Central Park: descrizione

CENTRAL PARK: DESCRIZIONE

Central park
Pre-1858
In the mid-1800s, 500,000 people were living in New York City, with most city dwellers housed in crowded, cramped quarters below 38th Street.

To escape the din of city life, people sought refuge in such pastoral spaces as Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
The first public figure to champion the need for open green space within the city was Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant. In 1844, he called for the creation of a large public park. Landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing joined Bryant in his pleas, and together they pressed officials to set aside land before it was swallowed up by the fast-developing city. In a moment of rare political consensus, both parties at that time endorsed the idea of a large public park. Between 1853 and 1856, the commissioners paid more than $5 million for land from 59th Street to 106th Street, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues.
Then, in 1857, the independent board of commissioners sponsored a public competition to design the new Central Park.

Central Park di Guillaume Musso: trama del romanzo

COSA VEDERE A CENTRAL PARK

1858 - 1871 Out of 33 entries, the commissioners chose the Greensward plan by Frederick Law Olmsted, superintendent of the Park work crews, and Calvert Vaux, the British architect who had convinced the commissioners to hold a design competition.
The varied terrain of the topography set aside for the Park invited pastoral, picturesque, and formal landscapes, all of which were included in Olmsted and Vaux’s plan. Achieving their vision, however, was a challenge to both architect and engineer, as the area was rocky, swampy, and muddy. The soil was inadequate to sustain the trees and shrubs Olmsted and Vaux planned, so 500,000 cubic feet of topsoil was carted in from New Jersey. Lacking modern machinery, workers manually dug up earth, and blasted out huge boulders with gunpowder. More than 10 million cartloads of materials and debris were carted in and out on horse-drawn carts. Thirty-six bridges and arches were built and six man-made water bodies, fed from the City's water supply, were created.

New York, tesina svolta

DIMENSIONI CENTRAL PARK

Andrew Haswell Green served as comptroller and treasurer of the board of commissioners from 1857 to 1871, when the Park was under construction.  Green recognized the brilliance of Olmsted and Vaux’s plan when other commissioners were ready to dismiss it. It is because of Green’s support and protection of the Greensward plan that so much of Central Park is true to its original design.  
1872 - 1933
Most of the landscapes of Central Park were completed twenty years after the design competition was announced. Hampered by an endless series of political battles, Olmsted and Vaux officially resigned many times for either aesthetic or political reasons. Olmsted was finally removed in 1877; Vaux stayed on and off until his death in 1895. In his 1882 essay "Spoils of the Park" Olmsted noted that because of Central Park’s uniqueness it needed an innovative form of management. He recommended that an executive office, a skilled landscape architect, and an unpaid and informed board of directors oversee the decisions for the Park.

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