The Central Park: Original Designs for New York's Greatest Treasure

By Cynthia S. Brenwall and Martin Filler

A pictorial history of the development of New York City’s Central Park from conception to completion.

Drawing on the unparalleled collection of original designs for Central Park in the New York City Municipal Archives, Cynthia S. Brenwall tells the story of the creation of New York’s great public park, from its conception to its completion. This treasure trove of material ranges from the original winning competition entry; to meticulously detailed maps; to plans and elevations of buildings, some built, some unbuilt; to elegant designs for all kinds of fixtures needed in a world of gaslight and horses; to intricate engineering drawings of infrastructure elements. Much of it has never been published before. A virtual time machine that takes the reader on a journey through the park as it was originally envisioned, The Central Park is both a magnificent art book and a message from the past about what brilliant urban planning can do for a great city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Apr 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683353188

Book preview

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

by Martin Filler

INTRODUCTION

The Greatest Single Work of Art in the City of New York

CHAPTER 1

The Genius of the Plan

CHAPTER 2

The South

CHAPTER 3

The West

CHAPTER 4

The North

CHAPTER 5

The East

CHAPTER 6

The Heart of It All

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Central Park in Winter. Hand-colored lithograph by Currier & Ives, c. 1870s.

FOREWORD

Central Park, the creation of a partnership between the visionary Frederick Law Olmsted and the architect Calvert Vaux, was the project that secured their high place in the history of architecture and urbanism. The triumphant outcome of that unprecedented commission, the first phase of which opened to the public in 1858, was widely publicized (including popular color lithographs by Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives that celebrated the seasonal pleasures of Central Park, from spring promenades and summer boating to autumn carriage rides and winter ice skating), and led to Olmsted and Vaux being asked to design several other urban oases—most notably Brooklyn’s superb Prospect Park of 1865-1873. After they ended their collaboration, in 1872, Olmsted went on to become America’s foremost landscape designer, and his large firm established modern standards for an old discipline that had never before been so thoroughly professionalized or so democratic in its public applications.

From Central Park onward, what had long been the exclusive privilege of a landowning aristocracy—open access to verdant acres that offered restorative contact with nature—became an amenity to be enjoyed by all city dwellers in common. Few accomplishments of the reform movements that arose during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries surpassed the social, physical, and psychological benefits provided by Olmsted and Vaux’s revolutionary breakthrough, which has improved the daily lives of millions over the past 160 years.

Central Park is not just the greatest example of its kind in the United States but, more remarkably, the first. Readers of this book, which is filled with detailed architectural designs for structures in the park, will immediately grasp the essential nature of Vaux’s contribution; Olmsted’s is worth underscoring at the outset. The self-taught polymath was the Proteus of nineteenth-century American civic culture: pioneering practitioner of innovative scientific farming methods; cofounder of the still-extant political and literary magazine The Nation; author of the sharpest first-person account we have of life in the American South immediately before the Civil War; reformer of military health care in the U.S. Army during that conflict; and champion of nature conservation policies that led to the creation of our National Park Service. The design of Central Park exemplified the characteristic that enabled Olmsted’s mastery of so many diverse fields, which in computer science has been called predictive vision, a term that perfectly describes his uncanny creative foresight. Unquestionably, an ability to project what a landscape design will look like in three dimensions at full maturity is a useful talent, but a rare one. (This is why the eighteenth-century British landscape designer Humphry Repton devised illustrated books that included foldout vistas with movable colored overlays to show before and after versions of his proposals and explain his ideas to patrons—a foretaste of the presentation boards with which Olmsted and Vaux persuaded the park’s Board of Commissioners to adopt their Greensward plan of 1858 as the winning entry in the park’s design competition.) Few laypeople can apprehend the outcome of such transformations, let alone fathom that Central Park, a seeming vestige of primeval nature somehow miraculously preserved, is a wholly manmade invention.

Before Olmsted died—at eighty-one, a great age in 1903—his certainty about how the Greensward plan would ultimately turn out was vindicated as its trees reached their full height after four decades and his naturalistic compositions took on an abundant appearance much like the Central Park we know today (rather than dotted with the feathery saplings depicted by Currier and Ives early on.) During that same timespan the population of Manhattan grew no less vigorously, from 813,000 in 1860 to 1,850,000 in 1900, a rise of more than a million inhabitants. What began as wasteland reclamation on the outer fringes of the populated city had by the end of the century turned into the proverbial green lungs of New York.

