Union Square, Manhattan
Union Square is a historic intersection and surrounding neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City, United States, located where Broadway and the former Bowery Road – now Park Avenue north of the Square – came together in the early 19th century. Its name denotes that "here was the union of the two principal thoroughfares of the island". The current Union Square Park is bounded by 14th Street on the south, 17th Street on the north, and Union Square West and Union Square East to the west and east respectively. 17th Street links together Broadway and Park Avenue South on the north end of the park, while Union Square East connects Park Avenue South to Fourth Avenue and the continuation of Broadway on the park's south side. The park is maintained by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
Adjacent neighborhoods are the Flatiron District to the north, Chelsea to the west, Greenwich Village to the southwest, East Village to the southeast, and Gramercy Park to the east. Many buildings of The New School are near the square, as are several dormitories of New York University. The eastern side of the square is dominated by the four Zeckendorf Towers, and the south side by the full-square-block mixed-use One Union Square South, which contains a wall sculpture and digital clock titled Metronome. Union Square Park also contains an assortment of art, including statues of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandhi.
Union Square is part of Manhattan Community District 5 and its primary ZIP Code is 10003. It is patrolled by the 13th Precinct of the New York City Police Department. The New York City Subway's 14th Street–Union Square station, served by the, is located under Union Square.
History
Development
Prior to the area's settlement, the area around present-day Union Square was farmland. The western part of the site was owned by Elias Brevoort, who later sold his land to John Smith in 1762; by 1788 it had been sold again to Henry Spingler. On the eastern part of the land were farms owned by John Watts and Cornelius Williams. The northwestern corner of the park site contained of land owned by the Manhattan Bank, which supposedly was a "refuge" for businesses during New York City's yellow fever epidemics.When John Randel was surveying the island in preparation for the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, the Bloomingdale Road angled away from the Bowery at an acute angle. Because it would have been difficult to develop buildings upon this angle, the Commissioners decided to form a square at the union. In 1815, by act of the state legislature, this former potter's field became a public commons for the city, at first named Union Place. Union Place originally was supposed to extend from 10th to 17th Streets. Several city officials objected that Union Place was too large and requested that it be "discontinued", and in 1814, the New York State Legislature acted to downsize the area by making 14th Street the southern boundary.
Mid-to-late 19th century
Residential neighborhood
In 1831, at a time when the city was quickly expanding and the surrounding area was still sparsely developed, Samuel Ruggles, one of the founders of the Bank of Commerce and the developer of Gramercy Park to the northeast, convinced the city to rename the area "Union Square". In doing so, Ruggles also got the city to enlarge the commons to 17th Street on the north and extend the axis of University Place to form the square's west side, thus turning the common from a triangular to a rectangular area. By 1832, the area had been renamed Union Square. Ruggles obtained a fifty-year lease on most of the surrounding lots from 15th to 19th Streets, where he built sidewalks and curbs. In 1834, he convinced the Board of Aldermen to enclose and grade the square, then sold most of his leases and in 1839 built a four-story house facing the east side of the Square. The park at Union Square was completed and opened in July 1839.A fountain was built in the center of Union Square to receive water from the Croton Aqueduct, completed in October 1842. In 1845, as the square finally began to fill with affluent houses, $116,000 was spent in paving the surrounding streets and planting the square, in part owing to the continued encouragement of Ruggles. The sole survivors of this early phase, though they have been much adapted and rebuilt, are a series of three- and four-story brick rowhouses, 862–866 Broadway, at the turn where Broadway exits the square at 17th Street. The Everett House on the corner of 17th Street and Fourth Avenue was for decades one of the city's most fashionable hotels. In the early years of the park, a fence surrounded the square's central oval planted with radiating walks lined with trees. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, arrangements were made for the erection of the statue of Lincoln in the square. In 1872, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were called in to replant the park, as an open glade with clumps of trees.
Initially, the square was largely residential: the Union League Club first occupied a house loaned for the purpose by Henry G. Marquand at the corner of 17th Street and Broadway. After the Civil War the neighborhood became largely commercial, and the square began to lose social cachet at the turn of the twentieth century, with many of the old mansions being demolished. Tiffany & Co., which had moved to the square from Broadway and Broome Street in 1870, left its premises on 15th Street to move uptown to 37th Street in 1905; the silversmiths Gorham Company moved up from 19th Street in 1906. The last of the neighborhood's free-standing private mansions, Peter Goelet's at the northeast corner of 19th Street, made way for a commercial building in 1897.
The Rialto
The Rialto, New York City's first commercial theater district, was located in and around Union Square beginning in the 1870s. It was named after Venice's Rialto, a commercial district. The first facility to open within the Union Square Rialto was the Academy of Music, which opened at Irving Place in 1854. The theater district gradually relocated northward, into less expensive and undeveloped uptown neighborhoods, and eventually into the current Theater District.Before the Civil War, theatres in New York City were primarily located along Broadway and the Bowery up to 14th Street, with those on Broadway appealing more to the middle and upper classes and the Bowery theatres attracting immigrant audiences, clerks and the working class. After the war, the development of the Ladies' Mile shopping district along Fifth and Sixth Avenues above 14th Street had the effect of pulling the playhouses uptown, so that a "Rialto" theatrical strip came about on Broadway between 14th and 23rd Streets, between Union Square and Madison Square.
At the same time, a transition from stock companies, in which a resident acting company was based around a star or impresario, to a "combination" system, in which productions were put together on a one-time basis to mount a specific play, expanded the amount of outside support needed to service the theatrical industry. Thus, suppliers of props, costumes, wigs, scenery, and other theatrical necessities grew up around the new theatres. The new system also needed an organized way to engage actors for these one-off productions, so talent brokers and theatrical agents sprang up, as did theatrical boardinghouses, stage photographers, publicity agencies, theatrical printers and play publishers. Along with the hotels and restaurants which serviced the theatregoers and shoppers of the area, the Union Square Rialto was, by the end of the century, a thriving theatrical neighborhood, which would soon nonetheless migrate uptown to what became known as "Broadway" as the Rialto became subsumed into the more vice-oriented Tenderloin entertainment district.
Early 20th century
Office and wholesale district
By the first decade of the 20th century, Union Square had grown into a major transportation hub with several elevated and surface railroad lines running nearby, and the New York City Subway's 14th Street–Union Square station having opened in 1904. With the northward relocation of the theater district, Union Square also became a major wholesaling district with several loft buildings, as well as numerous office buildings. The office structures included the Everett Building, erected at the northwest corner of Park Avenue South and 17th Street in 1908; the Germania Life Insurance Company Building, erected at the northeast corner of the same intersection in 1910–1911; and the Consolidated Edison Building, constructed three blocks south at 14th Street between 1910 and 1914. Existing houses were also converted into stores, including a pair of merchants' houses on the east side of the park at 16th Street in 1916.During this era, many of the older homes on Union Square were converted into tenements for immigrants and industrial workers. Numerous artists relocated into the attics of the remaining mansions along 14th Street, where they had their studios. The 1939 WPA Guide to New York City said that by the 1920s, the "south side of Fourteenth Street became virtually an ex-tension of Greenwich Village". Further, real estate values around Union Square had declined by the 1920s, with "burlesque houses, shooting galleries, and shoddy businesses" lining the square. Throughout the decade, most buildings on the eastern part of the square were purchased by department stores S. Klein and Ohrbach's. Real estate activity resumed in the late 1920s, and according to a 1928 piece in The New York Times, “several smaller operations are planned or are under way in the neighborhood". By then, at least eight banks had opened locations on the western and eastern sides of the park.