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For the pauper and the stranger dead there must be potter's fields. To the successive reservation of such burial places on Manhattan Island we owe Washington, Union and Madison squares and Bryant Park. Each of them lay originally beyond the city limits, was overtaken by the growth of the town, and its use was abandoned; then each in time be-came a public park with trees and lawns and winding walks and fountains and flowers and statues and nursemaids and children.
Union Square lies between Broadway and Fourth avenue, Fourteenth and Seventeenth streets. Broadway makes a bend here, and the cars go around a sharp curve, to which the disasters of the early days of the cable system gave the significant name of "Deadman's Curve."
Here southeast of the park stands H. K. Browne's bronze statue of ABRAHAM LINCOLN. The curb bears the words of the Second Inaugural: "With malice towards none, with charity for all."
Across the Square, the equestrian bronze statue of WASHINGTON (by the same sculptor) stands close by the spot where General Washington was received by the citizens when he entered the city on its evacuation by the British, Nov. 25, 1783.
Facing south on Broadway is the statue of LAFAYETTE, which was erected by French residents in 1876, with the dedication: "To the City of New York, France, in remembrance of sympathy in time of trial, 1870-71." The reference is to the period of the Franco-Prussian War. Lafayette is represented as offering his sword to America, 1776; and his words are engraved on the pedestal: "As soon as I heard of American Independence, my heart was enlisted." The bronze statue is by Bartholdi, of Statue of Liberty fame.
In the west of the Union Square is the JAMES FOUNTAIN, designed by Dunndorf and given to the city by D. Willis James. It is a much admired bronze group of a mother and her two children. The fountain in the center of the Square flowed for the first time Oct. 14, 1842, on the occasion of the Croton Water Celebration, when a pro-cession seven miles long filed past it in review by Governor Seward. In season there is in the basin a fine display of water lilies.
Fourteenth street leads west to Fifth avenue and Sixth avenue, and east to the Academy of Music and Tammany Hall. TAMMANY HALL is owned by the Tammany Society, a benevolent organization founded in 1789. It took the name from Tammany, a friendly and popular chief of the Delaware tribe of Indians; and it was this chief, who gave to one of the tribes for a totem the tiger, which was afterward adopted by the Tammany Society. The Tammany Hall General Committee is a political organization which occupies Tammany Hall as headquarters; it is distinct from the Tammany Society. |
