On October 13, 1857, just two weeks after the original park dwellers left their homes, the Board of Commissioners of Central Park offered prizes of four hundred to two thousand dollars for the four best proposals for "laying out the park." This notice for the first important landscape design competition in the United States elicited thirty-three varied proposals, which revealed the influence of English and continental traditions of landscape design as well as more eclectic vernacular ideas about what would make this public place appealing. But when the commissioners opened the proposals six months later, they found one curious entry. Plan 2 by an anonymous contestant was nothing but a pyramid.
Although the park commissioners themselves expected a unified aesthetic conception of the design, their specifications mandated a mix of facilities. They provided each competitor a copy of the topographical map done by Egbert Viele (who had also presented an early park design to the mayor's consulting board), with instructions that construction cost no more than the $1.5 million authorized by the legislature. Certain details Viele had defined as part of his park also appeared in the board's specifications: four or more cross streets connecting Fifth and Eighth avenues along the park's two-and-one-half-mile length; a twenty- to forty-acre parade ground (significantly reduced from Viele's fifty acres) with "proper arrangements for the convenience of spectators"; and three playgrounds, three to ten acres each. Responding to suggestions from Greeley, Bennett, and other editors, the commissioners also specified sites for an exhibition or concert hall, a flower garden, a winter skating lake, a prominent fountain, and a lookout tower. The requirements thus included at least one institution of cultural uplift or practical knowledge, playgrounds for healthful exercise, and a parade ground for the civic function of militia drills.
Contest entries came from both professional and amateur designers -- from landscape gardeners familiar with the theories and rules of their trade; from engineers who were attuned to the topographical problems of building roads, lakes, and scenic effects; and from general enthusiasts with ideas about landscape beauty or the kinds of amusements that should go into a park but with limited practical experience in laying out extensive grounds.
Although the commissioners had hoped to attract European experts in landscape design, all but two of the entrants who can be identified were Americans. At least half were from New York City, with nine proposals submitted by officers, engineers, surveyors, gardeners, or foremen who had been hired by the new park commission during its first eight months in office, or by its predecessor. The surviving verbal descriptions demonstrate that the contestants recognized common problems with the park site and, in many cases, offered similar solutions. Most entries, for example, embraced the logic of ordering the park -- particularly the drives and lakes -- in conformity with the natural topography.
Virtually all the designers recommended that the park north of the existing receiving reservoir and the planned new one be treated naturalistically, with scenic carriage drive and walks generally following the contours identified by Viele. Modifying the rugged terrain northwest of the reservoirs would be prohibitively expensive, and the territory from 85th to 106th streets was largely inaccessible to park visitors arriving by public transportation. Several contestants took up a theme already sounded by the commissioners and the press and proposed that the park boundary be extended northward from 106th to 110th Street to encompass the high point of the northwest rocky ridge. (The suggestion was implemented in 1863.)
The plans differed much more dramatically in the design of the lower half of the park. Although all contestants included the required parade ground, formal garden, major fountain, and an exhibition or concert hall, each pursued a different approach in treatment of these features in relation to the natural setting. Roughly two-thirds of the proposed plans highlighted the natural landscape itself. Working primarily within the naturalistic tradition, these plans provided relief from the city amid pastoral scenery of artistically arranged rocks, trees, lawns, lakes, and streams. The other one-third emphasized an artificial civic display of formal avenues, exhibition halls, museums, fountains, statuary, and zoological or botanical gardens, intended simultaneously to instruct and inspire their viewers in the accomplishments of civilization. A cluster of proposals within each of these dominant modes showed the influence of "popular eclecticism," some stressing the diverting ornamentation of the natural landscape, others emphasizing the parade and playgrounds as popular features accommodating large crowds of spectators and participants. And one particularly ambitious plan tried to merge all these impulses.
First prize went to plan 33, the "Greensward" plan, submitted by the park's superintendent, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the English-born architect Calvert Vaux. This decision would later be hailed as a landmark in the history of landscape architecture. And certainly it was. Yet accounts that emphasize its unique genius imply that artistic judgment alone governed the selection of the design. From the commissioners' perspective, more than aesthetics was at stake; politics as much as artistic merit determined just how the nation's first and most famous landscape park would be designed and built.
Olmsted and Vaux both had close ties to the Republican park commissioners. Olmsted had been recruited by Charles Elliott in August 1857 to apply to be the park superintendent, with the suggestion, as Olmsted later recalled, that he would be a "Republican the Democrats could live with." Although subordinate to Chief Engineer Viele, a Democrat neither Republicans nor reform members of his own party could live with, Olmsted noted that some commissioners had sought to advance his position at Viele's expense that fall by requesting that he (Olmsted) submit reports on drainage and planting. Calvert Vaux, who had earlier pointed out the artistic limitations of Viele's plan to Republican acquaintances on the board, carried the further cachet of having been the partner of Andrew Jackson Downing, the leading American landscape gardener of the mid-nineteenth century.
Empowered to select a design for Central Park, the commissioners had looked to the cultural authority of formal landscape design traditions and rejected the diverting eclecticism of commercial pleasure gardens. The majority voted for a design that most immediately reflected the tastes of those -- mostly affluent -- citizens who, like themselves, would feel at ease in a beautiful "rural" park where they could admire the scenery and one another. The choice of the Greensward plan reflected the preference of the board's Yankee Republican majority for the English naturalistic design tradition as well as for designers they felt at ease with. The contest over Central Park's design did not, however, end with the decision of the commissioners.
