Central Park, New York

DATE Work on the site began in 1857; first phase opened in 1858

SIGNIFICANCE: Central Park was the first artificially landscaped public park in the United States. Its success helped establish landscape architecture as a legitimate vocation and cemented the career of its designers, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824–1895). First opened in 1858, the park has provided an outdoor refuge, recreational facilities, and cultural events for New York City’s residents ever since.

LOCALE: Mid-Manhattan, bordered by 60th and 110th Streets and Central Park West and Fifth Avenue

With more than 800 acres of lush green lawns, sparkling ponds, and shaded walkways, Central Park has provided New York City dwellers with playing fields, bridle paths, bicycling and jogging trails, and winter skating and sledding since just before the American Civil War. Viewed by some as a pastoral retreat and by others as a haven for crime, the park has often been the center of controversy. Nevertheless, it remains one of New York City’s major attractions, visited by more than forty million people annually.

Park Origins

Early nineteenth-century New York City was a maze of streets and alleys and a jumble of commercial and residential buildings that many considered an unattractive place to visit or live. In the 1840s, to help counter that reputation, city residents began to debate the merits of constructing a large public park. In 1811, the city had designated 450 acres for park squares, but by 1838, that acreage had been reduced to 120. Many of New York’s wealthy families traveled extensively in Europe, where cities like London and Paris boasted beautifully landscaped parks. These New Yorkers, eager to overcome America’s reputation for boorishness and rough living, adopted many European customs. In the hope of establishing their city as an international cultural center, many of them also began to advocate the development of a park like those they enjoyed in their travels.

In an 1844 editorial in the New York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) suggested such a park. Mayor Ambrose Kingsland formally proposed the idea in 1851, when he asked the city council to appropriate public funds to purchase Jones Woods, 150 undeveloped acres bordering the East River between 68th and 77th Streets. Andrew Jackson Downing, a prominent landscape architect and the editor of the respected gardening journal, Horticulturalist, protested that this site was too small and suggested instead a park of at least 500 acres. In 1853, after months of debate, the state legislature authorized the city of New York to acquire more than 700 acres in the center of Manhattan, to be paid for with a combination of general taxes and an assessment on nearby property owners.

The land chosen for the new park lay between Fifth and Eighth Avenues and stretched from 59th to 106th Street. In 1859 this original site was enlarged to include the land between 106th and 110th Streets, bringing the park’s total acreage to the present 843. The site was predominantly uneven, rocky, and swampy. Except for Seneca Village, a mostly African American settlement on the west side of the proposed park, it was primarily home to the city’s castoffs—squatters and immigrants who farmed, raised pigs, and boiled bones. In 1855, the city began the task of evicting and compensating these people in preparation for work on the site. In 1857, the state legislature appointed the first Central Park Commission and charged it with the development of the park. Shortly thereafter, commission members hired Frederick Law Olmsted, a journalist, as the park’s first superintendent. His primary duty was to oversee the clearing of the future park’s grounds, which began on August 12, 1857.

The Greensward Plan

In October 1857, the newly created commission offered a two-thousand-dollar prize in a competition for the park’s design. Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, an English-born architect, decided to collaborate on an entry they called the Greensward Plan. Their plan called primarily for a pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition, that embraced nature’s wilderness—albeit often artificially constructed out of the park’s rocky, swampy land. It also included, however, several more formal gardens such as the Mall and Bethesda Terrace. Designed to be a place where city dwellers could forget their urban surroundings, the plan included borders of trees to hide the city from view. Four sunken transverse roads that allowed cross-town traffic to travel through the park undetected further excluded urban intrusions. Pedestrian, vehicular, and equestrian traffic streams within the park were innovatively separated by a clever series of bridges and tunnels that allowed park goers to move without interruption throughout the grounds. In April 1858, the commission chose Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward Plan from thirty-three entries as the official design. With few exceptions, it has served as the blueprint for the development of Central Park ever since.

With a design in place, work on the park began in earnest. The commission named Olmsted as chief architect and appointed Vaux as his assistant. Following on the heels of the nationwide financial Panic of 1857, construction proved a boon to the local economy by providing jobs to nearly twenty thousand workers. The site underwent a massive transformation. Workers blasted and removed rocks, drained swamps, and spread tons of fertilized topsoil. By 1873, when the park was finished, nearly 5 million cubic yards of organic material had been moved into or out of the park. Planting also took place on a monumental scale, with workers setting in place countless hardy perennials and between four and five million trees and shrubs, representing over six hundred varieties.

Evolution of the Park

The park opened in phases; the first users were ice skaters on the partially filled Central Park Lake in December 1858. Walking paths on the Ramble, a beautifully and intricately landscaped hillside just north of the lake, opened in June 1859, and the first of several sections of park roads opened in November of that year. During construction, and for the first several years of operation, users could only enter the park during official hours through one of eighteen gates, each guarded by a gatekeeper. Olmsted, who had strong views about how the park should be used, compiled several rules and regulations that were posted prominently throughout the park. They included restrictions against walking on any grassy area not labeled as a commons and allowing dogs to run loose. In order to enforce these regulations, he organized and trained a special force of park guards. These heavy restrictions, while widely enforced in the park’s early years, were slowly removed or revised in the last third of the century. When the park first opened, for example, boat rentals, music, and beer sales were all banned on Sundays. By 1877, however, the last of these Sabbath restrictions was lifted when concerts were at last permitted on Sunday, the only free day for many of the city’s working-class citizens. By the end of the century, Olmsted’s special park guard had merged with the metropolitan police force, turning the park into just one more city jurisdiction.

