- Date: 1968
- Sculptor: Irwin Glusker
- Medium & size: Bronze; two figures in a small boat (about one foot square), on a three-foot bronze and granite pedestal.
- Location: Central Park, just east of the Loeb Boathouse on the Lake.
Boats are permitted on only two of Central Park’s many bodies of water. You can race model sailboats and motorboats on Conservatory Water.
And as early as 1860, you could hire boatmen to row you around the Lake, the park’s largest body of water except for the two reservoirs.
Today, if you yearn for an excursion with a European feel, you can hire a gondolier with a dead-black Venetian gondola – the descendant of one donated to the park in 1862. According to Cook’s 1869 guide to Central Park (p. 58), the first gondola was the gift of John A.C. Gray, Esq., a former commissioner; it was not in use in 1869 because Gray did not present a Venetian gondolier with it. Cook noted that “It looks sufficiently romantic” just sitting in the water. But by 1900, there were gondoliers working at the Lake.
Olmsted and Vaux did not complain that rowboats would disrupt their pastoral landscape. But a large, permanent structure to store those boats – that was another matter. It would interfere with their carefully planned vistas of the Lake. Nevertheless, boating was extremely popular, and a place to store those boats was needed. In 1874, more than a decade after Central Park opened, an elegant boathouse was built to a design by Calvert Vaux. (The gondoliers above are standing in the Boathouse.)
Half a century later Vaux’s Boathouse was replaced with one far less elegant, which soon fell into disrepair.
In the early 1950s, Carl and Adeline Loeb donated money for a new building. The Boathouse, in faux-Victorian style, is now famous for its restaurant with delicious food and a fabulous view.
The Rowers honors the Loebs and commemorates the boathouse’s original purpose.
More
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