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'Most Unusual and Surrealistic' Central Park

At 341 hectares (843 acres), Central Park is nowhere near the largest urban park in America.  It’s certainly not the oldest; that would be a smaller park or two in St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565 — 60 years before Dutch settlers moved their cattle onto Manhattan Island.  A year later, they bought the whole island from resident Indians and named it “New Amsterdam.”

Fueled by its port and shipments sent down the Hudson River via the Erie Canal that connected to the Great Lakes in the nation’s interior, Manhattan grew into a teeming, polyglot economic powerhouse.  In 1811, city commissioners got around to drawing up a grid pattern of long north-south avenues and orderly east-west cross streets for mostly empty upper Manhattan.  As a result of that plan, to this day people who can hardly find their way around middlin’-sized cities elsewhere navigate New York’s bustling thoroughfares with ease.

Multi-unit “walk-up” buildings rose along these arteries.  Their apartments were eagerly rented by young couples, large immigrant families, and single “bohemians” such as landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux , a wealthy, dilettantish young architect from London.  Together, they had just won a nationwide competition to design a grand urban park in the midst of it all.

Their “Greensward Plan’s” vision of a wild yet easily accessible park was Olmsted’s doing.  Some of Central Park’s most cherished, manmade touches today, including its graceful bridges and arches, Victorian shelters, and ornate fountains, were Vaux’s.  The end product, in which Manhattanites take fierce pride — and frequent respites — is nearly universally regarded as one of the most important landscaped green spaces ever created.

Even before before Olmsted and Vaux moved to town, the city was gradually purchasing tracts of bramble bushes and copses and swampland that one report called a “pestilential spot where rank vegetation and miasmic odors taint every breath of air.

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