Seventh Avenue (Manhattan)

Fashion district information booth and sculpture at 39th Street

7th Avenue, looking south from 50th Street

Seventh Avenue/Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard is a thoroughfare on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It carries traffic downtown (southbound) south of Central Park but both ways north of it.

Seventh Avenue originates in the West Village at Clarkson Street, where Varick Street becomes Seventh Avenue. It is interrupted by Central Park from 59th to 110th Street. Artisans' Gate is the 59th Street exit from Central Park to Seventh Avenue. North of Warriors' Gate at the north end of the Park, the road runs in both directions through Harlem, where it is called Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. The road continues across the Harlem River via the Macombs Dam Bridge, where it becomes Jerome Avenue upon reaching the Bronx.

Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center on Seventh Avenue in the West Village is a main downtown hospital.

Running through the Garment District (which stretches from 12th Avenue to 5th Avenue and 34th Street to 39th Street), it is referred to as Fashion Avenue due to its role as a center of the garment and fashion industry and the famed fashion designers who established New York as a world fashion capital. The first, temporary signs designating the section of Seventh Avenue as "Fashion Avenue" were dual-posted in 1972, with permanent signs added over the ensuing years.

Seventh Ave is also famous for crossing Broadway and 42nd Street at an intersection known as Times Square. Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, The Fashion Institute of Technology, and Alwyn Court Apartments are some of the notable destinations that reside along 7th Avenue.

The AXA Center (originally The Equitable Tower), located at 787 Seventh Avenue and 51st Street, is a 229 meter (752 ft) tall skyscraper built in 1986 to house the AXA Group. Current cornerstone tenants include BNP Paribas, Sidley Austin LLP and Citigroup. Across the street to the northwest is 810 Seventh Avenue and two Sheraton Hotels to the north and west.

The street is mentioned in the Simon and Garfunkel song The Boxer, in which the protagonist mentions receiving "come-ons from the whores on Seventh Avenue." The Rolling Stones also note the street in "Shattered" stating, "I can't give it away on Seventh Avenue" while referencing other NYC fashion icons. It is also mentioned in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, when detective Sam Spade tells the gunman Wilmer that his telling him to "shove off" "would go over big back on Seventh Avenue. But you're not in Romeville now. You're in my burg."

In Dave Gibbons's Watching the Watchmen (Titan 2008), the comics artist speculates that the Gunga Diner, Utopia Cinema, Promethean Cab Co. and Institute for Extraspatial Studies are situated at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 31st Street.

External Links

NYCFashionInfo.com: The Official Source for NYC Fashion Information

References

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