Broadway in the Upper West Side is our Mitteleuropa boulevard. From 1868 to 1898, Broadway north of Columbus Circle was officially called, simply, the Boulevard. So it was called when Isidor Straus, the co-owner of Macy’s, moved into an old country house at Broadway and 105th Street, a house Straus eccentrically hung onto until well after it had become a Broadway anachronism.

Around the time the IRT came to Broadway in 1904, a flurry of apartment-house construction swept away most of the bucolic past. An example is the block-long Manhasset, on the west side of Broadway between 108th and 109th Streets. This was built in two phases – before it ever received a tenant. In 1899-1901 Joseph Wolf designed an eight-story building. The builder went bankrupt before its opening, and a new owner hired Janes & Leo, architects of the extravagant Dorilton at 71st Street, to enlarge the Manhasset, adding its great mansard and the beautiful classical entryways on the side streets. It opened in 1905.

Broadway crosses West End Avenue at 106th Street, forming Straus Park. Looking north from here, the Manhasset looms into view with an assertiveness rare in the gridded city.

The open space was called Bloomingdale Square until nine years after the Manhasset opened. In 1912 Isidor Straus and his wife Ida perished on the Titanic. She, an elderly woman in first class, could easily have been saved. But she chose to remain with her husband as the ship went down. She reportedly gave her place in the lifeboat, along with her fur coat, to her maid.

To New Yorkers this seemed somehow characteristic of the Strauses, known for their generosity and independent spirit. So the square was renamed, even as developers eagerly razed the anachronistic country house for another large apartment building.

A competition was held for a memorial to the Strauses. Criteria included that it not refer directly to them (for they would have disliked that) and that it evoke serenity. The winning memorial is now one of the city’s loveliest. It consists of a granite fountain basin and a granite exedra designed by Evarts Tracy. Fountains and exedrae are both foundational elements of a livable city. This is especially so when they frame a sculpture that is lovely to look at.

Augustus Lukeman’s “Memory” is nothing if not lovely. No more fetchingly languorous woman exists in our public sculpture. She reclines, in a gown that flows over her torso, her head propped pensively on her right hand. Ever contemplative, she brings out our contemplativeness, too.

In “Shadow Cities,” a beautiful essay in the New York Review of Books in 1997, Andre Aciman wrote of what Straus Park and “Memory” meant to him as an exile living in New York. He loved to sit in the little square, which he called “an oasis of the soul.” It seemed made “for retrospection, for finding oneself, for finding the center of things” – just as the Strauses would have wanted, and Tracy and Lukeman sought to deliver.