SNAP SHOTS IN CENTRAL PARK.

SNAP SHOTS IN CENTRAL PARK.By J. Crawford Hamilton.

By J. Crawford Hamilton.

THE TERRACE—STEPS LEADING DOWN TO THE BETHESDA FOUNTAIN AND THE LAKE.

The provincial, who knows all about Central Park and regards it as the eighth wonder of the modern world, is more nearly right than the New Yorker, who is inclined to take it as a matter of course. There are comparatively few who remember the unpromising aspect of the rocky, swampy waste which, thirty five years ago, occupied the midmost portion of Manhattan Island. The designers of the park have been so signally successful in overcoming the difficulties that confronted them when they took their task in hand, that the visitor of today hardly gives them due credit for the remarkable result, or realizes the vast expenditure of money, labor, and skill that has here created the most beautiful park possessed by any of the world’s great capitals.

THE CENTRAL PARK MENAGERIE ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON.

For where can Central Park’s charms be matched? Not beneath the smoky sky of London, where vegetation cannot attain anything like the variety and luxuriance possible in our clear, pure atmosphere. Besides, little attempt at landscape gardening has been made in any of the parks of the British metropolis. They may be termed useful rather than ornamental, and are valued more for their practical hygienic effect as breathing spots in a vast and crowded city than as fields for the artistic reproduction of natural beauties. And in Paris, thealléesof the Bois de Boulogne, prim and formal in their straightness, lack the charm of Central Park’s winding drives with their changing vistas of bordering woodland and meadow. Philadelphia and Chicago—if we admit those cities to a comparison—have parks of larger acreage, but inferior attractions. Quantity can never atone for defects of quality.

Central Park is not so very small, either. It is over half a mile in width, and more than two and a half miles in length. It covers 840 acres, which will hardly compare with Fairmount’s 2740 or the Bois de Boulogne’s 2150, but is enough to rank it with other large metropolitan parks, and to afford ample scope to the various arts that have contributed to make it what it is. Londoners call Hyde and Regent’s Parks large, but their united extent is but five acres more than that of Central Park.

Indeed, one of the most wonderful and attractive features of Central Park is the skill with which its apparent size has been magnified. A stranger driving or walking through it would never suppose that in his entire journey he had never been more than four hundred and fifty yards away from the streets of New York. The almost total exclusion of the outer world, and the production of effects of distance, are really remarkabletriumphs of landscape gardening.

ON THE DRIVE.

Another great charm of Central Park is the marvelous variety of its scenery and embellishments. In the Mall, and especially in the terrace that leads from it to the lake, we find the highest development of artificial decoration. The broad promenade and the straight avenue of trees, the work of masons and sculptors, the plashing fountain and the lake below—all these combine to produce the appearance of the garden of some old French chateau. On the other hand, on the banks of the Harlem Mere, in the North Park, sylvan nature reigns in almost primeval wildness. Here and there in the park are broad, level meadows, divided by stretches of thick wood. The Ramble, with its labyrinth of winding paths, its rustic bridge, its cave, and its miniature water falls, is an ideal Arcadian spot, while the lawn tennis ground presents afin de sièclecontrast. Then there are over thirty buildings, put to almost as many different uses, from the monkey house in the menagerie to the lofty tower of the Belvedere, which seems like a picturesque corner of a Rhine castle. As further evidence of the amount of work that has been done to perfect the park, and of the variety of its contents, it may be stated that it can boast of nine sheets of water, forty eight bridges and archways, nine miles of drives, five miles of bridle path, and nearly thirty miles of walks; that it has nineteen gates, and that over half a million trees have been set out within its limits.

THE OBELISK IN CENTRAL PARK.

