Seeing Central Park , livre ebook

ABRAMS BOOKS - Miller Sara Cedar Miller

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235 pages

English

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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 42 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.

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Nueva York

New York

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	07 avril 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683358794
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	12 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1119€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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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 day, whose works of art celebrated America s unrivaled scenery.
When the time came to design Central Park, the newly formed partnership of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux envisioned a gallery of mental pictures more like those paintings they had admired and the scenery they had enjoyed on landscaped estates. 2 Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, explained that, for him, a landscape painting was an ideal assemblage of elements from the natural world: [t]he most lovely and perfect parts of Nature may be brought together and combined in a whole that shall surpass in beauty and effect any picture painted from a single view. 3 Similarly, Olmsted theorized that [a] mere imitation of nature, however successful, is not art. And it was most certainly art that he and Vaux aspired to in their design for Central Park. In the natural world it was, he explained, unlikely that accident should bring together the best possible ideals of each separate [landscape and] still more unlikely that accident should group a number of these possible ideals in such a way that not only one or two but that all should be harmoniously related one to the other. 4 Thus, Central Park-like any great work of art-was intended to be greater than the sum of its individual parts, and Olmsted and Vaux said as much in their most famous statement: [t]he Park throughout is a single work of art, and as subject to the primary law of every work of art, namely that it shall be framed upon a single, noble motive, to which the design of all its parts, in some more or less subtle way, shall be confluent and helpful. 5
AN ELEGANT TAPESTRY
The design of the Park is simple and elegant, a beautiful tapestry made up of three types of landscapes-the pastoral, the picturesque, and the formal-that were designed to have three distinct modes of transportation-carriage drives, bridle paths, and pedestrian paths-threading their way through constantly changing scenery.
The pastoral landscape takes its name from the Latin pastor , or shepherd who grazed his flock in a large open meadow or pasture. When Olmsted and Vaux designed their plan, they named it Greensward, the English term for a vast lawn dotted with small clusters of shade trees-the type of landscape they most wanted for Central Park. The designers understood that creating seemingly limitless meadows and expansive lakes would best solve the problem of how to create the illusion of a rural landscape within the rigid rectangle of parkland, carved from Manhattan s