About Central Park
It’s hard to fully appreciate a park if you grew up with a backyard. Yet city dwellers, some of whom live in small, dark, cramped apartments, need public green spaces. Today there are more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds and recreation facilities across the five boroughs of New York City.
In mid-19th century America, the closest you could get to a park was to visit a cemetery. There were few formal parks, mostly maintained for nobility, in Europe. However, there was one public park in particular that inspired Central Park called Birkenhead Park in Liverpool. Landscape architecture was not yet an established field. Professions that foreshadowed it were horticulture, botany, gentleman farmers, and landscape gardeners.
One man who is often forgotten in this narrative is Andrew Jackson Downing, who first proposed the idea of New York’s great American public park in his magazine, The Horticulturist. Downing personally discovered English-born architect Calvert Vaux in London and convinced him to move to upstate New York, where together they had a successful firm. Sadly, Downing was killed in 1852 in a steamboat explosion on the Hudson River. If he had lived, one can only wonder how far his influence would have reached.
New York City was blessed with several visionaries (including journalists, publishers, politicians, and city commissioners) who agreed with Downing’s idea. From 1853 - 1856 the city paid $5 million dollars for undeveloped land in the middle of Manhattan that consisted of swamps and muddy terrain. In 1857 a competition was announced for designs for the park. 33 anonymous submissions were received for consideration. The winners were Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.
So complex was Olmsted that any one of the following descriptions can apply to him: a late bloomer, a renaissance man, and, although somewhat reluctantly, America’s first landscape architect.
As a young man Olmsted traveled to China as a merchant marine but suffered from acute seasickness. He unhappily worked in an Import/Export firm in Lower Manhattan. He tried his hand at farming but was too interested in ornamental trees to make a profit. A fervent abolitionist, he found limited success as a journalist, going undercover in the American South for a series of articles about slavery for the New York Times. In 1865 he co-founded The Nation magazine, which is still in publication today.
During the Civil War, Olmsted served as the Executive Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. A precursor to the Red Cross, the commission monitored the condition of hospitals and collected data on the war wounded. After the war he headed west to manage the Mariposa mining estate in the Sierra Nevada. It was a tremendous financial disaster. In 1883, he opened what is considered the first office dedicated to landscape architecture in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Although the most famous of New York City’s parks, Central Park is not the largest. That honor belongs to Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, which is an astounding 2,765 acres. Central Park clocks in at a mere 843 acres, making it the fifth largest in the city. Some are of the opinion that Central Park is not the most beautiful either. In serious contention for the top spot is Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which was also designed by Olmsted and Vaux.
Central Park Links
http://www.nycgovparks.org/
http://www.centralpark.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park
http://www.cpdsa.org/