Most historians of Central Park have stressed the unique genius of one man, Frederick Law Olmsted, allowing even his codesigner, Calvert Vaux, to recede from view. One historian tells us that "the actual design work in the park was functionally divided -- Vaux handled all the structures -- pavilions, boathouses, bridges; Olmsted handled all the rest." Vaux had "deferred to Olmsted in areas of aesthetic decision."
The effacement of Vaux as codesigner began as early as May 1858 when the Central Park commissioners conferred the singular title of architect-in-chief on Olmsted, who had since September 1857 been superintendent, and began paying Vaux a daily wage as his assistant. (Not until January 1859 would Vaux receive the title of consulting architect). Olmsted presented himself thereafter as Central Park's "representative man." Yet had Olmsted worked alone, had Vaux deferred to his partner in "areas of aesthetic decision," the Greensward plan would not have included some of its most distinguishing features.
The premise of the Greensward plan was that Central Park should express an overarching aesthetic motive. In criticizing Viele's plan, Vaux stressed its lack of an "artistic conception" that would give shape and coherence to the viewer's experience. The goal of Vaux's entire professional career had been to arrange "useful and necessary forms" to "suggest the pleasant ideas of harmonious proportion, fitness, and agreeable variety to the eye." For Vaux to have accepted the unplanned and eclectic aesthetic of commercial pleasure gardens would have meant surrendering his judgment as an artist. Olmsted, who admired the harmonious composition of English parks, found spontaneous manners as well as eclectic design distasteful. The partners envisioned the future Central Park as a unified work of landscape art.
Even before the competition, both men had advocated government support of culture and the arts, and they viewed a public park as one public institution among many -- schools, museums, libraries -- that could enhance the lives of free citizens. Central Park would be a democratic institution by virtue of the mixing of classes within its boundaries. And the Greensward plan itself postulated what individuals from all social backgrounds would do there: admire the artistically composed scenery, enjoy the spectacle of the crowd on the promenade, and engage in the wholesome exercise of driving, riding, walking, skating, or -- for those who played cricket -- competitive sports.
Not all New Yorkers shared Vaux and Olmsted's assumption that the "popular idea of a park is a beautiful open green space." That fact became apparent in the weeks after the award was announced. Critics for the Horticulturalist and the Crayon (a Ruskinian art journal) heartily endorsed the selection of the Greensward plan, but the Herald's James Gordon Bennett found it "impossible to make head or tail" of the winning plan and attributed its selection entirely to politics; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly admired the winning plan but primarily the Parade, playgrounds, Mall, and concert hall, ignoring the naturalistic landscape effects; and even the Times, Post, and Courier and Enquirer, which all agreed that the first prize was deserved, hoped that the plan would be modified by "valuable hints" that appeared in some of the losing plans.
Although the park commissioners arranged a public exhibition of the plans, they also attempted to preempt public discussion of the design. A week after the awards, a committee (Andrew Green and Charles Russell) consulted with Superintendent Olmsted and proposed three modifications: first, thirty-foot roads with a fifteen-foot pedestrian walk on one side and a twenty-foot bridle path running for three miles on the other to save paving costs and to satisfy the expectations of equestrians (the Greensward plan itself pointed to the example of the Vienna Prater and the Bois de Boulogne in proposing sixty-foot carriage drives, flanked on either side by twenty-foot walks); second, a cost-saving "footway" instead of the carriage entrance between Sixth and Seventh avenues; and third, drawing the western drive deeper into the park, thereby reducing the Parade.
In his campaign to modify the winning plan, Commissioner Robert Dillon recruited the board's newest member, financier August Belmont, also a prominent Democrat. Dillon and Belmont invoked the design tradition of artificial civic display when they announced their "dissent entirely" from the Greensward plan's naturalistic aesthetic.
The two commissioners thought that the park would be more urbane if its circulation system allowed for more intensive use of the grounds. With Belmont's public support, Dillon proposed the separation of drives, walks, and rides as a "cardinal" design principle both for practical and for aesthetic reasons. To install paths on either side of the drives would expose pedestrians to "the distractions, noise, dust, and dangers of horsemen and carriages." And in place of the Greensward proposal for a equestrian path only around the reservoir, Dillon suggested a separate ride running the length of the park "to accommodate manly and invigorating horsemanship."
A majority of the board rejected Dillon and Belmont's proposals for enhancing the park's grandeur and endorsed Olmsted's rebuttal that a grand avenue would "destroy scenery at great cost" and that "straight lines of trees or stately architecture ... belong not to parks for the people, but to palatial gardens."
By publishing their suggestions for modifying the Greensward plan, Dillon and Belmont brought a wider public into the design negotiations and recruited both the Herald and the Tribune to their call for more ample rides and walks and the "convenience" of their separation. Since many historians have identified the separation of ways as one of the most praiseworthy elements of Central Park's original design, it is worth stressing that without Dillon and Belmont's public protest, this feature would not have been adopted. By the end of June, Republican commissioners successfully closed further public debate and fixed the park's definition as rural scenery. Then, apparently without a formal resolution, they directed Vaux and Olmsted to rework the circulation system into the separate ways advocated by the Democratic commissioners and the press.
The designers ingeniously responded to the commissioners' demands in such a way as to accommodate the convenience of park goers and to give the natural landscape even greater emphasis. Not only did they design winding rides and walks separated from the drive, they introduced more than thirty bridges to carry the various routes over each other. In a technique that Vaux, as architect, appears to have most fully mastered in the later design of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, bridges themselves became graceful frames for landscape scenes beyond.
All text from: The Park and the People Courtesy of Barbara Blackmar & Roy Rosenzweig
