Central Park Mall
Encyclopedia
Bethesda Fountain
Bethesda Terrace overlooks The Lake in New York City's Central Park. It is on two levels, united by two grand staircases and a lesser one that passes under Terrace Drive to provide passage southward to the Elkan Naumburg bandshell and The Mall, of which this is the architectural culmination, the...
provides the only purely formal feature in the naturalistic original plan of Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted was an American journalist, social critic, public administrator, and landscape designer. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, although many scholars have bestowed that title upon Andrew Jackson Downing...
and Calvert Vaux
Calvert Vaux
Calvert Vaux , was an architect and landscape designer. He is best remembered as the co-designer , of New York's Central Park....
for Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. The Mall, designated the "Promenade" in Olmsted and Vaux's "Greensward" plan of 1857, was called the "open air hall of reception" in the text that accompanied the plan in the competition. "A 'grand promenade' was 'an essential feature of a metropolitan park', the designers acknowledged, yet its formal symmetry— like all architecture in the park— must be rendered 'subservient' to the natural 'view as the ultimatum of interest'", Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar reported in their history of Central Park. It was designed so that a carriage could disgorge its passengers at the south end, then drive round and pick them up again overlooking Bethesda Terrace, whose view of the Lake and Ramble
The Ramble and Lake, Central Park
The Ramble and Lake in Central Park together form an inseparable central feature of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's "Greensward" plan to provide a Central Park for New York City...
formed the "ultimatum of interest" in Olmsted and Vaux's vision. With no need for tiresome redoubling their steps, fashionable New Yorkers, who in the first decades of the Park's existence drove through it in their stylish equipages but rarely walked in it, had their chance to mingle with the less affluent, a mix that was considered thoroughly "American", and picturesque enough to be illustrated repeatedly in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century watercolors of Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Brazil Prendergast was an American Post-Impressionist artist who worked in oil, watercolor, and monotype...
(illustrations) and, slightly later, of Ludwig Bemelmans
Ludwig Bemelmans
Ludwig Bemelmans was an Austrian author, an internationally known gourmet, and a writer and illustrator of children's books. He is most noted today for his Madeline books, six of which were published from 1939-1961...
: "'a great charm of Central Park' wrote J. Crawford Hamilton in Munsey's Magazine
Munsey's Magazine
Munsey's Weekly, later known as Munsey's Magazine was a thirty-six page quarto magazine founded by Frank A. Munsey in 1889. Munsey aimed at "a magazine of the people and for the people, with pictures and art and good cheer and human interest throughout". John Kendrick Bangs was the editor. The...
, 'is the marvellous variety of its scenery and embellishments' including the crowds". Facing onto the Mall near its upper end is the Naumburg Bandshell (designed 1916, built 1921-23), replacing Vaux's wooden construction of 1860, where nineteenth-century concerts devolved into open-air popular dances as the evenings fell. Behind it, the wisteria
Wisteria
Wisteria is a genus of flowering plants in the pea family, Fabaceae, that includes ten species of woody climbing vines native to the eastern United States and to China, Korea, and Japan. Aquarists refer to the species Hygrophila difformis, in the family Acanthaceae, as Water Wisteria...
pergola
Pergola
A pergola, arbor or arbour is a garden feature forming a shaded walkway, passageway or sitting area of vertical posts or pillars that usually support cross-beams and a sturdy open lattice, often upon which woody vines are trained...
parallels the Mall at the top of a slope; it provides screening for Central Park SummerStage, New York's premiere outdoor concert stage .
Grading the Promenade and the Center Drive that swept along its western flank offering views over the Sheep Meadow was among the first priorities, attacked in the first year of construction, 1858. By 1860 with slender elm saplings growing in turf, it was ready for the first of the open-air concerts, in Calvert Vaux's octagonal bandstand with its eight-sided bell-shaped roof. The New-York Tribune encouraged hesitant New Yorkers of the better sort: "We saw no conduct which would have been out of place or inconvenient to the most scrupulous or delicate nerves in the private garden of a gentleman." Still some preferred to hear the tunes from a little distance, in an open carriage, "without the inconvenience of descending" a contemporary Guide phrased it, and, as the park's modern historians noted, "looming over the heads of the rest of the crowd, symbolizing and reinforcing the class hierarchy Central Park was supposed to transcend".
American Elm
Ulmus americana, generally known as the American Elm or, less commonly, as the White Elm or Water Elm, is a species native to eastern North America, occurring from Nova Scotia west to Alberta and Montana, and south to Florida and central Texas. The American elm is an extremely hardy tree that can...
were planted to give the high-arched shady canopy that was becoming the mode for prime residential streets in affluent towns of New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
, Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
and Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
; the elms are gone from America's Elm Streets, victims of Dutch Elm disease
Dutch elm disease
Dutch elm disease is a disease caused by a member of the sac fungi category, affecting elm trees which is spread by the elm bark beetle. Although believed to be originally native to Asia, the disease has been accidentally introduced into America and Europe, where it has devastated native...
, but the Central Park elms, isolated from contamination from neighboring elms and closely watched by the gardeners of the Central Park Conservancy, now form one of the largest remaining plantations of the trees.
Olmsted was strongly opposed to punctuating the carefully planned rural aspect of the park with statuary, but the pressure to memorialize cultural heroes has resulted in the Mall becoming a kind of "Literary Walk". The first sculpture to be sited here was in commemoration of the New York society poet Fitz-Greene Halleck
Fitz-Greene Halleck
Fitz-Greene Halleck was an American poet notable for his satires and as one of the Knickerbocker Group. Born and reared in Guilford, Connecticut, he went to New York City at the age of 20, and lived and worked there for nearly four decades. He was sometimes called "the American Byron"...
, but more than half of the sculptures erected in Central Park in the nineteenth century were projects financed and promoted by ethnic associations of the more recent immigrants: "immigrant New Yorkers were emphasizing their status as 'cultivated' people by honoring leading cultural (not political or military) figures in the city's most 'cultivated' space". The statue of Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
centered at the south end of the Mall was financed by the elite New-York Historical and Genealogical Society, however: it "could be seen as an 'ethnic' assertion by native-stock Americans who felt beleaguered in a city more and more dominated by immigrants."