Union Square does not strike us as historically hallowed ground. Named for the intersection, or “union,” of the Bowery and Bloomingdale Road, the square is also the intersection of fateful arcs of our national history.

At the southern end of the square stands a beautiful equestrian statue of George Washington. This was modeled by the important American sculptors Henry Kirke Brown and his young apprentice John Quincy Adams Ward. Washington bestrides his steed like Marcus Aurelius in the Campidoglio. He points southward, as though saying “Lo, it is Circuit City.” Actually, he points to the city ahead. We believe that the general passed near this spot on November 25, 1783, when he rode down from the Van Cortlandt mansion, in the Bronx, to reclaim the city from the British army.

In 1783, this was still countryside well north of the city. By 1848, when Henry and Mary James moved their family into a commodious house on 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, Union Square had become, in the words of the Herald,”now nearly the center of the fashionable faubourgs.” The Jameses departed for Europe in 1855. A year later, the statue was dedicated. Five years after that, Abraham Lincoln came to New York to deliver his great speech at the Cooper Institute.

Lincoln visited New York four times. The last time he was dead. On April 25, 1865, his funeral cortege made its plaintive passage north from City Hall through streets draped in mourning. The cortege proceeded along Broadway to Union Square, thence jogged onto Fifth Avenue en route to the Hudson River Railroad depot at 34th Street. At Union Square, the procession paused. Throngs gathered as Archbishop John McCloskey and Rabbi Samuel Isaacs, of Shaaray Tefila, said prayers. Five years later, Henry Kirke Brown added his second statue to the square: the standing bronze of Lincoln, looking south from the north end of the square.

By then, the fashionable faubourgs had moved north. Union Square had become a center of retailing, as well as the city’s theater district. Constant change is the theme of Union Square, as the age of Tiffany’s yielded to the age of S. Klein. Today, Union Square is again hot property. Retail chains have flocked to the square. Barnes & Noble occupies the lower floors of the old Century Magazine Building, a characterful 1880s piece on the north side of the square. On the east side of the square, the lovely Union Square Savings Bank (1905-07), designed by Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., has become the Daryl Roth Theatre. It marks the return of theatrical activity to the square, just as Barnes & Noble represents an updating of the square’s old Brentano’s Literary Emporium. The glorious Greenmarket has spawned a restaurant renaissance in the neighborhood, recalling 19th-century days when Luchow’s offered pre-or post-performance repast to audiences from the Academy of Music, at Irving Place and 14th Street.

In a sense, Union Square moves forward into the past.