From an imaginatively restored Victorian square to a floating garden, Louise Nicholson revels in Manhattan's rus in urbe

Apollo, Sept, 2005 by Louise Nicholson

London's squares are well known; New York's less so. Like other parts of the city, their fortunes rise and fall. One in particular, Madison Square Park, has recently been rescued and dusted down to become a hip meeting place and the most important changing outdoor gallery for contemporary sculpture in Manhattan.

It is a joyous story, worth telling to encourage imitators. The square evolved slowly. The commissioners' 1811 plan for the city's grid expansion up the island kept a 240-acre void between 23rd and 34th streets, the intention being to create a grand public space. By the 1840s, development had eaten all but a patch of 6.23 acres which, on 10 May 1847, opened as possibly the city's first official public park. Named after the fourth president, James Madison, it was one of several speculative developments in the area that included Union, Gramercy and Stuyvesant parks, aiming to create a rus in urbe residential area.

Madison Square was soon surrounded by brownstones. Then, after the Department of Public Parks was formed in 1870, it was re-landscaped by William Grant and Ignatz Pilat. Pilat, the department's chief landscape architect, had assisted Frederick Law Olmsted on designs for Central Park. The Olmsted influence is present in the sinuous paths leading to a central oval lawn and an elaborate cast-iron fountain, all much enjoyed by late-nineteenth-century high society--Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Wharton were born in nearby streets, and Winston Churchill's grandfather, the tycoon Leonard Jerome, built a mansion overlooking the park, complete with an opera theatre. Commerce flourished too: Daniel H. Burnham and Co.'s landmark Flatiron Building went up in 1901-1903. But as the twentieth century progressed the park lost its glamour.

Finally, in the late 1990s, when people walked around the park rather than through it, Debbie Landau and restaurant owner Danny Meyer campaigned to revive the lost square. The Madison Square Park Conservancy was founded, inspired by the successful Central Park Conservancy, and funds were raised to mend and then maintain the park. The goals were to restore it to its 1870s state, revive an open space for the neighbourhood, create an outdoor gallery for contemporary sculpture and make Madison Square Park a New York destination. HM White Site Architects were appointed, specialists in parks and open spaces. Hank White, the principal partner, remembers well the mess he found. 'We respected the park's history', he explains, 'by reorganising the visual clutter to create spatial clarity and bring the Victorian elements to light'.

For the gallery spaces, White created informal 'outdoor rooms ready to receive a variety of sculptures'. To fund the art shows the retail store Target gave $1 million to the City Parks Foundation, which then appointed the Public Art Fund as curator. Since 2000, Tony Oursler's The Influence Machine, Wim Delvoye's Gothic and two group shows have been exhibited annually. Stewart Desmond of the Madison Square Park Conservancy says artists love to show here--Mark di Survero would chat with people looking at his three steel beam sculptures exhibited in 2004, while the more retiring Sol le Witt quietly watches how visitors encounter his two concrete works on exhibition now until the end of the year, Okcle with Towers and Curved Wall with Towers.

Sol le Witt is the first in a three-year plan for the square's art--Ursula von Rydingsvard comes in 2006, Roxy Pains in 2007. Mr Desmond wants to expand to have three shows a year and to include more artists working with light, sound and projection. All this, together with a full children's art programme, evening music concerts and Danny Meyer's hip Shake Shack cafe: Madison Square Park has revived as a historical square for today's New Yorkers.

The Robert Smithson retrospective at the Whitney Museum (until 23 October) is being promoted by a floating annex. It is the realisation of a playful 1970 pencil drawing by Smithson, Floating Island to TravelAround Manhattan, showing a tugboat pulling a lush garden through the water in front of skyscrapers (right). Weather permitting, his dream will become reality from 17 to 25 September (8am to 8pm), thanks to the Whitney and the Minetta Brook arts organisation. Nurseries and parks are supplying the native New York shrubs and trees. After their show-time stint in a barge full of soil, they will be planted in Central Park. The boat will navigate the ships and ferries of New York harbour and the Hudson and East rivers to chug round the island for all to view from the thirteen public piers, Battery Park and other riverside landmarks. Smithson, who died tragically aged 35 in 1973, was a New Jersey boy who studied in New York and had his first show at the Artist's Gallery. He will surely be there in spirit.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]