East 23rd Street, which runs between Fifth Avenue and the East River (FDR Drive), is a main street of Manhattan's neighborhood of Gramercy Park. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MetLife), headquartered at 1 Madison Avenue at East 23rd Street, played a significant role in shaping the character of development along East 23rd Street in the early 20th century.
Opposite Madison Square Park on East 23rd Street are two skyscrapers originally built by MetLife. 1 Madison Avenue, with its ornate clocktower face, was one of Manhattan's first skyscrapers. 11 Madison Avenue was intended to be the base of a much taller skyscraper, but the onset of the Depression forced MetLife to scale back its plans. Even so, the building stands today as an Art Deco masterpiece.
Peter Cooper Village, one of MetLife's experiments in middle-income community building (until bought by Tishman Speyer). Peter Cooper Village was a sister project to MetLife's Stuyvesant Town, which was built across 20th Street to the south.
On the far east end of East 23rd are Stuyvesant Cove Park, the Asser Levy Public Baths, and a parking garage now used as a gas station.
On October 17, 1966, this street was also witness to New York's deadliest fire in terms of firefighters killed until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The "23rd Street Fire", as it came to be called, began in a cellar at 7 East 22nd Street and soon spread to the basement of 6 East 23rd Street, a five-story commercial building that housed a drugstore at street level. Twelve firefighters were killed; two chiefs, two lieutenants, and six firefighters plunged into the flaming cellar, while two more firefighters were killed by the blast of flame and heat on the first floor.
The Flatiron Building is on the south side of the street at Broadway. The origin of the term "23 skidoo" is said to be from wind gusts caused by the building's triangular shape or hot air from a shaft through which immense volumes of air escaped, producing gusts that supposedly lifted women's skirts.
Read more about this topic: 23rd Street (Manhattan)
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“The majority of the men of the North, and of the South and East and West, are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not send men to Congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty,... it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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