By the turn of the twentieth century Central Park was hemmed in on all four sides, much in the same way that Manhattan’s postmillennial wonder, the High Line, has stimulated real estate development on its periphery. In both instances, although more than a century apart, ever-taller buildings formed a veritable palisade enclosing each park, as the city’s economy prospered and apartment houses were erected to the maximum legal height in order to take advantage of a rare respite from increasing urban density.

Central Park’s enduring hold on the public imagination is reflected in its recurrent presence in popular entertainment, and especially the movies of the Golden Age of Hollywood, which defined an idealized cultural landscape for all Americans. There was Gold Diggers of 1933 (which featured Pettin’ in the Park, a bizarrely sexualized production number choreographed by Busby Berkeley) and Born to Dance (1936), in which James Stewart serenades Eleanor Powell with Cole Porter’s haunting ballad Easy to Love. Even more compelling was Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse’s Dancing in the Dark sequence in The Band Wagon (1953), a pinnacle of midcentury dance. Often Central Park was portrayed as almost a character in itself, a place of pure romantic enchantment where a couple in love could find themselves together but alone at the very heart of our greatest metropolis.

These three musical numbers were all filmed at ground level, and indeed on studio sound stages rather than in the real thing. However, Central Park has been used as an on-site location for a long list of other films, from the silent Romeo and Juliet (1908), a treatment of the Shakespeare tragedy shot at the Bethesda Fountain, to Hair (1979), the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (as it billed itself), which romped all over the park’s 843-acre expanse. For me, though, the most affecting cinematic evocation of Central Park comes at the very end of Swing Time (1936), the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicle that concludes at the top of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper overlooking Central Park. A trompel’oeil north-south view of Olmsted and Vaux’s design displays several of its most distinctive features—the Drive, the Lake, the Sheep Meadow, the Transverses, and the Reservoir—clearly identifiable as contradictory snow and sunshine break out over the iconic contours of this Eden for Everyone, all to the strains of Jerome Kern’s irresistible musical score.

A populist paradise was exactly what the creators of Central Park hoped it would become, as confirmed by the ravishing preparatory drawings for myriad elements of the scheme—from the comprehensive Greensward plan of 1858 to countless small grace notes with which the park was initially embellished—reproduced here more fully than ever before. Much praise has been accorded Olmsted and Vaux for how skillfully they organized the implementation of Central Park, but the heartfelt participation of many other dedicated artists is fully demonstrated in the illustrations on the following pages.

The finest of these ink-and-watercolor renderings rival the technical expertise of those being made contemporaneously by students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, although Americans began to attend that venerable academy in significant numbers only after the Civil War. This impressive visual evidence indicates that the prime movers behind Central Park considered the very best none too good for their fellow citizens, whatever their station in life, and no effort was to be stinted on their behalf. That these movers were all toiling on behalf of and through the institutions of government and politics—even Olmsted and Vaux were public employees—is testament to the efficacy of democratic rule in their day. In this regard, it seems appropriate that the original art reproduced in this book resides in New York City’s Municipal Archives.

As Olmsted’s detailed writings on the social implications of design emphasize, his belief in the uplifting power of public art was well justified, proven by how from the very beginning Central Park has acted as a veritable engine of urban acculturation. Without question it has succeeded in its supporters’ aims beyond their fondest hopes or ability to imagine the city’s ever-shifting demographic makeup more than a century and a half after this civic crown jewel first opened.

It is important to recall that in the decade that preceded the public movement to create Central Park, between a million and a million and a half foreign immigrants poured into New York. Today, when the very premise of immigration to the United States is being seriously challenged, Central Park proudly stands as our finest civic architectural tribute to the foundational American principles of equality and opportunity for all.

—Martin Filler

Central Park—The Bridge. Hand-colored lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1864–72.

Park builders standing on Willowdell Arch. Victor Prevost, photographer, 1862. From left to right: Andrew Haswell Green, George E. Waring (probably), Calvert Vaux, Ignaz Pilat, Jacob Wrey Mould, and Frederick Law Olmsted.

INTRODUCTION:

THE GREATEST SINGLE WORK OF ART IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Every foot of the park’s surface, every tree and bush, as well as every arch, roadway and walk has been fixed where it is with a purpose.

—Frederick Law Olmsted

Nature first, 2nd and 3rd—Architecture after a while.

—Calvert Vaux

The most masterful work of art in New York City is not contained in a museum or gallery. Instead it is the Central Park, a sylvan sanctuary located in the heart of the metropolis that was created through a combination of aesthetic vision, skillful engineering, and democratic ideals. Built to provide New Yorkers a retreat for the eyes and soul, the park came together through a serendipitous blending of people, place, and time. Designed in 1858 by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, both of whom believed in the power of nature to uplift and refine the human spirit, the urban arcadia was planned to resemble a charming bit of rural landscape¹ and truly represent the Romantic ideal of rus in urbe—country in the city. With their partnership, Vaux and Olmsted brought together not only a shared appreciation for pastoral beauty, but also the diverse talents needed to orchestrate the monumental human effort required to transform difficult and demanding terrain into a public pleasure ground that is still today one of the city’s most beloved civic treasures.

The idea of reserving green space for the rapidly increasing population of Manhattan in the second quarter of the nineteenth century was brought before the public by two prominent visionaries, William Cullen Bryant and Andrew Jackson Downing.² Bryant, the Romantic poet and editor of the New York Evening Post, was the first to call for a substantial park for the city. The city, he wrote in a July 1844 editorial, was in dire need of an extensive pleasure ground for shade and recreation. Pointing out that while all large cities have their extensive public grounds and gardens, New York had only the Battery and a small green around City Hall, he urged the city to acquire a large tract of land before it became too expensive: Commerce is devouring inch by inch the coast of the island and if we would rescue any part of it for health and recreation it must be done now.³ Bryant initially advocated for the privately owned forested area along the East River known as Jones’ Wood⁴ for his park, but as his agitation over the lack of progress made by city leaders grew, he appealed for land in the center part of the island or elsewhere.

Downing, a landscape gardener⁵ from Newburgh, New York, and one of America’s foremost authorities on domestic architecture and horticulture,⁶ published a series of open letters between 1849 and 1851 in his magazine, the Horticulturist, lamenting the lack of public parks throughout the United States. In 1850, he wrote that every American who visits London, whether for the first time or the fiftieth time, feels mortified that no city in the United States has a public park—here so justly considered both the highest luxury and necessity in a great city. What are called parks in New York, are not even apologies for the thing; they are only squares or paddocks.⁷ Downing felt that the only places in the United States that would give an untraveled American any idea of the beauty of many of the public parks and gardens abroad⁸ were public cemeteries like Green-Wood in Brooklyn and Mount Auburn outside of Boston. Befitting a man who socialized with the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and subscribed to the writings of the English art critic John Ruskin on the aesthetics of nature, it was Downing’s opinion that a richly designed view was a work of art akin to any fine painting or sculpture and could serve as a source of moral and educational enlightenment. He argued for amenities such as museums, libraries, parks, and gardens that would provide a broad ground of popular refinement that raises up the workingman to the same level of enjoyment with the man of leisure and accomplishment.⁹

By 1851, Bryant’s and Downing’s campaigns had begun to bear fruit. On May 5 of that year, newly elected Mayor Ambrose C. Kingsland took his proposal for a park on a scale worthy of the city to the Common Council: The establishment of such a park would prove a lasting monument to the wisdom, sagacity, and forethought of its founders, and would secure the gratitude of thousands yet unborn for the blessing of pure air, and the opportunity for innocent, healthful enjoyment.¹⁰ Like Bryant years before, Kingsland had set his sights on the 160-acre Jones’ Wood, a rough rectangle bounded by Third Avenue, the East River, Sixty-Sixth Street, and Seventy-Fifth Street. In June, the state legislature authorized its acquisition by the city through eminent domain. By the end of the year, challenges to the constitutionality of the plan had arisen—the savvy owners of the site would not go quietly—and it was clear that another site would have to be found. Meanwhile, Downing editorialized that a park of only 160 acres was shortsighted and that "five hundred acres is the smallest area that should be reserved for the future wants of the city, now, while it may still be obtained.¹¹ In January 1852, the city’s Board of Aldermen formed a Special Committee on Parks that made a formal proposal for a second option: to build the Central Park" in the rectangle bounded by Fifth Avenue, Eighth Avenue, Fifty-Ninth Street, and 106th Street. This area, at 778 acres more than five times the size of Jones’ Wood, was home to the recently completed Croton Receiving Reservoir and the soon-to-be-built reservoir extension, which together were often called the Yorkville Receiving Reservoir, or simply the old reservoir, to distinguish it from the New Reservoir