7 facts about Columbus Circle

Columbus Circle is the traditional municipal zero-mile point from which all official city distances are measured, although Google Maps uses New York City Hall for this purpose. For decades, Hagstrom sold maps that showed the areas within 25 miles (40 km) or 75 miles (121 km) from Columbus Circle.

You’ve come across Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel, on multiple occasions. She’s the face of New York City, memorialized in statues that decorate various institutions and tourist attractions throughout the city. Among a number of places, you’ll find her sitting on top of the Manhattan Municipal Building downtown, on the facade of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and as Columbia Triumphant for the USS Maine Monument in Columbus Circle.

Known by the nickname, “Miss Manhattan,” Munson made a living by posing as a model for photographers, painters and sculptors in the early 1900s.

In 1903, just two years before the installation of the area’s famed traffic circle, the 1,355-capacity Majestic Theatre opened at 5 Columbus Circle. The theater was famous for hosting first musical production of The Wizard of Oz, among other things, and thanks to the theater crowd it attracted, a number of eating and drinking establishments popped up in the area soon after it opened.

The circle became known as a center for soapbox orators in the early-mid 20th century, comparable to Speakers Corner in London. It became a home particularly for non-leftists in contrast to Union Square, and for a time in the late 1930s it became a home to a number of far right speakers.

The area sometimes had a poor reputation for cranks and street preachers, the “lunatic fringe whose tub-thumping make a nightmare of Columbus Circle” condemned by a New York Court of Appeals ruling in a case related to elsewhere in the city,that prompted mid-20th century configurations, but was also sometimes showcased by the national government as a rambunctious symbol of American freedom of speech.

In the 1950s, Robert Moses razed San Juan Hill, a predominantly black neighborhood that stretched from 59th to 65th Streets, bordered by Amsterdam and 11th Avenues. Although the neighborhood had struggled with violent crime (its gangs reportedly inspired the opening sequence of West Side Story), it was also home to 7,000 people, had a rich cultural history (the Charleston was invented here), and boasted a number of famed jazz spots.

But in 1955 Moses had declared the area a “blighted slum,” and thanks to his position as the head of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, he was able to order the area cleared and replaced in part with what is now Lincoln Center, and used some of the federal funds to build the aforementioned Coliseum.

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