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.