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I had one of the Devil’s own nights, I’ll never go there any more.

In succeeding verses the hapless tourist is bilked at an auction, bounced from a variety hall, and battered in a bar (“I struck a place that they called a dive. I was lucky to get out alive”), with each crisis punctuated by the pointed refrain: “I’ll never go there any more.”

More appealing metropolitan portraits were furnished by “The Sidewalks of New York” (1894) and “The Band Played On” (1895), the latter a song about Matt Casey’s stylish social club in a rented hall where on Saturday night he and his cronies would grease the floor with wax, don their Sunday clothes, and waltz with strawberry blondes. Most of the big hits were waltzes, with lyrics that got to the point as quickly as an advertisement and memorably melodic choruses that made it easy for audiences and parlor performers to sing along.

These blockbuster successes, which kept New York life in the nation’s ear, inspired dozens of other songwriting firms to try their hand. Most continued to locate around 14th Street, until the flourishing Witmark brothers moved uptown to West 28th Street, nearer the new theatrical district. By the late 1890s almost every major music publisher had followed them, creating a new center for the popular music industry soon to be dubbed Tin Pan Alley.

BIG TENT ON MADISON SQUARE

While Union Square mediated between Bowery and Broadway, Madison Square, a few blocks north, accommodated both simultaneously.

Ever since the old New York and Harlem Rail Road shed at Madison and 26th had been rendered obsolete by Grand Central Depot, the Vanderbilt family had leased the old terminus to various theatrical entrepreneurs. In 1873 P. T. Barnum used the premises, remodeled as the Great Roman Hippodrome, for performances of the world’s first three-ring circus. Later, bandmaster Patrick S. Gilmore rented it for boxing matches, marathon running races, and the first Westminster Kennel Club Show (1877).

In 1879 William Kissam Vanderbilt reasserted family control over the site and rechristened it Madison Square Garden, appropriating for indoor halls a word long associated with outdoor “pleasure gardens.” In the early 1880s Vanderbilt focused on sports events, relying heavily on six-day-long marathon runs and boxing “exhibitions” featuring John L. Sullivan. But in 1885 a clampdown on the still illegal sport cut off that income stream, and events like the National Horse Show, which started that year, failed to replace it. Vanderbilt decided to raze his “patched-up, grimy, drafty, combustible old shell” and sell out to a syndicate of titans that included J. P. Morgan (president), Andrew Carnegie, James Stillman, and W. W. Astor.

Their Madison Square Garden Company raised over $1.5 million, solicited Stanford White to design the new structure, and launched construction with a workforce of over a thousand men. Eleven months later, one of the largest public entertainment halls in the world opened its doors. Its vast buff-and-yellow base, girdled by pedestrian arcades and embellished with terra-cotta, was crowned by a three-hundred-foot-plustall tower modeled on Seville’s Moorish Giralda. Exceeded in size only by Pulitzer’s World Building, the tower became an instant attraction and emblem of New York City. After 1891 elevators carried the public to a loggia, from which stairs provided access to an observation platform 289 feet above the street that afforded bird’s-eye views of the metropolis, and on higher still to a two-person perch at the 304-6101 level. At the pinnacle, a Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana was unveiled on November i, 1891, with a grand illumination of red fire, colored lights, and rockets. When the bombs bursting in air revealed that Diana was nude, moralists condemned it as an outrage, but J. P. Morgan liked it, and it stayed.

The Garden offered bourgeois audiences orchestral performances, light operas, and romantic comedies in the Garden Theater, as well as an array of deluxe facilities including a ballroom-concert hall, an