The Central Park

The Central Park: Original Designs for New York's Greatest Treasure
Cynthia S. Brenwall
Harry N. Abrams, March 2019



Hardcover | 11-1/2 x 9-3/4 inches | 230 pages | 250 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1419732324 | $50.00

Publisher Description:

Drawing on the unparalleled collection of original designs for Central Park in the New York City Municipal Archives, Cynthia S. Brenwall tells the story of the creation of New York’s great public park, from its conception to its completion. This treasure trove of material ranges from the original winning competition entry; to meticulously detailed maps; to plans and elevations of buildings, some built, some unbuilt; to elegant designs for all kinds of fixtures needed in a world of gaslight and horses; to intricate engineering drawings of infrastructure elements. Much of it has never been published before. A virtual time machine that takes the reader on a journey through the park as it was originally envisioned, The Central Park is both a magnificent art book and a message from the past about what brilliant urban planning can do for a great city.

dDAB Commentary:

Years ago I taught at the Columbus Circle campus of the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), when a couple projects given to first- and second-year students were located in Central Park. I don't recall their individual programs, but one was a building along Central Park West, not far from the American Museum of Natural History, and the other was a structure along the edge of the huge reservoir that sits in the middle of the park. Proximity to the school meant we could visit the sites as classes and the students could return to them as often as needed to absorb the qualities of Central Park and its many details. While Central Park is often seen as a natural place, it is 100% designed and constructed, and doing a project in the park forced students to confront this fact and then hopefully see it as a place that is constantly changing, even though many New Yorkers don't want to see it change and the projects were just hypothetical, educational.

But earlier this decade the landmark Central Park Precinct (along the 86th Street Transverse) got a contemporary glass-and-copper canopy over part of its courtyard, and in the coming years the Metropolitan Museum of Art will attempt to jut a wing designed by David Chipperfield into the park. So to this day the park evolves, though how it does is another thing entirely. I'd argue that the best interventions would be done by architects with the keenest knowledge of the park's design and details — not to mimic those details, necessarily, but to understand them and find contemporary equivalents. And though I doubt that Cynthia S. Brenwall, conservator at the City of New York Municipal Archives, wrote The Central Park as inspiration for the few contemporary architects able to actually do work in Central Park, I can see the book's value extending beyond historical documentation.

With 250 illustrations — a fraction of the thousands of drawings created for the park and housed in the Municipal Archives — The Central Park is a treasure trove of architectural details: plans, sections, elevations, and other drawings of bridges, buildings, follies, sculptures, paving, flagpoles, walls, gates, and much more, even a gondola. Not everything in the book was built or remains as it was designed, so the book is really about intentions, most of them from well over a century ago. Architectural drawings generally convey the ideas of architects to clients, builders, and sometimes the general public; in the case of Central Park they came from the partnership of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux but also from Jacob Wrey Mould and the other designers or engineers involved in its early days. The drawings reveal, among other things, the widely diverse character of designs for the park's many parts that went into creating a cohesive, continuously evolving masterpiece on a metropolitan scale.

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Author Bio:

Cynthia S. Brenwall is a conservator at the New York City Municipal Archives, which preserves the historical records of the government of New York City. She lives in New York City. Martin Filler is a prominent American architecture critic. He lives in New York City.

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