The Grandest Madison Square Garden by Suzanne Hinman

Author:Suzanne Hinman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815654858
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2019-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

22

Up under the Stars

AS THE EARLY SPRING of 1892 progressed, Stanford White was overseeing the completion of the last bit of the Madison Square Garden complex—the new roof garden. He had laid out a rectangle measuring 200 by 80 feet that ran north to south the full length of the roof from Twenty-Sixth to Twenty-Seventh Street and west to east from Madison Avenue to the amphitheater’s glass skylights. It was certainly a unique location, with a stunning view over Madison Square and beyond, over the roofs of the city in all directions.

From the beginning White’s intention had been to make the roof garden the sort of pleasant place for light entertainment that could easily be found abroad—an enjoyable spot to spend a summer evening after the theater, eat a light supper, have a drink, and smoke a cigar, all while listening to good music. Something like a beer garden, perhaps, but for a rather different class of people and a refuge of sorts for those unfortunate New Yorkers forced by their labors to remain in the city during the long, hot summer months.1

This, however, would not be the first theatrical rooftop summer garden in Manhattan. That distinction belonged to the Casino Theatre, that Moorish fantasy with the quite distinctive if not downright phallic red-tiled tower thirteen blocks up Broadway at West Thirty-Ninth, catty-corner to the Metropolitan Opera House. Owner and conductor Rudolph Aronson had been inspired by the street-side concert gardens he had enjoyed in Paris along the Champs-Élysées and had hoped to open a similar establishment in town. But when he considered Manhattan’s summer heat and the high cost of its square footage, a garden on top of the roof of a building he already planned to erect seemed like the perfect solution.2

While the Casino Theatre proper continued to entertain a rather highbrow audience by presenting European operetta on its main stage, since 1883 its summertime roof garden had served as a pleasant spot to lounge to the tunes of a Hungarian band before and after the theater’s main event, or even watch the theatrical performance through an opening in the roof. Although the weather obviously affected attendance—with the roof garden packed to overflowing on a warm evening and relatively deserted on a cool or rainy one—it was not unusual for more than eight thousand patrons to crowd onto the Casino’s roof each week.

Spurred by the planned opening of the new Madison Square Garden roof, the old and rather rustic Casino Roof Garden was in the process of being enlarged, improved, and totally made over into an elegant Parisian café chantant. A 30-foot stage was being erected, the old garden plantings torn up for added seating, European variety acts booked, and a very French cuisine being planned in the kitchen.3 Once again Stanford White was engaged in a contest, a race to complete and open his own roof garden for the season before the Casino on May 30, following the annual Decoration Day military parade down Fifth Avenue.

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To begin, the floor of the Madison Square Garden’s roof garden was laid with paving brick from W.

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