On the east side of the square, between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets, is the enormous building of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., the tower of which has fifty stories and reaches a height of six hundred and ninety-three feet. Two elevators run to a height of five hundred and forty-four feet. Adjacent is the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, with its massive dome. At the southeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street stands the Manhattan Club, and at the northeast corner is the huge Madison Square Garden, with its Moorish tower capped by a fine statue of Diana.
The Herald Office, a Venetian palace, stands at Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street, in Herald Square.
West of Herald Square, at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street, is the magnificent station of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, covering an area four hundred and fifty by one thousand eight hundred feet, the largest structure of the kind in the world, connected by tunnels under the Hudson River with New Jersey, and under the East River with Long Island. The tracks are forty feet below the level of the city streets.
The Metropolitan Opera House, opened in 1883 and rebuilt ten years later, after a fire, stands between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets.
At Forty-second Street and Broadway is the Times Building, an ornamental structure sixteen stories high, upon a triangle of ground.
To the east of Madison Avenue is the Grand Central Station, the terminus of the New York Central, the New York, New Haven and Hartford, and the Harlem Railways. Opposite the station is the Belmont Hotel, twenty-two stories high.
The corner at Broadway and Forty-second Street is the recent heart of the theatrical and hotel district, for clustered there are a dozen hotels, the immense Astor and Knickerbocker among them, and there are twenty theaters within half a mile, six of them almost side by side on Forty-second Street.
Beyond Times Square, Broadway is rather uninteresting, but there are some lofty specimens of apartment houses or French flats farther up. From Forty-fifth Street on, Broadway is largely occupied by automobile stores and garages. At the corner of Fifty-sixth Street is the new Broadway Tabernacle and at Fifty-ninth Street Broadway reaches the southwest corner of Central Park and intersects Eighth Avenue.
At the intersection, the so-called Circle, stands the Columbus Monument by Gaetano Russo, [611] erected in 1892, and consisting of a tall shaft surmounted by a marble statue, in all seventy-seven feet high. Beyond Seventy-eighth Street, Broadway, now a wide street with rows of trees, is usually known as the Boulevard. From One Hundred and Eighth Street to One Hundred and Sixty-second Street it coincides with Eleventh Avenue, at One Hundred and Sixteenth Street it passes Columbia University, and from One Hundred and Sixty-second Street it, as Kingsbridge Road, runs on to Yonkers.
Fifth Avenue, the chief street in New York from the standpoint of wealth and fashion, begins at Washington Square to the north of West Fourth Street and a little to the west of Broadway, and runs north to the Harlem River, a distance of six miles. Below Forty-seventh Street the Avenue has now been largely invaded by shops, tall office buildings, and hotels. The avenue has been kept sacred from the marring touch of the street railway or the elevated railroad, and is traversed by a line of motor omnibuses. The avenue is wide and well-paved, and many of the buildings are of brown sandstone. On a fine afternoon Fifth Avenue is alive with carriages and horsemen on their way to and from Central Park and it is, perhaps, seen at its best on a fine Sunday.