Читать книгу Mad Men's Manhattan - Mark P. Bernardo - Страница 6

“Oh, you mean love. You mean the big lightning bolt to the heart where you can’t eat and you can’t work and you just run off and get married and have babies. The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”

—Don Draper to Rachel Menken, Season 1, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

Madison Avenue, which runs from Madison Square Park at 23^rd Street to the Madison Avenue Bridge at 138^th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, has become synonymous with the advertising industry in the United States. Both the park and the avenue are named for James Madison, the fourth U.S. president. Madison Avenue’s association with advertising began in the 1920s, when the industry experienced tremendous growth. Yet, advertising as a business has existed in New York City since long before that: there were twenty agencies based there as early as 1861.

“Madison Avenue” was first used as a term to refer to the ad industry in 1923, and although the association between the area and the business remains, many large agencies have migrated to other areas of the city due to the rising costs of office space on the East Side. In the 1950s, however, it was widely accepted wisdom that any agency that wanted to achieve success would set up shop on Madison. Thus, it made perfect sense for series creator Matthew Weiner to place his fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency there. (The term “mad men” is a contraction of “Madison Avenue ad men.”)

Sharp-eyed Mad Men viewers may have noticed that the Sterling Cooper offices have a real-world address: 405 Madison Avenue. Although it is tempting to make this the first stop on a Mad Men city tour, those who do may be disappointed to find that there is no office building at this location, just a bank of ATMs. (A visit to a cash machine might be a good idea for a first stop on a Mad Men tour.)