The Central Park we know and love has evolved from its initial design 160 years ago – and its famous layout is just one of 33 entries in a competition to choose how the park would look.
150 years later, in 2008, the only other surviving entry – thought forever lost - resurfaced to give us a glimpse of another designer’s vision for the city’s central green space. And now, the team at Budget Direct have used the rediscovered plan to create an alternative Central Park showcasing how this losing entry would look today, had it been chosen over F. L. Olmsted and C. Vaux’s winner.
Olmsted and Vaux used every moment leading up to the competition’s deadline to create their free-flowing and modern design. In fact, they had to hand their sketches in to the janitor of the Central Park Arsenal after the building had closed on the evening of the deadline, such was their last minute rush. Their design was numbered 33 of 33 entries in the contest, whereas as that of park engineer John J. Rink, author of the rediscovered runner-up, was handed in early enough to be labeled number four.
Rink’s design is a watercolor fantasy inspired by European fairytales as well as the real-life gardens of Versailles and other famous palaces. The competition to design Central Park included instructions for several details that it was obligatory for entrants to include: a parade ground, a perimeter barrier of trees and shrubs, a fountain, watchtower, and skating arena, and four roads crossing through park. But despite these limitations, Rink came up with quite a different presentation to that of Olmsted and Vaux.
Spiraling gardens and topiaries make for a more cultivated area than that we observe today. And you can see why the winning design was considered more appropriate for New Yorkers than Rink’s baroque vision: sure, from a bird’s eye view, his spirals look charming; but from the ground level, it is too complicated and mazy to be as accessible as the open spaces of the Olmsted and Vaux’s idea.
But there are several details that are reasonably consistent between the losing design and the park as it exists today. Rink suggested a two-wing museum around the banks of his reservoir, for example, that would have been around the same size as the Metropolitan Museum of Art that sits in the park just off Fifth Avenue.
And there appears to be a statue, in Rink’s diagrams, not far from where the bust of Thomas Moore is positioned today. We don’t know who Rink may have had in mind for this rendering, but given the patriotic names he gave the roads and gates of his park, we can guess it might have been an early American president.
What do you think – would you have felt as comfortable in Rink’s arch park as you do exploring the real Central Park in the 21st century?