been an inn where travelers leaving the city or returning to it could get a meal or lodging before continuing their trip. The hotel stood between East 23rd and East 24th Streets facing Madison Square, where the Toy Center South would later stand.Morris, Lloyd (1951) Incredible New York; high life and low life from 1850 to 1950. Wakefield, MA.: The Murray Printing Company, pp. 6–7.