The good kind of MSG

Madison Square Garden will be 135 years old in June 2014, but the giant arena that we know as “The Garden” today is really the fourth of its type in New York City.  

MSG 1.0 was actually built in Madison Square, about 8 blocks southwest of the current site.  

It was a roofless venue with seating for 10 thousand people, and staged circuses, dog shows, and flower competitions.  In the late 1880s, when professional cycling was all the rage in the United States, MSG was the most important velodrome in the country.  The Madison, the team event in track cycling (and featured in our modern summer Olympics) is named after the venue.  Incidentally, the Australian line dance to Nutbush City Limits is also called “The Madison”, but sadly it has no connection to MSG or New York.  Anyway, the absence of a roof made MSG 1.0 too hot in summer and too cold in winter, so it was demolished in June 1889.  

Version 2.0 (plus roof) was opened on the same site a year later.  Gala music performances, more circuses and one Democratic Convention were held here, before it too was demolished in 1926.  

Version 3.0 was built further uptown in Hell’s Kitchen, and is perhaps most famous for staging Marilyn’s breathy birthday serenade to JFK in 1962. 

Six years after that show-stopping performance, MSG 4.0 (the current Garden) was opened on the site above Penn Station on W34th Street.  MSG 4.0  has seating for 19,763 people.  Elton John has played The Garden sixty-five times, but Billy Joel still holds the ticket sales record, having performed 12 consecutive sell-out shows there in 2006, and he has residency there now.