NEW YORK (AP) — Republican Donald Trump's rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden follows a long series of political events in the storied New York arena.

The garden has hosted Democratic and Republican national conventions since the 19th century, and in 1939, thousands attended successive Nazi and Communist Party rallies in the run-up to World War II. Marilyn Monroe took the stage to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962, cementing the legend surrounding what the New York Knicks announcer calls “the most famous arena in the world!”

Here are some highlights from the political history of Madison Square Garden, which has housed four buildings over time.

Grover Cleveland is making a comeback

Grover Cleveland is the only U.S. president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Trump hopes to be second.

After the 1892 Democratic National Convention met in Chicago and nominated Cleveland – who was out of office after serving from 1885 to 1889 – he accepted the nomination with a speech at Madison Square Garden – the second – in his home state of New York.

The Evening World reported that “a band stationed on one of the balconies played popular songs, with the audience joining in the chorus of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” and “Four years more of Grover.”

Cleveland promised to lower tariffs, while Trump had already said so High tariffs are imposed on foreign goods would stimulate the US economy. Cleveland then defeated Republican Benjamin Harrison to become both the 24th and 22nd President.

A record-breaking 103 ballots

The Democratic Party, which met at the second Madison Square Garden in 1924, was deeply divided over immigration, Prohibition and the growing prominence of the Ku Klux Klan. The race was deadlocked between William Gibbs McAdoo of California and New York Governor Alfred E. Smith, whom the Klan opposed because he was Roman Catholic.

From June 24 to July 9, vote after vote failed to secure a nomination. The Associated Press reported July 2 that McAdoo “reached the long-sought goal of 500 votes through much frantic work and persuasion and maneuvering by his floor managers, who said they had not yet finished their work.”

It wasn't enough. After both McAdoo and Smith dropped out, a compromise candidate, former West Virginia Congressman John W. Davis, was nominated on the 103rd ballot. he later lost to Republican Calvin Coolidge.

Speeches by Hoover, Roosevelt

While the first two gardens were located near Madison Square—where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at 23rd Street—the third was located northwest of that neighborhood, at Eighth Avenue and West 50th Street. It opened in 1925 and hosted both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during their campaigns.

To Roosevelt, a Democrat who favored “a New Deal for the American people,” Hoover, the incumbent Republican president, said in a speech on October 21, 1932, that he rejected “the proposal to change the entire foundations of our national life “.

Roosevelt defeated Hoover and then spoke at the Garden again during his 1936 and 1940 campaigns.

In a fiery speech on October 31, 1936, he railed against “the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, ruthless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteers.” “Never before in our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they are today,” Roosevelt said. “They are united in their hatred of me – and I welcome their hatred.”

Nazis, communists gather

More than 20,000 people attended a rally in the Garden on February 20, 1939, organized by the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi group that hung swastikas next to a giant portrait of George Washington.

The group's national secretary, James Wheeler-Hill, claimed that if the first U.S. president were still alive, he would be “friends with Adolf Hitler.” Bund leader Fritz Kuhn, wearing a Nazi armband, called for a “socially just, white, non-Jewish United States” and “non-Jew-controlled unions, free from the Jewish rule of Moscow.”

A Jewish protester, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, stormed onto the stage. The AP reported what happened next:

“Immediately a dozen or more stormtroopers attacked him, knocking him down and beating him while he held his head in his arms and his black, wild hair flowed. A squad of police pushed the stormtroopers aside, picked him up from the platform floor, held him high above their heads, and ran toward an exit. Most of his clothing was torn from his body. He was later charged with disorderly conduct.”

The 1930s were also the peak of the Communist Party's popularity in the United States. Police estimated that a week after the Bund meeting, 16,000 to 17,000 people attended a communist rally in the garden. CPUSA general secretary Earl Browder said the allegations that American communists took their orders from Moscow constituted “a slanderous attack” spread by supporters of the “anti-Comintern alliance of Rome-Berlin-Tokyo warmongers,” the reported AP.

President's birthday party

A Democratic Party fundraiser and John F. Kennedy's birthday party, where Marilyn Monroe wore one skintight dress to serenade the President, took place on May 19, 1962 in the third edition of the garden.

It was the hottest May Day in New York City's history, with temperatures reaching 99 degrees (37 degrees Celsius). “Heat was still heating up in the Garden when the president remarked, 'I can retire from politics now,' after a sultry rendition of Marilyn Monroe's 'Happy Birthday,'” the AP reported.

Monroe and Kennedy both died within a year and a half of each other, she from a drug overdose and he from an assassin's bullet.

George Wallace campaigns in New York

The current Garden opened in 1968, about a mile south of its predecessor, home to the NBA's Knicks and the NHL's Rangers musical performances, Price wars and other spectacles.

George Wallace, the former and future governor of Alabama, gave a speech during his 1968 presidential run as the American Independent Party candidate in which he advocated “Stand Up for America” ​​for the kind of populist nationalism that inspired Trump's “Make America Great.” “Defines Again” movement.

Wallace's campaign was less explicitly racist than in Alabama, but he championed law and order: As protesters interrupted the Garden rally, Wallace questioned why Democratic and Republican leaders were “capitulating to these anarchists.”

“There are no riots in Alabama. “They start a riot down there and the first one of them to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that's all,” Wallace said.

Republican Richard Nixon then defeated Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Wallace to win the presidency.

Meeting place for Democrats and Republicans

The 1976, 1980 and 1992 Democratic National Conventions and the 2004 Republican National Convention also took place in this garden.

When Jimmy Carter accepted his nomination, he alluded to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. “Our country has been through a time of torment,” Carter said. “It is now a time of healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.”

Carter returned in 1980 and faced a challenge from Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, who lacked the delegates he needed. AP reporters noted that Kennedy's “futile struggle to reverse the odds was symbolized in the convention center, where its tiny rooms contrasted with five large, white trailers decorated in Carter's campaign green from which the president's men headed Congress.” led.”

Carter won the nomination but lost the election to Republican Ronald Reagan.

When Democrats met again in 1992, Bill Clinton accepted his nomination in a 52-minute speech that “tested the attention of many in the partisan audience,” according to AP political reporter David Espo. Clinton promised “a government that is leaner, not meaner; a government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy.”

The Republican Party held its only convention at Madison Square Garden in 2004, when New York was still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center.

“We will build a safer world and a more hopeful America, and nothing will hold us back,” said President George W. Bush.

In the city outside, more than 1,800 people were arrested demonstrating against the Iraq war and for other causes.

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Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.