The physical likeness of the statue of Beauty atop the fountain just south of the entrance steps to the library is the model Audrey Munson, whose countenance and contours have provided the personification of Civic Fame above the Municipal Building; the figure of Abundance as goddess Pomona outside the Plaza Hotel; and “Columbia Triumphant” at the USS Maine Monument for the bombed ship that ushered the US into the Spanish-American War. After a suicide attempt and failing mental health, brought upon by pressure from family and the media, Audrey was checked into an upstate asylum in 1931, where she died over 60 years later at age 104.

The four corners of the flagpole seem to symbolize the virtues of the western world before the onset of World War I, but in fact the totems north and south of the library facade were installed at the eve of World War II, when they may have seemed as both hallowed and dated as today, yet remain the type of ideas that sent explorers cleaving the waves of the Atlantic to colonize lands where civilizations of peoples had inhabited for thousands of years: “Conquest,” represented by a sword; “Discovery,” represented by a globe; “Adventure,” by the ship Argo; and “Civilization,” by a topless female holding a book. The whole structure rests on the backs of four turtles, which reference creation myths of the Lenni Lenape, who dwelled in Manhattan long long long before Director-General Peter Syuyvesant, or his successor, Rudolph Giuliani.

The New York Public Library is a horizontal mammoth in a nexoid of skytowers; it is a tranquil dominion of free information and public learning in the most dense cross-section of commuter traffic between the Atlantic Ocean and the Los Angeles River. Two blocks east, 750,000 people pass through Grand Central Terminal every weekday, and four blocks west at the Port Authority a half a million bus riders go to and fro in and out of a box-like monolith as utilitarian as Grand Central is mythical. NYPL is a physical and psychological civic space that conducts like electric current between each famous structure.

The signs of the zodiac limn the entrance to this late 1920s, pre-crash office tower that connects W. 42nd Street with W. 43rd through a lobby arched with Guastavino ceilings.

There was a time in the mid-1800s when this Art Brut waterworks served as a public promenade with the highest views of the city.

William Cullen Bryant, a 19th century poet and namesake of the library’s backyard park, edited the New York Evening Post, advocated for the emergence of the Republican Party in the 1850s, espoused ending slavery and supported the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here he sits in commanding intellectual posture, embodying the western liberal mind and spirit. Across from Bryant - not pictured here - sits the statue of another American poet, Gertrude Stein, sculpted in the 1920s but not installed in the park until the 1990s - the first statue of a real female (versus a personification or symbol, like Audrey Munson) in NYC since Joan of Arc in Riverside Park in 1915; Gertrude sits in the lotus position, in meditative repose, zenlike, at one with the universal void. These two statues anchor the soul and central nervous system of the library and the midtown park.

This was New York’s first World Fair, existing for a handful of years before the Civil War. A centerpiece attraction was the Latting Observatory, which had an observation deck 315 feet tall, providing visitors the highest view of the islandscape up to that time - 30 feet taller than the Flatiron Building. The nonrepresentational totem burned up in an 1858 fire.

This is the former site of a modest rowhouse occupied in the 1890s by the Comstock School for Young Ladies, where 18-year old Helen Potts was poisoned to death with quinine by her sicko medical student newlywed husband, Carlyle Harris, who tried to make it look like Helen OD’d on prescription pills for chronic migraines. Prior to the murder, Harris twice attempted, and failed, to perform an abortion in the second trimester of Helen’s pre-matrimonial pregnancy. Sick, fearful, and in severe pain, Helen traveled alone to Scranton, PA, where her doctor uncle completed the botched procedure and saved her life. Haris was arrested for the murder and spent ten months in the Tombs during the trial, which was covered heavily in Mauve Decade newspapers. In 1893, Harris was electrocuted by the State of New York. Today, gotham folklore has it that the new 1907 building is haunted by the ghost of Helen Potts, whose unbearable migraines cause her shrieking cries of pain to echo in the hallways on the anniversary of her death.

A 1920s steeple of class-act Art Deco, the golden tips of the tower are supposed to mimic the hue of a radiator aflame, and symbolic figures at the base of the building represent states of heat such as “lust” and “labor” and “drunkenness.” The lower facade is also decorated with fire-breathing salamanders - a symbol of the court of King Francis I, under whose auspices in 1524 the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed to the “New World” - allegedly the first European to blaze the waters of Lower New York Bay, and cast western eyes on the shores of Brooklyn and Staten Island. In 1926, Lynn Bomar of the New York Giants stood on the roof of the building and hail mary’d a football into Bryant Park, where Giants halfback Hickey Haines, wearing a waistcoat and tie, caught what the papers called the longest forward pass on record.