The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019 6:30-8:00 pm

Suzanne Hinman Book Talk

The Grandest Madison Square Garden

When completed in 1890, the (second) Madison Square Garden complex on the northeast corner of Manhattan's Madison Square featured the tallest tower in the country, from its base to the 18-foot sculpture of a nude Diana. In The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York, art historian Suzanne Hinman examines the lives and achievements of the two creative minds behind the building, architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, as a gateway to explore the art, architecture, and popular entertainment of Gilded Age New York City. For her illustrated talk, Hinman will focus on White’s struggle to get the building constructed, its initial reception, and eventual destruction in 1925 to make way for the New York Life Building skyscraper.


Suzanne Hinman is an independent scholar and former curator, gallerist, professor, and museum director at the Savannah College of Art and Design. While serving as associate director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, she developed her interest in the artists and architects of the American Gilded Age and the famed Cornish Art Colony. The Grandest Madison Square Garden is her first book.

The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.