Herald Square is formed at the intersection of Manhattan’s 34th Street, Broadway, and Avenue of the Americas. Wherever Broadway crosses a Avenue there is a “Square.” Herald Square, Times Square, and Union Square are examples.
When I was a boy a half a century ago, New York City did a poor job of telling its own history in public spaces. Now, many sites and neighborhoods have markers and historical signs to alert passersbye to the history of the places they see. Herald Square is familiar to almost everyone in the U.S. as the area in front of Macy’s Department Store where the Thanksgiving Day Parade is at its apogee. In recent years it is also a space where you can learn a little bit about our Civil War Era history.
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The Herald Square history marker features James Gordon Bennett, Sr., the Herald’s iconic Civil War Era publisher. Bennett was an immigrant from Banffshire in Scotland. Born into a Catholic family in 1795, he would, after immigrating to the United States as a young man, become a vocal opponent of the Church. Bennett left Scotland in 1819, travelling first to Nova Scotia and later to Boston. He entered the newspaper industry in Charleston, South Carolina, then moved to New York City to work on a prominent newspaper there. In 1835, Bennett started the Herald, which attracted readers with its coverage of racy crimes that did not always make their way into the more staid news sheets. In spite of its popular crime coverage, the paper exerted national power by taking stands on government issues and interviewing prominent political leaders. It was the first newspaper to publish an interview with a sitting president when it interviewed Martin Van Buren.
During the 1840s and 1850s, up to 1860, Bennett backed men of four different parties for president. His candidates included Democrats, Whigs, and the Constitutional Union candidate John Bell in 1860. In 1864, Bennett promoted George McClellan’s Democratic candidacy, although the Herald did not formally endorse him.
While Bennett had many immigrant readers, he published Know Nothing propaganda like the fabricated Maria Monk memoir denouncing the Catholic Church. He also denigrated African Americans and did not advocate the end of slavery or the extension of civil rights at the end of the Civil War.
Bennett’s retrograde racial politics did not stop him from being an innovator in news coverage. He maximized the use of developing technologies like the telegraph and steam ships for rapid coverage of far-off events.
The statuary at the James Gordon Bennett Monument in Herald Square depicts the Goddess Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, with a bell being hammered by two bell ringers symbolically spreading knowledge through the ringing bell. The figures were on the old New York Herald building which stood in the Square but which was demolished in 1921.
At the base of the statues are tributes to James Gordon Bennett and his son of the same name who took over publishing the paper during Reconstruction when he was still in his 20s.
People visiting the Square can still hear the ringing bell! Of course, it is not the statuary bell that is ringing. The monument includes a gigantic clock on the top which triggers a bell inside the monument.
During the Bloomberg mayoralty Herald Square was repurposed for pedestrian use and there is now a nice are where people can sit and relax and enjoy the square. Food outlets are on the Square as are chess boards!
Minerva’s owls are on pedestals at the entrance to the monument, and you can see Macy’s Department Store with its own famous clock in the background. Macy’s was started in 1858, although the current building is a recent 1902 edifice.
The New York Public Library maintains an outdoor Reading Room in the Square on nice summer days where visitors can read a newspaper, though not the Herald.
Note: All photos on this page taken by Pat Young.
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