Grand Army Plaza - New York, NY - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

Taken from Wikipedia, "Grand Army Plaza lies between 58th Street and 60th Street, just west of Fifth Avenue and just east of East Drive. It is bisected by Central Park South. The plaza is bounded on the north by Scholars Gate, once one of the two main entrances to the carriage drives of Central Park; bounded on the west by the famed Plaza Hotel; bounded on the south by the Bergdorf Goodman department store, formerly the site of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II House, once one of Fifth Avenue's grandest Gilded Age mansions.

The centerpiece of the plaza's northern half (carved out of the southeastern corner of Central Park), is the equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens,[1] while the principal feature of the plaza's southern half is the Pulitzer Fountain, topped with a bronze statue of the Roman goddess Pomona sculpted by Karl Bitter.

The idea for a unified treatment of the plaza was first proposed by Bitter in 1898. The current layout was designed by Beaux-Arts architecture firm Carrère and Hastings and completed in 1916. The New York City Board of Aldermen named it Grand Army Plaza in 1923 after the Grand Army of the Potomac."

"The Fifth Avenue shopping district also begins in Murray Hill. It is paralleled on the east by Madison Avenue, lined with ships specializing in men's wear and interior decoration, and by wealthy Park Avenue, a continuation of Fourth Avenue. Impressive skyscraper hotels, Rockefeller Center, and a number of fashionable churches, such as St. Patrick's and St. Thomas, stand in this mid-town area. On and near Fifty-seventh Street are gathered many of the art galleries that make Manhattan the art center of the country. North of its intersection with Central Park South (Fifty-ninth Street) at Grand Army Plaza, Fifth Avenue still retains a few of the millionarie's villas and castles that faced the park before the apartment house boom. In fact, there are more single-family residences in the neighborhood of upper Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues than remain in any other part of Manhattan." -- New York City, 1939

Book: New York City Page Number(s) of Excerpt: 183 Year Originally Published: 1939

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