Many of these changes were the work of the Tammany machine that controlled New York City politics in the 1870s. The Tweed Charter, passed in 1870, transferred the supervision of the park from the Board of Commissioners to a new board under the authority of the city’s Department of Public Parks. While the new system’s more flexible attitudes encouraged more people than ever to use the park, they also neglected much needed park maintenance. Olmsted, forced out of his position in 1878 after several disagreements with the new commission, expressed his disgust over park deterioration and the politicization of its control in an 1882 pamphlet entitled The Spoils of the Park. Vaux’s resignation from park management in the next year signalled the end of an era for Central Park.

From the first days of construction, debate over what kind and how many buildings to allow in the park has been frequent and heated. Olmsted and Vaux, who believed that the park should contain few buildings, included only a few structures, all designed by Vaux: the Ball Players’ House (1869), the Dairy (1870), the Workshops (1871), a stable (1871), and Belvedere Castle (1871). With the exception of Belvedere Castle, which was built to grace the more formal grounds of the Mall, each of these buildings provided a specific service to park goers or workers. In subsequent years various other buildings have been proposed and their merits debated. Significant additions to the park include the Central Park Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tavern on the Green. Playgrounds, tennis courts, ice skating rinks, and the Delacorte Theater have also been completed. The only building left standing today that predates the park is the 1848 Arsenal at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue, saved by the Greensward Plan for museum space.

Since the end of the Olmsted/Vaux era, the park has endured a series of declines and renewals. Vaux’s one-time partner and successor, Samuel B. Parsons, Jr., shared much of the designers’ vision. After his 1911 departure, the park began a serious decline. Park grounds suffered as maintenance became careless; several varieties of trees and shrubs disappeared throughout the next several decades. During the Great Depression, the city allowed the unemployed to build squatter colonies within park boundaries. When Fiorello La Guardia (1882–1947) became mayor in 1934, he appointed Robert Moses (1889–1981) as park commissioner, a post he held until 1960. Moses provided much needed stability and continuity to park management, and during his tenure, the park was largely restored. During the second half of the twentieth century, despite a brief period of decline in the 1970s, a well-maintained, beautifully restored Central Park, provided a natural refuge to an ever more crowded Manhattan. In the midst of restoration, a special garden, called Strawberry Fields, was landscaped in a section of the park in 1985 that was dedicated as a living memorial to the late John Lennon, one of the famous members of the Beatles who had lived in the renowned Dakota apartment building across from the park’s west side. On a darker note, the much-publicized case of a female jogger who was brutally beaten and raped in Central Park occurred on April 19, 1989. As the group of five young men originally suspected and eventually convicted of the crime were African American and Hispanic, news of the incident increased racial tensions and fears of crime that were rampant in the city at the time.

In 1998, Douglas Blonsky became the park's administrator. In an effort to ensure that the area would be properly and efficiently maintained, he instituted a zone management system, which split the park into forty-nine separate zones that would each be overseen by an individual gardener; this head gardener would be in charge of managing the grounds technicians and volunteers working within their zones. By 2018, according to its website, the Central Park Conservancy, which was formed in 1980 specifically to manage the restoration of the deteriorating park, had invested a total of $950 million in the park, supplying three-quarters of its $67 million annual budget. According to the Conservancy, forty-two million people visit the park each year. While reports indicated that overall crime occurring in the park had decreased significantly over the years, it was reported in 2015 that the Guardian Angels, a neighborhood watch group composed of volunteer citizens originally formed in the 1980s, had returned to patrol the park for the first time in twenty years due to an increase in robberies and muggings on the grounds.

Visiting the Park

Despite the political infighting, the disputes about correct park usage, and the roller coaster of decline and renewal, the public has always enjoyed Central Park. Some of the most visited sites include the Sheep Meadow, a vast green lawn popular for picnics and sunbathing that derives its name from the sheep that grazed there until 1934. The nearby Sheepfold, a building designed by Jacob Wrey Mould and built in 1870, housed the sheep at night. After their departure, the building was remodeled and became the famous Tavern on the Green. Strawberry Fields continues to draw large crowds. The Carousel, a popular attraction since 1870, still rings with the shouts of happy children. Another draw for children is the Central Park Zoo, featuring animals from sea lions to penguins to lemurs. The formal gardens, including the Mall and the neighboring Bethesda Terrace, remain favorites with the park’s many visitors. Free stage productions and concerts are offered frequently in the summer at the Delacorte Theater and the Great Lawn.

While it is best to avoid the park at night, except for planned events, the gates are no longer in place and the park is open at all times. Good maps and guidebooks are widely available and should be consulted by first-time visitors.

Bibliography

Beveridge, Charles E., and David Schuyler, eds. “Creating Central Park, 1857–1861.” In The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Vol. 3. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

"Central Park History Overview." Centralpark.com, 2 Dec. 2023, www.centralpark.com/visitor-info/park-history/overview/. Accessed 3 June 2024.

Culgan, Rossilynne Skena. "Central Park, New York City: Our Ultimate Guide." TimeOut, 6 Mar. 2024, www.timeout.com/newyork/parks/central-park. Accessed 3 June 2024.

Kinkead, Eugene. Central Park, 1857–1995: The Birth, Decline, and Renewal of a National Treasure. New York: Norton, 1990.

Miller, Sara Cedar. Central Park, An American Masterpiece: A Comprehensive History of the Nation's First Urban Park. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003.

"Park History." Central Park Conservancy, www.centralparknyc.org/visit/park-history.html. Accessed 10 May 2018.

Putnam, Karen, and Marianne Cramer. New York’s Fifty Best: Places to Discover and Enjoy in Central Park. New York: City, 1999.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.

Silverman, Robert. "Vigilante Justice Comes Back to NYC." Daily Beast. Daily Beast, 31 Aug. 2015. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.