Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York

“What’s in a name?” queries Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet.” Note this one: The 840 acres assigned to Central Park was due to the fact of its location within the surrounds of the middle reservoir of the Croton Aqueduct’s chain of receiving and distributing water basins (during its existence between 1842 and 1955) is the result of the mid-nineteenth-century advocacy by citizen proponents for the creation of a recreational open space to be achieved by the exemption from private ownership of platted lots between Fifth and Eighth Avenues from 59th Street to 106th Street, an area heretofore within the confines of New York City’s official grid plan for laying out intersecting thoroughfares of streets and avenues.
 
The Central Park, published in 1926 by as a civic group named The Central Park Association, whose mission was almost identical to that of the Central Park Conservancy more than half a century later, provides an excellent history of the advocacy, design, and building history of the park. Of special interest, the second half contains complete descriptions of the honorifically bestowed names of each of the park’s eighteen entrance gates as a means of burnishing the image of New York City as a great metropolis filled with population of diligent citizens of various trades and occupations. In this post, follow in the footsteps of the committees that chose the names of the entrances to Central Park.

“Rus in Urbe” (countryside within the city)? People’s Park? Lovers’ Retreat? Birdwatchers Paradise? Central Park wears all of these labels. Its building and rebuilding as a scenic recreational amenity par excellence is an ongoing story that does not grow old since its administration under the aegis of the public-private partnership of the New York City Department of Parks and the Central Park Conservancy, moves in an ongoing line of success stories. For Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence, the Central Park Mall is what its designers intended: a promenade for an engaged upper-class couple’s Sunday afternoon walk. For Henry James, the quintessential literary expatriate, it is an eye-opener on the success of New York City as an example of American democracy seen in its best light.