Go to A	Go to B	Go to D	Go to F	Go to G	Go to H

1881 saw the commemoration of David Glasgow Farragut, Civil War fleet commander, best remembered for his "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" line. The sculpture is by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the pedestal by Stanford White. It is considered to be the first use of Art Nouveau in the U.S.

In July 1901, an attempt to turn seating in the park into a for-profit concession sparked rioting.

The U.S. Arsenal was converted by 1824 to the House of Refuge of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents - the first such institution in the country.

By 1877, the club members had incorporated their new name, Westminster Kennel Club, and scheduled their first dog competition for May 8th. The event was initially known as the First Annual New York Bench Show of Dogs. The dogs had been assigned to benches when not being viewed by judges in the ring. "This allowed for interaction of dogs and their owners with spectators and other owners and breeders as an educational process," notes the WKC website.

The four-day event took place at Gilmore's Garden, a passenger depot property on Madison Avenue and 26th Street then owned by railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who leased it to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" lyricist Patrick Gilmore. The building was later renamed Madison Square Garden by the Vanderbilt family in 1879.

Of the 1,201 entries at the dog competition, wrote The New York Times on February 1, 1976, a number of the contestants, which included two Deerhounds bred by the Queen of England and two Staghounds from a pack owned by the late General George Custer, were seen "rigged up with ribbons, mats, cushions, bells and lace collars, in the most dainty style."

The show's opening day attracted an estimated 8,000 spectators and as many as 20,000 in its second and third days, which led to adding a fourth day with those proceeds donated to an ASPCA home for stray and disabled dogs. "There was a very good attendance all day, and at night the crush was so great that the utmost difficulty was experienced moving about," reported The New York Times on May 9, 1877. "The streets outside were blocked with liveried carriages, and the gentlemen who served as ticket sellers could not make change fast enough to suit the throng that was clamoring for admittance."

The current art in the park is "Delirious Matter" by artist Diana Al-Hadid. It is on view through September 3, 2018. Six new sculptures will be installed across Madison Square Park's central Oval Lawn, peripheral lawns, and northern reflecting pool. Delirious Matter is the artist's first major public art project.

In spring 2018, artist Diana Al-Hadid (American, b. Aleppo, Syria 1981, lives and works in Brooklyn) will create newly commissioned sculptures in Madison Square Park. Two wall works will be combined with rows of hedges to form a room suggesting the elegiac beauty of deteriorating structures nestled into plant material. Three reclining female figures, titled Synonym, sit on plinths and will be displayed on the surrounding lawns. In the Park's reflecting pool, the artist will realize a site-specific sculptural bust of a female figure perched atop a fragmented mountain. Al-Hadid is best known for creating work using traditional and contemporary sculpture materials and processes in unfamiliar ways that pivot amongst architecture, figuration, and abstraction. Despite the eroded appearance, the process is additive. Al-Hadid devised a distinctive process that is, in her words, "a blend between fresco and tapestry." Delirious Matter is the first project by the artist and the first Conservancy commission to unite sculpture with plant materials.

Al-Hadid draws influences from the disrupted typologies of architecture, antiquity, cosmology, and Old Master paintings. She finds inspiration in numerous and varied sources such as ancient frescoes, caves, Northern Renaissance art, Islamic miniatures, ancient time-telling devices, and the modern sculpture of Italian Medardo Rosso. These various interests reflect her perspective as an immigrant from Syria who moved to Ohio when she was a child. She has said: "I was educated by Modernist instructors in the Midwest, but also was raised in an Islamic household with a culture that very much prizes narrative and folklore."

Her work is therefore indebted to storytelling and to a close study of Modernist principles. Al-Hadid's walls on the Oval Lawn measure thirty-six feet long by fourteen feet high and twenty-two feet long by fourteen feet high. Their porous structures enable the viewer to see through the sculpture, to breach the wall. The imagery of these delicate facades stands in contrast to the strapping canyon of early twentieth-century skyscrapers surrounding Madison Square Park. The apparent fragility of Al-Hadid's materials - a delicately poured polymer modified gypsum and fiberglass - is belied by its toughness and resilience. This inherent tension functions as an essential aspect of the project.