How the War of 1812, a Vanderbilt, and an insurance company gave us Madison Square Garden

The Knicks play home games in a venue that, indirectly, takes its name from America's shortest president, the 5'4 James Madison

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Here’s the second column in What’s In A Name, a series examining the names of stadiums, trophies, and other non-human entities in the sports world. Paid subscribers to Assigned selected it in our first subscriber poll, and it will continue until some unspecified point in the future when I feel like the idea has run its course or needs a break. Want to participate in the decision-making process next time around, or just want to help make this work feasible? Become a paid supporter of Assigned today!

Modern NBA arenas do not come by their names accidentally. 29 franchises play in a venue where naming rights have been sold to a corporate sponsor, sometimes leading to outcomes that personally disappoint me, like the Rockets not playing in Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (home of the Cleveland Cavaliers) or the Kings not playing at the Smoothie King Center (home of the New Orleans Pelicans). Sometimes the named sponsor has a local connection, like Memphis-based FedEx and the Grizzlies, and sometimes we just sort of shrug and say “sure, the Orlando Magic now play in the Kia Center.”

One NBA home court remains free of a corporate name: Madison Square Garden, the self-proclaimed World’s Most Famous Arena. And that name, which turned 175 years old in May, only began and persisted thanks to several dominos of history falling one way instead of the other.

How many dominos? I suppose we could get extremely expansive with it – if the Dutch pass up New Amsterdam for someplace farther south, maybe the Ocean City Knicks become one of the NBA’s most prominent franchises – but let’s limit it to four key points in the history of New York that directly connect to Madison Square Garden’s modern existence.

Most of these events occurred before basketball’s invention in 1891 and before the Stanley Cup’s introduction to hockey in 1892.

DOMINO ONE: THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1812

The Madison in Madison Square Garden, James Madison, has his fingerprints all over the early history of the United States. Madison helped write The Federalist Papers, played a critical role in the creation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and rose to become the new nation’s fourth president. However, his run for a second presidential term matters most for our timeline's purposes.

The three presidential elections preceding this one featured a Federalist nominee and another from the Democratic-Republicans, and while the proceedings did not always go entirely smoothly, the clash of distinct political parties remained the center of those votes.

In 1812, the Democratic-Republican Party nomination naturally went to Madison, the incumbent President. He faced DeWitt Clinton, the Mayor of New York City, the Lieutenant Governor of New York, the nephew of recently deceased Vice President George Clinton … and a Democratic-Republican as well. 

Clinton ran a hybrid campaign; the Federalists did not make him their nominee, but he enjoyed significant support from sections of the party while continuing his appeal to antiwar Democratic-Republicans, many of whom also really wanted to see a New Yorker as President for the first time. That plan almost worked. If Clinton had won Pennsylvania (which Madison took with 62.6 percent of the vote), Electoral College victory would have been his.

Two years after he won reelection, New York City honored the President with a military parade ground named in his honor: Madison Square. (Clinton, somewhat awkwardly, was still the city’s mayor.) If the election had swung the other way, would this area have been named for a Virginian who had lost a national election to a prominent New York politician? Take, for example, the 1814 destruction of the White House by the British. If they pulled that off two years earlier, could Madison’s campaign have survived the disastrous P.R. of “the incumbent could not even protect his own house?”

DOMINO TWO: THE DEATH OF JAMES MADISON

On June 28, 1836, Madison died in Montpelier, his Virginia home, at the age of 85. This made Madison one of the longest-living presidents for some time; John Adams had lived to 90, but no other former commander in chief surpassed Madison until Herber Hoover died in 1964, two months after his 90th birthday.

In honor of Madison, New York City again plopped his name on a piece of infrastructure, this time a newly-built city street which we now know as Madison Avenue. Madison Avenue originates at the southeast corner of Madison Square Park at 23rd Street and runs uptown along the Upper East Side into Harlem.

Maybe this road was always going to be named after Madison given the square it borders. But the timing of the former president’s death certainly helped, as there was likely no other pressing reason to name the thoroughfare after him. Had Madison lived another year, maybe we’d be referring to Ross Avenue (Betsy) or Crockett Avenue (Davy) or Burr Avenue (Aaron), all of whom also died in 1836. This would significantly complicate the naming of the television show Mad Men, admittedly.

Instead, the Madison-ing of the avenue reinforced the Madison-ness of the square, and in 1847, a sodded and enclosed Madison Square was renamed Madison Square Park and opened to the public.

DOMINO THREE: MADISON SQUARE GARDEN GETS ITS NAME

If you’ve been to New York or looked at a map of the city, you might be wondering why we’re talking about a park that’s two blocks east and six blocks south of the arena where the Knicks and Rangers play. 

The current Madison Square Garden has three predecessors, and the first two of them were built right next to Madison Square Park. Still, somebody chose to lean into the geography; that somebody happened to be William Vanderbilt, the richest man in America upon his father Cornelius’s death in 1877. (Dad was nicknamed “the Commodore,” which is where Vanderbilt University got their sports nickname.)

Amongst the property William inherited was an open-air events space that had been built by P.T. Barnum in 1874; it was first known as The Great Roman Hippodrome before becoming Gilmore’s Garden. The previous ventures struggled financially, so, in 1879, William decided to class up the joint with updated landscaping, lighting, pathways, and a new name: Madison Square Garden. 

Again, if Barnum or Gilmore had made their businesses just off Madison Square Park work, the venue might never have gotten the name change by William Vanderbilt. The name stuck even once the original structure was torn down and replaced with an updated Madison Square Garden in 1890.

DOMINO FOUR: NEW YORK LIFE GIVES UP THE NAME

The land where the rebuilt 1890 version of Madison Square Garden sat belonged to the New York Life Insurance Company, who decided in the 1920s to let the existing leases at the Garden expire and build a new headquarters for the company at the site. Boxing promoter Tex Rickard had been using the Garden for many of his bouts, and he rounded up investors to fund the construction of a new sports arena at Eighth Avenue and 50thStreet.

But why come up with a new name when New Yorkers had associated spectacle and entertainment with “Madison Square Garden” for nearly five decades? He secured the rights to the name from New York Life, who did not plan to christen their headquarters that. 

They could have said no; an insurance company wasn’t interested in hosting boxing matches and dog shows, but the name might have appealed to them for nostalgia reasons. Instead, Tex took the name for his new building, geographic logic be damned. That officially untethered Madison Square Garden from the park, and when the current building was constructed 17 blocks south of Tex’s original, the name kept traveling with it.

Had these events unfolded differently, the name Madison Square Garden might never have been coined in the first place. The dominos fell just so, and that’s why the World’s Most Famous Arena is named after a park it’s not near, which is named after a President who wasn’t from the city. 

Oh, and one more thing: Tex’s new business went so well that he dreamed of building other Madison Square Gardens all over the country, and he expanded to Boston in 1928. That’s where the Boston Garden gets its name. Although that one did still get a corporate sponsor – TD, a subsidiary of Canada's Toronto-Dominion Bank.