Grand Army Plaza (Manhattan)

Grand Army Plaza lies between 58th Street and 60th Street, just west of Fifth Avenue and just east of East Drive. It is bisected by Central Park South. The plaza is bounded on the north by Scholars Gate, once one of the two main entrances to the carriage drives of Central Park; bounded on the west by the famed Plaza Hotel; bounded on the south by the Bergdorf Goodman department store, formerly the site of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II House, once one of Fifth Avenue's grandest Gilded Age mansions.The centerpiece of the plaza's northern half (carved out of the southeastern corner of Central Park), is the equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, while the principal feature of the plaza's southern half is the Pulitzer Fountain, topped with a bronze statue of the Roman goddess Pomona sculpted by Karl Bitter.The idea for a unified treatment of the plaza was first proposed by Bitter in 1898. The current layout was designed by Beaux-Arts architecture firm Carrère and Hastings and completed in 1916. The New York City Board of Aldermen named it Grand Army Plaza in 1923 after the Grand Army of the Potomac.