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History Calvert Vaux Central Park in the Cinema - Movies Shot in Central Park Frederick Law Olmsted Greensward Plan Seneca Village

Virtually all the designers recommended that the park north of the existing receiving reservoir and the planned new one be treated naturalistically, with scenic carriage drive and walks generally following the contours identified by Viele. Modifying the rugged terrain northwest of the reservoirs would be prohibitively expensive, and the territory from 85th to 106th streets was largely inaccessible to park visitors arriving by public transportation. Several contestants took up a theme already sounded by the commissioners and the press and proposed that the park boundary be extended northward from 106th to 110th Street to encompass the high point of the northwest rocky ridge. (The suggestion was implemented in 1863.)

The plans differed much more dramatically in the design of the lower half of the park. Although all contestants included the required parade ground, formal garden, major fountain, and an exhibition or concert hall, each pursued a different approach in treatment of these features in relation to the natural setting. Roughly two-thirds of the proposed plans highlighted the natural landscape itself. Working primarily within the naturalistic tradition, these plans provided relief from the city amid pastoral scenery of artistically arranged rocks, trees, lawns, lakes, and streams. The other one-third emphasized an artificial civic display of formal avenues, exhibition halls, museums, fountains, statuary, and zoological or botanical gardens, intended simultaneously to instruct and inspire their viewers in the accomplishments of civilization.  A cluster of proposals within each of these dominant modes showed the influence of "popular eclecticism," some stressing the diverting ornamentation of the natural landscape, others emphasizing the parade and playgrounds as popular features accommodating large crowds of spectators and participants. And one particularly ambitious plan tried to merge all these impulses.
First prize went to plan 33, the "Greensward" plan, submitted by the park's superintendent, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the English-born architect Calvert Vaux. This decision would later be hailed as a landmark in the history of landscape architecture. And certainly it was. Yet accounts that emphasize its unique genius imply that artistic judgment alone governed the selection of the design. From the commissioners' perspective, more than aesthetics was at stake; politics as much as artistic merit determined just how the nation's first and most famous landscape park would be designed and built.

Olmsted and Vaux both had close ties to the Republican park commissioners. Olmsted had been recruited by Charles Elliott in August 1857 to apply to be the park superintendent, with the suggestion, as Olmsted later recalled, that he would be a "Republican the Democrats could live with." Although subordinate to Chief Engineer Viele, a Democrat neither Republicans nor reform members of his own party could live with, Olmsted noted that some commissioners had sought to advance his position at Viele's expense that fall by requesting that he (Olmsted) submit reports on drainage and planting. Calvert Vaux, who had earlier pointed out the artistic limitations of Viele's plan to Republican acquaintances on the board, carried the further cachet of having been the partner of Andrew Jackson Downing, the leading American landscape gardener of the mid-nineteenth century.

Empowered to select a design for Central Park, the commissioners had looked to the cultural authority of formal landscape design traditions and rejected the diverting eclecticism of commercial pleasure gardens. The majority voted for a design that most immediately reflected the tastes of those -- mostly affluent -- citizens who, like themselves, would feel at ease in a beautiful "rural" park where they could admire the scenery and one another. The choice of the Greensward plan reflected the preference of the board's Yankee Republican majority for the English naturalistic design tradition as well as for designers they felt at ease with. The contest over Central Park's design did not, however, end with the decision of the commissioners.

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