My second non-Prospect Park dalliance yesterday was Madison Square Park. It's a nexus of weird history, Manhattan's and my own family's, and I contemplated it while shambling around sucking on a caramel shake (or, as I call it, "heroin"), from the park's own legendary Shake Shack.
The Ballad of Mother Met (A Madison Avenue Rag)
Ah, memories swirl around the Met Life tower (now getting the finger from that bizarre sliver condo-under-construction on 23rd Street). Some member of my family has toiled for "Mother Met" on and off from the dirty Thirties through the go-go Eighties, eating a furtive lunch in Madison Square Park under the glaring eye of the great clock to avoid serfdom in the company cafeteria (with its free "dinner" at lunchtime). My mother left high school a few months before graduation to work in their loan department at the depths of the Great Depression in support of her fatherless family. She got $13 for a six-day work week as a file clerk, prying through folders full of sad stories of men who drained their life insurance policies just to survive.
Each morning, she passed jobless men selling apples in the park; all her life, she recalled how she couldn't meet their eyes. (And we think we have it rough now.) In the Seventies, my dad, a field agent, took a job in the home office, and so did Spouse for an ill-fitted few years before he found his niche in the wacky world of non-profits. And here also was my first paying job, as a temp in data entry. I spent the summer of my 16th year typing in long lists of U.S. Steel employees and their dependents, and skirted the park because its splintered benches were occupied by homeless guys and reeking, mumbling bag ladies. (No Shake Shack then, but I could probably have gotten real heroin if I'd wanted it.) On my last day and last hour that August of 1974, I typed in the names of the entire family of Napoleon Bonaparte, and raced out the door into the park's hallucinatory heat in a rapture of freedom.
Yesterday, in the habit of AYITP, I took a closer look at the park, now a well-manicured oasis tended by work crews and studded with sponsorship plaques. There is a spacious dog run, although it is barren and malodorous compared to the dog paradise of Prospect Park's Long Meadow.
But amid city traffic and noise, it offers precious respite for Corgi snoodling.
At the park's northern edge, there is a damn cool monument to the guy who said (sort of), "Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!" The story of Civil War naval hero David Glasgow Farragut is incredible: He joined the navy at age 10 or so, was given charge of a ship at age 12, and was the first U.S. Admiral ever.
The sculptor was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who would have made a great Oscar-night dress designer judging from these windswept sea-goddesses. The architect was Stanford White, who was shot to death across the street at the old Madison Square Garden by the jealous millionaire husband of his mistress, the ravishing Evelyn Nesbit. And the crab plaque in yesterday's entry is inlaid at the base of it all.
So many parks, so little time.