Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"values and business of advertising and public relations," 1954, from the street in Manhattan, laid out c.1836 and named for U.S. President James Madison. The concentration of advertising agencies there seems to date from the 1940s.
Wikipedia
Madison Avenue is a north-south avenue in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, United States, that carries northbound one-way traffic. It runs from Madison Square (at 23rd Street) to meet the southbound Harlem River Drive at 142nd Street. In doing so, it passes through Midtown, the Upper East Side (including Carnegie Hill), East Harlem, and Harlem. It is named after and arises from Madison Square, which is itself named after James Madison, the fourth President of the United States.
Madison Avenue was not part of the original New York City street grid established in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, and was carved between Park Avenue (formerly Fourth) and Fifth Avenue in 1836, due to the effort of lawyer and real estate developer Samuel B. Ruggles who had previously purchased and developed New York's Gramercy Park in 1831, who was in part responsible for the development of Union Square, and who also named Lexington Avenue.
Since the 1920s, the street's name has been metonymous with the American advertising industry. Therefore, the term "Madison Avenue" refers specifically to the agencies, and methodology of advertising. "Madison Avenue techniques" refers, according to William Safire, to the "gimmicky, slick use of the communications media to play on emotions."
Madison Avenue was an Australian electronic music duo consisting of writer-producer Andy Van Dorsselaer and singer-lyricist Cheyne Coates. Madison Avenue is best known for the song " Don't Call Me Baby", which peaked at number two on the ARIA Singles Chart in 1999 and number one in New Zealand and the United Kingdom in 2000.
Madison Avenue is a street in the borough of Manhattan in New York City
Madison Avenue can also refer to:
- Madison Avenue (Baltimore), a street in Baltimore, Maryland
- Madison Avenue (film), a film by H. Bruce Humberstone with Dana Andrews, Eleanor Parker and Jeanne Crain
- Madison Avenue (band), a dance music group from Australia
Madison Avenue is a 1961 CinemaScope film directed by H. Bruce Humberstone starring Dana Andrews, Jeanne Crain and Eleanor Parker. The film was completed in 1960 but was not released immediately. On April 13, 1961, Madison Avenue opened at the Rialto Cinema in London's West End for a two-week run. In late April, the film had a UK general release as part of a double bill with The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. The film was not seen in the United States until January 1962.
Usage examples of "madison avenue".
Right now I'm moving down Madison Avenue, after spending close to an hour standing in a daze near the bottom of the staircase at the Ralph Lauren store on Seventy‑.
Half an hour later they had made their way across town to Madison Avenue.
Then a Negro -- someone's butler from a house in Madison Avenue -- enraged me, and I struck him.
Seward felt that he deserved full credit for having so bombarded the archbishop with telegrams that His Eminence had been obliged to summon the faithful to his house on Madison Avenue, where he had scolded and soothed a crowd of some five thousand men, mostly Irish.
Subcults reach out to capture us and appeal to our most private fantasies in ways far more powerful and subtle than any yet devised by Madison Avenue.
And I'd have to work at my father's and ride in Madison Avenue buses and read newspapers.
The vehicular traffic on Madison Avenue was moderate, as was the number of pedestrians.
Tarras, a week before, had prepared for him an exhaustive exegesis of his own work of legal compilation, with the help of the Madison Avenue task force.
I am private secretary to a rich man, and live in a fine brown-stone house on Madison Avenue.
We rode uptown along Madison Avenue, turned into Central Park, and came out by the West 72d Street entrance.