Verdi Square

Verdi Square occupies a small triangular slice of land where Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue converge. While it serves as a serene urban park today, its irregular shape is a direct result of the old Bloomingdale Road cutting diagonally across the rigid Manhattan street grid. The site was originally part of the eighteenth-century village of Harsenville, a collection of rural estates and summer villas that predated the dense apartment blocks you see now. When the city acquired the land in eighteen eighty-seven, it was initially designated as a portion of Sherman Square, only receiving its current name decades later to honor the Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi.