Seeing Central Park: The Official Guide

By Sara Cedar Miller

An authoritative visual survey of New York City’s Central Park, with new photography and updated text.

For more than 160 years, Central Park has been the centerpiece of New York City, with more than forty-two million visits each year. In Seeing Central Park, Sara Cedar Miller takes readers through America’s most popular and celebrated park, where natural and manmade features are interwoven into a spectacular work of art. Combining superb research and writing with breathtaking photographs, Seeing Central Park is not only a guide through every significant design feature but also a gorgeous gift book.

Since the book was first published in 2009, the Conservancy has completed a number of renovations and opened new areas of the park, including the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, Rhododendron Mile, and Dene Slope. This updated edition features these landmarks alongside revised entries and new photography throughout. With its pastoral and picturesque landscapes, roads and paths, bridges, buildings, structures, and sculpture, Central Park is a living museum of superb Victorian decorative arts and landscape design. From the Pond to Harlem Meer, it’s all covered in Seeing Central Park.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781683358794

Book preview

Seeing Central Park: The Official Guide Updated and Expanded

CONTENTS

Foreword by Elizabeth W. Smith, Central Park Conservancy President and CEO

Introduction

PART ONE 59th to 65th Streets

PART TWO 65th to 72nd Streets

PART THREE 72nd to 79th Streets

PART FOUR 79th to 96th Streets

PART FIVE 96th to 110th Streets

Endnotes

List of Features

Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

Central Park, beautiful and beloved, is the heart of New York City.

Since its inception in 1858, Central Park’s true purpose has been as a green oasis and escape from the noise, congestion, and rigid hardscape of New York City’s streets. Today, after a forty-year restoration effort by the Central Park Conservancy, this masterpiece of art is experiencing the longest period of sustained health, beauty, and responsible oversight in its entire history. That achievement transformed the Park from a neglected ruin into a stunning retreat for millions of New Yorkers and a world-class destination and landmark for countless national and international visitors as well. And whether they visit once a day or once in a lifetime, visitors now agree that Central Park defines New York; you just can’t imagine the City without it.

In this updated edition of Seeing Central Park, Sara Cedar Miller narrates the fascinating history of Central Park and celebrates in pictures the historic renaissance of the Park, led by the extraordinary efforts of the Conservancy and its dedicated trustees, volunteers, and staff. The book serves as a literal record of the Conservancy’s accomplishments and includes updates on the most recently renovated and opened areas of the Park, including the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, Rhododendron Mile, the Dene Slope, the Frederick Douglass Memorial, and Belvedere Castle.

The Conservancy’s turf crew mowing the Mall

Since 1980, the Conservancy has overseen the investment of more than $1 billion into Central Park, over 80 percent of which has come from private philanthropy. As we enter our fifth decade of managing the Park, the Conservancy is committing anew to delivering on the promise of the original purpose of the Park: to provide a profoundly democratic space and beautiful green respite for every person who wanders through its inviting entrances. Our challenge is to ensure that the Park stays the way the photographs in the pages of this book have so beautifully memorialized, and that our visitors take as much pride in caring for it as we do.

I would like to thank our dedicated Conservancy staff, who every day—sunrise to sunset, rain or shine, and in all four seasons—sustain the landscapes, architecture, and monuments to ensure that every visit you make to Central Park will be a joyful and memorable experience.

Join us by becoming a member of the Central Park Conservancy today at www.centralparknyc.org. Together, we can guarantee that Central Park will continue to be the beating heart of one of the greatest cities in the world.

Elizabeth W. Smith

President and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy

Central Park is one of the most important works of art in America.

Almost entirely man-made and built between the years 1858 and 1873, its visionary designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, referred to their creation as a single work of art. Composed of natural elements—turf, wood, water, and rock—and balanced with exceptional examples from the decorative and fine arts, the Park could also be perceived as an outdoor museum that brilliantly combines the kinds of attractions in its neighboring cultural institutions, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the intention of this book to guide both Park visitors and armchair travelers through this unique masterpiece and museum without walls, interpreting and explaining—through words and images—how to see Central Park.

The Lake and Bow Bridge

INTRODUCTION

The beauty of Central Park appears so natural that it is thought by many to be the last remaining virgin territory on Manhattan Island, yet nothing could be further from the truth. When the 776-acre site was set aside in 1853 for the future park, the terrain was scruffy and broken with as little as three or four inches of soil laying between the surface and the bedrock below. With no drainage outlets, the hardened soil became impenetrable, making the survival of healthy vegetation nearly impossible. The original woodlands were decimated in the 1780s by the British during the Revolutionary War. By the mid-nineteenth century, some second-growth trees had emerged along with a smattering of kitchen gardens and orchards, planted by the pre-Park’s few settlers, but early photographs show a landscape that in many areas resembled the surface of the moon.¹

VICTORIAN DESIGN: THE ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE

The natural and manufactured elements that make up Central Park were planned, planted, and placed according to the practical and aesthetic decisions of its designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who won the design competition for Central Park in 1858. For the next sixteen years the designers and their team of more than 4,000 laborers, gardeners, stone masons, engineers, and artisans blasted rock, drained swamps, moved tons of earth, and built roads, walks, and ornamental structures. The result became one of America’s most important and enduring works of art whose man-made greensward and gardens, woodlands and water bodies, bridges and byways sought to evoke the idealized scenes painted by contemporary artists of the Hudson River School.

In the decade preceding the construction of the Park, America’s first school of painting emerged in the scenic Hudson River Valley, north of New York City. Such painters as Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Frederic Church celebrated on canvas the nation’s natural landscapes, ranging from such awesome scenic wonders as Niagara Falls to the more intimate woods, meadows, lakes, and streams of the Catskill Mountains and New England.

Frederick Law Olmsted

Calvert Vaux

The Park’s designers were closely connected with these paintings and with the natural scenes that inspired them. As a young boy, Olmsted was trained by his father to admire the local Connecticut landscape as they traveled on horseback and carriage. In the early nineteenth century, middle-class Americans, like the Olmsteds, were discovering for the first time the leisure-time pleasures of scenic tourism, or sightseeing, as we call it today. Later in his life, Olmsted traveled widely to visit the magnificently designed estate parks of the monarchs and aristocrats of Britain and continental Europe. In England, he was especially excited and inspired by Birkenhead Park. Opened in 1847, it was the first free public park in the world to be created by a municipality, and it welcomed all citizens of Liverpool.

As a young architect, Calvert Vaux had taken many sightseeing and sketching trips through his native Britain and Europe as well. When he moved from London to the Hudson River Valley in 1850 to design private homes and estates for the well-to-do and growing middle class, he immediately fell in love with the varied landscapes of his newly adopted country. Vaux also fell in love with and married Mary McEntee, whose brother, Jervis McEntee, was a painter of the Hudson River School. Thus, his circle of professional colleagues and friends, both upstate and in New York City, where he moved in 1856, included the leading landscape designers, artists, poets, and writers of the