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In
their master plan for Central Park, the 1858 "Greensward
Plan," Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux proposed an
architectural "heart of the Park" defined by a sweeping
Promenade that would culminate in a Terrace overlooking the Lake. As
Vaux said to a newspaper reporter in 1865, however, the architecture
was always to be subordinate to the landscape: "Nature first,
2nd and 3rd – architecture after awhile."
Yet
Olmsted and Vaux also understood the practical nature of a public
park. There had to be places for people to gather, to experience the
human variety the City had to offer, as well as the inspiration of
nature. And they succeeded splendidly with Bethesda Terrace and what
we now call the Mall (formerly the Promenade). Park visitors stand on
Bethesda's Upper Terrace and look across the Lake at the rugged
shoreline of the Ramble. They look down on the lawn Terrace and watch
classes of new mothers doing aerobics, using strollers for
counterpoises. Or they watch rowboats or even an occasional gondola
pass across the Lake's foreground. The scene is framed now as it was
before the turn of the century - with two twenty-foot ornamental
poles bearing gonfalons, colorful medieval-style banners. Leaving the
Upper Terrace, visitors can sit on benches built into the lawn's
Terrace walls and watch the human parade at eye-level.
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On
the lower Terrace is one of the most photographed fountains in the
world, "Angel of the Waters." Bethesda Fountain, as it is
often called, was the only sculpture commissioned as part of the
original design of the Park. The artist, Emma Stebbins, was the first
woman to receive a commission for a major public work in New York
City; the fact that she was the sister of Col. Henry G. Stebbins, the
President of the Central Park Board of Commissioners, does not
detract from her accomplishment or talent. The sculpture, dedicated
in 1873, is a neoclassical winged female figure who symbolically
blesses the water of the fountain with her one hand and carries a
lily, the symbol of purity, in the other. The fountain celebrates the
opening of the Croton Aqueduct, which brought fresh water to New
Yorkers in 1842.
The
decorative elements for Bethesda Terrace itself were designed by
English-born architect Jacob Wrey Mould. Reasserting the primacy of
nature, Mould chose representative wildlife and seasonal design
motifs. There are also carvings symbolic of day: a rising sun, a
crowing cock. Night is represented by a lamp and book, a bat and owl,
and a witch flying over a Jack-O-Lantern. |
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