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Dear Diary: Not long ago, I got off the express bus at Madison Square Park with a friend to attend a business dinner at a smart restaurant nearby. A young man holding an instrument case rushed over to my friend and asked if he would sell the black shirt that he was wearing. The young man explained that he desperately needed the shirt: he was late to play a gig and had no luck finding a black shirt at nearby stores. My friend could name his price and he would gladly pay it. After a moment's hesitation, my friend took off his sport jacket, removed his shirt and handed it over, saying, ''Fifty dollars!'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IT was sometime in the mid-1980s, Carol Peligian recalls, that she told her broker not to telephone her until she'd found her an apartment among the run-down, sparsely populated commercial blocks of Fifth Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets. The broker's response was succinct: ''You're out of your mind.'' Ms. Peligian's husband, Robert Boghosian, was scarcely more enthusiastic. But Ms. Peligian, an artist, recognized New York as a great shape-shifting organism; she felt that the decidedly unglamorous area below Madison Square Park might have a future to match its richly textured past. At the time, that stretch of Fifth Avenue was ''like a canyon: it was abandoned, it was vast and boarded up,'' she said. ''But it had a faded old beauty just waiting to be cared for a little bit.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BY day it's the Canal Street of Midtown, a blurry tumble of frantic shop fronts in an epic half-mile panorama, Perfume-Hairpieces-Jewelry-Sweatshirts-Sunglasses. But by night the stretch of Broadway from 26th to 31st Street, between the Shake Shack and Herald Square, gives a foretaste of what promises to be a hip new hotel center. This section of Broadway got its big break in the 1870s, as a new entertainment district coalesced north of Madison Square, bringing hotels and restaurants. The marble-fronted Grand Hotel, at the southeast corner of 31st Street, opened in 1868, followed in 1871 by the gangly 300-room Gilsey Hotel, at the northeast corner of 29th. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ON any given day in Madison Square Park, New Yorkers seem more willing to wait on line for a single Shake Shack burger than they might at the Louvre for a glimpse of the ''Mona Lisa.'' After four years of attracting devotees who stand on hourlong lines at its 20-by-20-foot stand, Shake Shack, Danny Meyer's burger and milkshake joint, plans to open a larger indoor restaurant in mid-October on Columbus Avenue and West 77th Street. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information on the restaurant 230 Fifth located in Madison Square Park in New York City.