It just gets weirder on my Madison Square Park tour as I descend the island to the southwestern quadrant. One building which always grabs my eye is the Met-Life Tower, not to be confused with the taller, newer, and more well-known Met-Life Building which announces itself in great white letters in the city's skyline. The tower fits importantly in my early impressions of New York City because of a film of a worker scaling to the top of the bell-shaped spire and waving at the camera with his hat (I can't find this footage on Youtube, but I would advise all interested parties to check out Ric Burns' "New York" documentary which does have the footage). The monolith held the title of World's Tallest for three years until it was surpassed by the Woolworth building in 1913. One feature of the tower peculiar to New York is a grand round-faced clock. In a city that has embraced wristwatches and more recently, cell phones, I doubt the Met-Life Tower ever had a chance at becoming as iconic as Big Ben in London or the Old Town Hall Clock in Prague. Before the days of individual timekeepers, clock towers were communal devices signaling the end of workdays and calls to worship. In New York, each person is his own island, a complex of occasions as Charles Olson would have it. Placed in a collectivist European city, the Met-Life Tower might have been a great locus to which people made pilgrimages towards like the Camino de Santiago. But here in New York, it hardly warrants a glance upwards.
Skipping past Shake Shack and William Seward (who is not related to William S. Burroughs), I come to the most occultishly interesting phenomena at the tip of the Flatiron Building. I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, 23 Skidoo. This was a fad expression printed on pennants and arm bands in the 1920's, much in the style of "Don't Have a Cow,Man" or "Where's the beef?"
I've looked this term up in various slang dictionaries and found it to basically mean "get out while the getting's good." It was a meme which can be found in numerous pieces of pop culture of the era and even in the transcript of the Titanic sinking. Allegedly, the term comes from the wind tunnel effect created on 23rd Street famous for lifting up ladies' skirts. Crowds of layabouts used to lean on the building for the sole purpose of catching a glimpse of ankles and bloomers. The cops got in the habit of shooing them away and the code for it became "23 Skidoo."
The whole term carries some occult weight for the mere usage of the number "23" which ties it into the whole "23 Enigma" (first identified by William Burroughs!). Way back in 1912, the intellectual warlock Aleister Crowley published a poem entitled "23 Skidoo" in his "Book of Lies"--(Read on page 55, here).
The term was also used as the title of Otto Preminger's 1968 LSD-inspired film which starred Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Burgess Meredith, Mickey Rooney, Slim Pickens, and Groucho Marx in his last film role playing "God." The urban legend surrounding it is that all the cast and crew of this bizarre film were taking LSD during the filming--funny to imagine Gleason from "The Honeymooners" tripping. I've watched bits and pieces of the film--(available to watch here and if you can make it through the whole thing, your patience is greater than mine). I can attest that Carol Channing's pupils seem dilated as dinner plates, but they were always kind of like that, right?
Well, finally, just to add to the weirdness of Madison Square Park is the Pentagram Building across the street on 5th Avenue. It's just this building that says "Pentagram" on the front, see? Does anyone else think that's weird or is it just me? Hello? Hello?

Madison Square Park is gothic and creepy--roiling at its corners are Masons, Satanists, Illuminati, and everything else that terrified Robert Anton Wilson. It seems almost exclusively devoted to secret histories.

The first thing to unnerve me was a monument to Chester A. Arthur who was the 21st President of the United States. Now, I'm enough of a history buff to recall the achievements of most presidents--but Arthur? The guy was born in Vermont where I lived for 4 years and I still hadn't heard of him. Turns out he replaced the big man Garfield in 1881 after Garfield took a bullet to his fat belly and Chester finished his term. Now Chester was known for two notable acts-one decent, one ignominious. He was the father of the civil service by passing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act which insured plenty of government jobs for those who could pass a written examination. Notoriously, he also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned immigration of coolie laborers for the next ten years-(we must have not need any railroad track lain at that point.)) Perhaps he was good essentially (Mark Twain gave his administration a ringing endorsement) but ultimately chose to a certain anonynimity as this is his most famous attribution: "I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business."

"Damn the torpedoes," quoth one Union admiral envired in front of the Madison Square Park reflecting pool overlooking legions of plaid-shorted Euro-tourists suffering mild heat strokes. David Glasgow Farragut, admiral of the U.S. Navy, was a hero of both the War of 1812 and the Civil War. In his finest moment he led his fleet to victory against the Confederates in the Battle of Mobile Bay, navigating full steam through a minefield (which were called "torpedoes" back then). When the USS Tecumseh hit a depth charge and sank, the fleet began to retreat. Lashed to the rigging of his flagship Hartford, he signaled by way of trumpet, "What's the Trouble?," to which the response from the USS Brooklyn was "Torpedoes," and he lay down that famous line before ordering the ships full steam ahead and winning a crucial naval victory.

So why hadn't I heard of him before looking him up? I'm enough of a Civil War buff to know that if Lee had listened to Longstreet, flanked Meade instead of sending Pickett up the middle, the Confederacy would have won. I'm enough of a Tennessean to know Davy Crockett, John Sevier, Sequoyah, Andrew Jackson, Minnie Pearle, Dolly Parton, and even Popcorn Sutton, but I really had never, ever heard of Admiral Farragut, even though he was born 50 miles from where I was. As though to rub mud in my face at my ignorance of this native kinsman, I stumbled upon Farragut Square in Washington D.C. last weekend. Looking upon the stoic image this man cut, I'd say he probably caught the eye of bronze sculptors and maybe even Lincoln himself to whom he was a favorite.
Well, there's plenty more of Madison Square Park to visit, so check back later in the week for the second installment of my tour!