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• William Church Osborn Memorial Playground Gateway
• Date: 1952
• Sculptor: Paul Manship
• Medium & size: Bronze with granite posts, 5.5 feet high, 8 feet wide.
• Location: Central Park, gateway to playground at 84th St. & Fifth Ave.

Paul Manship is famous for his Prometheus at Rockefeller Center, but some of his most charming works show stylized animals. The Osborn Gates, for example, show scenes from Aesop’s Fables – moralizing tales that have been circulating for thousands of years. At the upper left are the fox and the crow. The fox slyly wonders if the crow’s voice is as handsome as his appearance. As the flattered crow opens his beak to sing, he drops his piece of cheese, and the hungry fox gobbles it up.

Next is the speedy but overconfident Hare, who has just woken from his nap and is about to be defeated by the ponderous but persistent Tortoise.

On the right-hand gate, the peacock, his gorgeous tail spread but his feet stuck on the ground, gazes enviously as the drab crane soars overhead.

Below them, a ravenous wolf faces a rather fierce-looking lamb. The wolf accuses the lamb of muddying the stream, eating from the wolf’s pasture, and insulting the wolf. The lamb bleats that he’s done none of those … and the hungry wolf gobbles him up anyway. The usual interpretation: “The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny” – or, less politically, “An empty belly has no ears.”

In the fable of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse, the city mouse invites his cousin to an elegant banquet, but the two are frightened away before they can eat. The Country Mouse decides it’s better to live simply but without fear.

In a nod to the playground’s denizens, the pillars support family groups of deer and bears. The bears may look familiar – there’s a much larger version of them just south of the Metropolitan Museum. See this post.

Money for the Osborn Gateway was raised privately to honor William Church Osborn. Son of a nineteenth-century railroad magnate, Osborn headed the Children’s Aid Society, the Citizens Budget Commission, and the Metropolitan Museum for a combined total of135 years. The playground that was named for him in 1953 was built just west of the Metropolitan Museum. Twenty years later the Museum took over that space when it needed a site for the Temple of Dendur. The Osborn Gates were only recently refurbished and installed as the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Ancient Playground.

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• Manship (1885-1966) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and trained with Solon Borglum and in Rome. On a 1912 trip to Greece Manship was inspired by Archaic Greek art (then relatively unknown), whose crisp details and glossy surfaces he adapted for mythological subjects. In the 1930s he was the most famous living sculptor in the United States. Manhattan has the Four Elements on the former AT&T Building, 1917 (195 Broadway); Prometheus and his companions, 1934; the Group of Bears, 1932 (Fifth Avenue at 81st Street, just inside Central Park), the Governor Alfred E. Smith Flagpole with charming New York State fauna, 1946 (Catherine and Cherry Streets); and the gates at the entrance to the Central Park Children’s Zoo, 1961 (near 66th Street). Queens has an armillary sphere in Flushing Meadows, and the Bronx has the Rainey Gates at the north entrance to the Bronx Zoo, 1934.
• For the story of Central Park in the 1850s-1870s, see my book Central Park: The Early Years.
• For early images of Central Park, see the pages on this site for through 1860, 1861-1865, and 1866-1870.
• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. More here.
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