For non-New Yorkers, the first thing to note is that Madison Square Park IS NOT Madision Square Garden (it hasn't been for a long, long time).
Madison Square Park is easily accessed by bus, subway, and foot.
The architectual foundation of the area is the Flatiron Building, one of Manhattan's iconic structures. This building gives the neighborhood its' name: The Flatiron District.
Until the late 1980's, the Park was a haven for daytime drinkers and overnight homeless sleepers and it lost its sense of being a multiple-use public space. It was known by some, disparagingly, as Madison Square Pee, for the wafting smell of urine. This has changed and one hopes that the homeless who once made it a place to sleep at night have obtained better services over the years.
In the mid-1990's, the park attained something of a television-cult following, as the location for the cable show "fX Breakfast Time." The show was famously not available for cable customers in NYC, so few people actually knew that for three hours each morning a nationally televised show was being broadcast from the neighborhood. The show (and related fX broadcasts from the site) launched the careers of several TV personalities who subsequently became famous in reality-TV world, such as Tom Bergeron, Jeff Probst, and Phil Keoghan.
The park boasts some old statuary, including a statue of William Seward.
The most famous corporation on the park was Metropolitan Life on the eastern side of the space, boasting a beautiful skyscraper [see photo above]; their headquarters have since moved elsewhere. Food was important in the regeneration of the park, as visitors will find from a kiosk opened early in the decade and from some notable restaurants. Residential buildings can be found on the south of the park.
One of the iconic photographs of the 20th century was taken in Madison Square Park: Edward Steichen's "Flatiron" image. See a copy of this image in Wiki at Steichen's "Flatiron".
