Given the size of Central Park, it was obvious to engineer Egbert Ludovicus Viele that roads would have to be built across it for use by commercial traffic. In his 1856 plan, Viele showed the transverse roads intersecting with the park’s carriage roads and pedestrian walkways. For perpetually impatient New Yorkers, that would have been a potentially lethal arrangement.
In the Greensward Plan, created in 1858, Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted proposed an elegantly simple alternative. Sink the transverse roads into man-made canyons, so that park traffic and business traffic were on separate levels. Seven bridges and a couple tunnels should do it.
But as it turned out, there were to be many, many more bridges. August Belmont, whose name is still famous in racing circles, was a member of Central Park’s Board of Commissioners when the winning design for Central Park was announced. Belmont and his friends successfully lobbied for the addition of a three-mile bridle path. To segregate galloping horses from hapless pedestrians and Sunday carriage-drivers, nineteen bridges were added to the Greensward Plan.
These over- and underpasses are minor miracles of landscape design and architecture. Since Vaux and Olmsted didn’t want manmade works to be the focal point of the park, the bridges usually slip into view around a corner or down a hill.
By 1865, more than thirty bridges had been constructed. It’s not clear from the annual reports of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park who designed all the bridges, but some have been attributed to Calvert Vaux with the assistance of Jacob Wrey Mould. The most exquisitely detailed ones are on pedestrian walks in the south end of the park. From Greywacke to Playmates and Trefoil to Willowdell, no two balustrades, cornices, copings, abutments, buttresses, spandrels, or voussoirs are the same.
The most elaborate of all the bridges is the one that leads pedestrians from the Mall down to Bethesda Terrace and the Lake.
Central Park’s seven original cast-iron bridges were the highest tech of their day. To create and assemble such a bridge was faster and far less expensive than building one of stone, brick, or wood.
Bow Bridge, the most famous of the cast-iron bridges, exists only because several Commissioners insisted that impatient New Yorkers shouldn’t have to meander around the Lake in order to meander in the Ramble.
In the Ramble and further north, bridges are usually rustic, built of rough-hewn wood or stone. One is even made of massive boulders collected in the park.
In the late nineteenth century – after Vaux’s time – three large bridges were added. They allowed traffic from the newly developed Upper West Side to enter the park at West 77th, West 90th, and West 110th Streets.
As the Park declined over the years, so did its bridges. Bricks fell out. Carvings deteriorated. By 1885, Glen Span’s elaborate wooden superstructure had been replaced by mundane but durable stone. The wondrous wood-and-cast-iron Gapstow Bridge was replaced in 1896 with a simple arch of Manhattan schist.
Hazards of the Twentieth Century
Perils unimagined by Vaux and Olmsted arrived with the twentieth century. Speeding cars chipped the stone balustrades and knocked down the iron railings.
In the 1930s, Park Commissioner Robert Moses decided to expand the Heckscher playground and the Zoo. He autocratically ordered the demolition of two cast-iron bridges and Marble Arch.
As with the rest of the Park, the Central Park Conservancy has done a magnificent job of restoring the bridges to their original state, from elegant iron railings to the long-lost urns on the Bow Bridge.
More
- 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.
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