The list of statues to be found in Central Park is a long and rather curiously mixed one. Daniel Webster, Alexander Hamilton, FitzGreene Halleck, S. F. B. Morse—these names are well worthy to be thus commemorated. It is not inappropriate that the marble image of Columbus, the discoverer of the New World, should stand in the chief pleasure ground of its metropolis. Nor can there be any objection to the ideal figures—that of Commerce, the cleverly modeledIndian Hunter, and the memorial to the soldiers of the Seventh Regiment who fell in the civil war. But strangely enough, all the other statues in the park are those of foreigners. The German residents of New York presented the busts of Humboldt and Schiller. Citizens of Italian birth erected the bust of Mazzini, while sons of stern Caledonia contributed the statues of Burns and Scott. From South America came the equestrian bronze of Bolivar, and the list of monuments is completed by those of Shakespeare and Beethoven. Great men as all these worthies were, and laudable as is the desire of their fellow countrymen to do them honor, it is somewhat unfortunate that the erection of a statue in Central Park should have come to be the recognized method of giving expression to this feeling. If the process is continued indefinitely, the park will become so thickly dotted with the monuments of foreigners that the statues of Webster and Hamilton may have to be removed to make room for the images of the deceased poets and scientists of England and France, Finland and Kamskatka.

Of this tendency to cosmopolitanism the Mall seems to be headquarters. Halleck (the poet, not the general), is the solitary American represented in its statuary. The visitor may listen there to imported music discoursed by a band principally composed of imported musicians, or stroll to the terrace to admire the most ambitious ornament of the park—the Bethesda fountain, which, although designed by a New York artist—Miss Emma Stebbins—was modeled in Rome and cast in Munich.

IN THE NORTH PARK—A SOLITARY STROLL.

In its vegetation, too, Central Park has a cosmopolitan tone. Much has been done to make it a sort of Jardin d’Acclimatation for the trees and shrubs indigenous to other climes. The commissioners’ efforts in this direction have had good results in varying its flora with exotics whose foliage or flowers make them pleasing to the eye as well as interesting to the botanist. They have not always been equally fortunate, however, and have been criticised for an apparent partiality to foreign trees in preference to natives of sturdier growth and better suited to the climate. It is not every Europeanplant that will flourish here. For instance, six years ago a splendid row of English hawthorn bushes lined a long stretch of the park’s western edge between Sixtieth and Seventieth Streets, and in May bore a wealth of the white blossoms that take their name from the month. They are there no more, killed by the severity of our winters.

AN AFTERNOON GATHERING ON THE MALL.

Asia, and especially Japan, have contributed some valuable additions to Central Park’s woods and shrubbery. The most conspicuous of these is the Rose of Sharon, whose pink and white blossoms are the park’s chief floral ornament in the latter days of summer—for it is in spring that most of the other shrubs and creepers flower.

In the spring, indeed, Central Park reaches its acme of natural beauty and artificial attraction. In the spring its drives are thronged by the equipages of the Four Hundred who later in the year are scattered over two or three continents. In the spring the trees and meadows are clothed with a fresh garb of green, and the Park policeman in a new suit of gray, the cynosure of admiring nursemaids. In the spring the wistaria, the honeysuckle, the jasmine, and the guelder rose make the landscape gay with color. In the spring the dogwood, the most beautiful and characteristic of our lesser trees, sends down its falling petals in a snow white shower. In the spring the New Yorker may be pardoned if for once he feels positively poetical as he witnesses in Central Park the annual miracle of nature’s rejuvenation.

THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE STRAIT BETWEEN THE UPPER AND LOWER LAKES.

But more observers’ eyes, probably, are turned upon the driveways and their wonderful parade of vehicles than upon the panorama of wood and meadow. Such a sight as the wheeled procession that pours through the entrance at Fifty Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue cannot be found elsewhere in America, and is indeed only matched by the displays of Rotten Row and the Champs Elysées. Other American cities admittedly look to New York as their leader and mentor in the matter of fine horseflesh and smart equipages. The very latest and handsomest products of the carriage builders’ skill are here to be seen whirling along behind teams whose value represents a small fortune. There comes the banker’s victoria, drawn by a pair of horses whose clock-like gait and well fed aspect of sleekness show that they appreciate their position in the establishment to which they belong. Behind this comes a trim, light phaeton; then a family party in a barouche; these predominating types of vehicle being interspersed with the tall and ostentatious four in hand, the more unconventional buckboard, the natty dogcart, and thedemocratic park coach, whose passengers take in all the beauties of the scene at twenty five cents a trip.

