The stretch of glories departed is quickly passed.  The nine blocks are really eight, for it is at Twenty-second Street that the Flatiron begins, and the drab hives behind are forgotten as the vision of the Square strikes the eye.  The Parisian, sipping an aperitif at the corner table of the Cafe de la Paix, believes himself to be occupying the exact centre of the universe.  The Manhattanite knows him to be wrong by a matter of three thousand and some odd miles.  Be he plutocrat or panhandler he knows that it is some spot from which he can look up and see the lithe figure of Diana, and the illuminated clock in the tower of the Metropolitan Building.

Although not formally opened as Madison Square until 1847, the story of the land goes back almost two hundred and fifty years.  It was in 1670 that Sir Edward Andros, Governor of the Province, granted to Solomon Peters, a free negro, thirty acres of land between what is now Twenty-first and Twenty-sixth Streets, extending east and west from the present Broadway (Bloomingdale Road) to Seventh Avenue.  Forty-six years later the negro’s descendants sold the tract to John Horn and Cornelius Webber, and a hundred years after it became vested in John Horn the second.  In the middle of the present roadway west of the Flatiron Building the Horn farmhouse, occupied by John the Second’s daughter and son-in-law, Christopher Mildenberger, stood when the Avenue was cut through to Twenty-third Street in 1837.  It was allowed to remain there two years more, when it was removed to the famous site at the northwest corner of Twenty-third Street and became the Madison Cottage.  The old chroniclers tell of the joyous spirit and flavour of that roadhouse, a favourite rendezvous of horsemen in the forties, and of the genial management of its proprietor, Corporal Thompson.  In the Collection of Amos F. Eno there is a photograph of the business card of the Cottage, with the announcement that the stages “leave every 4 minutes.”  A picture shows the stages before the building with its slanting roof and its three dormer windows facing the Avenue and Park.  Several miles beyond the city proper, it was a post tavern in the coaching days, and the huge pair of antlers announced the “Sign of the Buck-horn.”

It had its brief and glorious day and then passed.  Early in 1853 it was torn down to make room for a circus, known as Franconi’s Hippodrome, built by a syndicate of American showmen, among whom were Avery Smith, Richard Sands, and Seth B. Howe.  The lithograph in the Collection of J. Clarence Davies shows a combination of tent roof and permanent wall.  There was a turretted sexagonal entrance at the corner facing the Avenue and Twenty-third Street, and another at the northern end of the building.  Seven hundred feet in circumference was the Hippodrome, of brick sides, two stories high, with an oval ring in the centre two hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long, seating six thousand people, and having standing room