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

In his campaign to modify the winning plan, Commissioner Robert Dillon recruited the board's newest member, financier August Belmont, also a prominent Democrat. Dillon and Belmont invoked the design tradition of artificial civic display when they announced their "dissent entirely" from the Greensward plan's naturalistic aesthetic.

The two commissioners thought that the park would be more urbane if its circulation system allowed for more intensive use of the grounds. With Belmont's public support, Dillon proposed the separation of drives, walks, and rides as a "cardinal" design principle both for practical and for aesthetic reasons. To install paths on either side of the drives would expose pedestrians to "the distractions, noise, dust, and dangers of horsemen and carriages." And in place of the Greensward proposal for a equestrian path only around the reservoir, Dillon suggested a separate ride running the length of the park "to accommodate manly and invigorating horsemanship."

A majority of the board rejected Dillon and Belmont's proposals for enhancing the park's grandeur and endorsed Olmsted's rebuttal that a grand avenue would "destroy scenery at great cost" and that "straight lines of trees or stately architecture ... belong not to parks for the people, but to palatial gardens."

By publishing their suggestions for modifying the Greensward plan, Dillon and Belmont brought a wider public into the design negotiations and recruited both the Herald and the Tribune to their call for more ample rides and walks and the "convenience" of their separation. Since many historians have identified the separation of ways as one of the most praiseworthy elements of Central Park's original design, it is worth stressing that without Dillon and Belmont's public protest, this feature would not have been adopted. By the end of June, Republican commissioners successfully closed further public debate and fixed the park's definition as rural scenery. Then, apparently without a formal resolution, they directed Vaux and Olmsted to rework the circulation system into the separate ways advocated by the Democratic commissioners and the press.

The designers ingeniously responded to the commissioners' demands in such a way as to accommodate the convenience of park goers and to give the natural landscape even greater emphasis. Not only did they design winding rides and walks separated from the drive, they introduced more than thirty bridges to carry the various routes over each other. In a technique that Vaux, as architect, appears to have most fully mastered in the later design of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, bridges themselves became graceful frames for landscape scenes beyond.

All text from:

The Park and the People

Courtesy of Barbara Blackmar & Roy Rosenzweig

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