The bridle path, too, on a sunny afternoon in May, is a spectacle to be remembered. Its pictures come and pass more swiftly than those of the drive, where moderation of speed is a necessity, and is promptly enforced, in the rare cases of its infraction, by the mounted policemen. And, by the way, these sublimated graycoats are themselves worthy of a second glance. Their animals are a really beautiful and well groomed set—most of them bays—and the riders’ horsemanship is of such uniform excellence that a stranger in the park can hardly distinguish one member of the mounted force from another. And in their patrol over fourteen miles of driveway and bridle path their duty is by no means a sinecure. Their courage and promptitude have often been tried by the accidents caused from time to time by untrained horses or reckless or inexperienced drivers and riders. At the season and the hour when it is most frequented, the bridle path is no place for the careless or unskilled horseman. As much space has been given to it as can well be spared, but its width is so comparatively small that at some of the bends serious accidents might easily occur. The rule against riding more than two abreast is a highly necessary one.

The separation of the drives and the bridle paths is a point in which convenience has been subordinated to other considerations. If they lay close together throughout their length, instead of winding through the park on wholly divergent lines, the enjoyment of both riders and drivers would be increased. A radical alteration in the plan of the park, however, would be necessary to effect such a change.

Nearly a quarter of Central Park is occupied by its various bodies of water. These have their ornamental and their practical side. The latter is of course represented by the reservoirs that receive the principal portion of the water supply brought down by the Croton aqueduct. There is a smaller double basin (now being deepened) in the center of the park opposite Eightieth Street, overlooked by the Belvedere, and the main reservoir that fills nearly the whole of the space between Eighty Sixth and Ninety Sixth Streets, and forms the division between the North Park and the South Park. That this big pond, pretty nearly half a mile in length and in width, adds nothing to the attractions of the park, few who have walked or ridden along its border will maintain.

CHILDREN AND NURSES IN THE PARK.

Of the ornamental waters the Lake—so calledpar excellence—is the chief. The effect with which irregularity of outline may be used to add to apparent size is well exemplified by comparing this with the reservoir. Take a boat on the upper part of the Lake, near the foot of the Terrace, row under the bridge across the strait into its lower expanse, and continue to the furthest extremity of the creeks that open into it, and you will hardly guess that the whole sheet of water measures but twenty acres, while the Croton reservoir covers more than a hundred. You will also be likely to think that you have found a remarkably pleasant place for a row, especially if your expedition ismade in the dusk of a summer evening, when the red lanterns that glow dimly in the bows of the boats make a picturesque scene which is often pronounced to be “just like Venice” by those who have never been in that city of watery streets.

A “TALLY HO” IN CENTRAL PARK—THE FAVORITE VEHICLE OF THE JEUNESSE DORÉE.

The other lakes are the Pond, near the Fifty Ninth Street entrance, on which ply the swan boats; the Conservatory water near Fifth Avenue and opposite Seventy Fourth Street; and three in the North Park—Harlem Mere, in the northwestern corner, and the two miniature lakelets called the Pool and the Lock.

The swan boats are by no means the park’s only attraction especially designed for children. There are the swings and merry-go-round of the carrousel, and the little carriages that are drawn up and down the Mall by well trained goats. The menagerie, too, is a source of never failing wonder and amusement. There is always a crowd, in which young people predominate, watching the monkeys, gazing with something like awe at Tip, the huge elephant who has murdered more than one of his keepers, or throwing peanuts and similar esculents to the more docile pachyderm whose quarters are in the neighboring cage.

The enjoyment of the children would be greater yet if the grass covered lawns were not forbidden territory to them. In a few places, indeed, they are allowed to play upon nature’s green carpet, and the privilege might well be extended without injury to the park.

Back to Index Next