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The Belvedere was closed for renovations for over a year: it was reopened on 5/28/2019.

Once upon a time, Calvert Vaux designed a fairy-tale castle – not for a princess, but for a park.

In the Greensward Plan that Vaux created with Frederick Law Olmsted, the only straight line is the Mall, a grand promenade. The end north of the Mall and Bethesda Terrace were designed to open up to a lovely view across the Lake to the Ramble.

Through the 1860s, while the Park was under construction, only one manmade structure was visible beyond the Ramble – a firetower on the 79th Street Transverse. It sat on the highest point at the southern end of the Park.

The Board of Commissioners assigned their staff architect to create a focal point for the view from the Mall by replacing the firetower with something more decorative. Calvert Vaux was trained in the most popular style of his day: Gothic Revival. It was the perfect style for a castle. Viewed in the distance, the Belvedere had a fairy-tale charm. It also gave a delightful old-world touch to that marvel of modern engineering, the original Croton Reservoir, which occupied the center of the Park between the 79th and 86th Street Transverses.

Those who braved the convoluted paths of the Ramble to reach the Belvedere discovered that it wasn’t a very spacious castle. Vaux designed it at three-quarter scale, to make it look more distant and imposing from the Mall and the Reservoir.

Even at three-quarter scale, the Belvedere was a massive project. During their brief reign, Boss Tweed’s cronies on the Board of Commissioners scrapped the second half of Vaux’s plan. Instead, they told architect Jacob Wrey Mould to design a colorful wooden pavilion.

In 1871 Andrew Haswell Green, his frugal hands again firmly grasping the Park’s financial reins, grumbled that the Belvedere project was “unnecessarily extravagant.” Once it was completed, the only residents of the fortress were a few meteorologists, who were forced by the lack of window panes into very close contact with New York’s erratic weather. But it was indeed a lovely focal point for the view from the Mall.

By 1900, the trees in the Ramble had grown so high that the Belvedere disappeared from view. Out of sight, out of mind … When the park was strapped for cash – as it often was – the Belvedere was among the first structures to be slighted. Mould’s pavilion collapsed to splinters around 1900. In the 1920s, the committee for the John Purroy Mitchel Memorial blithely proposed razing the castle, which one Park commissioner deemed “without value from an artistic standpoint.”

By the 1970s, when the city was on the verge of bankruptcy, vandals were bombarding the Belvedere with spray paint. Its granite retaining walls were falling down. Its windows were boarded up.

Belvedere Castle was refurbished and reopened in 1983, under the aegis of the Central Park Conservancy. It’s again charmingly reflected in water – little Turtle Pond, the last remnant of the old Reservoir. Visitors scale its narrow stairs for a sweeping reconnaissance of the Park. But trees still block sight of it from the south, so it’s no longer the happy ending to a view from Bethesda Terrace.

Belvedere, 2013-2018

All photos copyright © 2018 Dianne L. Durante

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2019 Renovation

Note the new tower on the wooden pavilion at the right. All photos copyright © 2019 Dianne L. Durante

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Information from the Central Park Conservancy

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More

• For more early images of Central Park, see my pages on images through 1860, 1861-1865, and 1866-1870. For more on Central Park in the nineteenth century, see my book Central Park: The Early Years (details here).
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