Central Park

Since its creation in 1858, Central Park has been one of New York City’s landmarks. The first landscaped public park in the United States could not have been envi­sioned, let alone built, without a profound knowledge of German garden theory and German garden design.

It was a German philosopher and pro­fessor of aesthetics, Christian Cayus Lorenz Hirschfeld (1742-1792), who was the first person worldwide to articulate and substan­tiate the need for a public park designed for all social classes and financed by the gov­ernment. He explored this idea in his groundbreaking book, Theorie der Gartenkunst (Theory of Garden Art, 1779-1785), a five-volume work that Olm­sted owned and heavily relied upon—both for content and style—in his own writing and his park design. The English Garden in Munich was the first realization of Hirschfeld’s social principles, a landscaped park that Olmsted visited several times and on which he lavished much praise.

New York City was growing rapidly in the 1840s. Urbanization and its conse­quences, such as the inhumane and unhy­gienic conditions of tenement housing, bred fatal epidemics. The influx of Ameri­can farmers and European immigrants in search of better job possibilities led to fierce competition for employment, often resulting in poverty and leading to riots and crime. Wanting to exercise control over the lower classes as well as believing in nature’s therapeutic ability to civilize the ri­otous classes, members of the upper class expressed the urgent need for a public park.

To ensure the best possible results for the design of Central Park, a contest was held in 1857. It was the first landscape de­sign competition in the United States. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), an autodidactic landscape gardener and for­mer journalist, and his partner Calvert Vaux (1824-1895), a British-born archi­tect, won the competition when their de­sign entry “Greensward,” beat out thirty- two competitors. Characteristic of their design were the pastoral and picturesque landscapes, the extensive sweeping mead­ows (Sheep Meadow, East Meadow) juxta­posed with wooded rugged-rocky terrains (the Ramble, as well as landscape around the lakes called Loch and Pool) planted with indigenous vegetation. Four trans­verse roads crossing through the park were mandatory in the design. Olmsted and Vaux deliberately lowered them below park level so as to avoid disrupting, visually or acoustically, the three-dimensional land­scape paintings they had created. They also relied to a great extent on the terrain’s nat­ural pictorial qualities and deliberately kept the architecture sparse.

Olmsted was not the only designer of Central Park; neither was Vaux. Both men counted on the tremendous botanical knowledge and the artistic sensibilities of German gardeners whom they assigned leading positions in the Central Park ad­ministration. Ignaz Anton Pilat (1820­1870) in particular, but also Wilhelm Fis­cher (1819-1899) and Eugene Achille Baumann (b. 1821), who had received a thorough education in Germany and had already been well established in New York, were instrumental to the park’s realization.

Olmsted and Vaux relied on the Ger­man philosopher Christian Cayus Lorenz Hirschfeld for their social vision for the

Central Park Summer, by John Bachmann. A New York City landmark, Central Park could not have been envisioned, let alone built, without a profound knowledge of German garden theory and German garden design. Central Park’s 44 bridges (here, Bow Bridge) were focal points of Olmsted’s and Vaux’s effort to make the park function as a national monument. (Library of Congress)

park, but they resorted to the celebrated German landscape gardener Hermann Heinrich Furst von Puckler-Muskau (1785—1871) for the aesthetics. The picto­rial language the German aristocrat em­ployed designing his expansive estate in the southeastern town of Muskau (1815) bears distinct national connotations. To make Central Park “a great work of art of the Re­public,” the American designers and their German gardeners resorted to the national aspects of Puckler’s pictorial language. In fact, Olmsted’s partner Charles W. Eliot would later identify Puckler-Muskau’s pic­torial language as a “national style,” urging American landscape architects to adopt it.

The national aspects of Puckler’s picto­rial language consist of the naming of things to evoke the historical past, in Puck- ler’s case, his aristocratic genealogy, but he also makes references to German mythol­ogy by naming old oak trees “Thor” and “Odin.” Further, Puckler’s deliberate use of indigenous rock as building material and his use of indigenous plants were meant to imbue the park visitor with national pride about the native vegetation. Olmsted and Vaux singled out nature as the nation’s greatest cultural resource and the most po­tent expressive vocabulary. Like Puckler, Olmsted and Vaux used indigenous vegeta­tion to display the tremendous diversity of flora in the United States and, by doing so, educated the park visitors and encouraged them to take national pride in their native plants.

a time when the United States was becom­ing an increasingly industrial nation. Their adoption of Puckler’s national principles is further exemplified by their use of local building material. The bridges and rustic seats were often made of the gneiss and Manhattan schist found in the park.

The park’s forty-four bridges, too, were focal points of Olmsted’s and Vaux’s effort to make the park function as a national monument. The bridges’ design, building material, location, and above all their quaint names (Pine Banks Arch, Huddle­stone Arch, Springbanks Arch, Oak Bridge) are intended to evoke the nostalgia for American rural life. Explicit allusions to, for instance, the Natural Bridge, a nat­ural and national monument Thomas Jef­ferson describes in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784—1785), express the design­ers’ intention to make Central Park a na­tional monument as well.

Olmsted and Vaux also customized the park’s landscape to preserve and document the lost landscape of the nation. Just as the painters of the Hudson River School painted the Catskill Mountains, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks exactly when they were being destroyed by tourism and industrialization, Olmsted and Vaux evoked the very same landscapes in the park. They provided allusions to those ex­emplary terrains for two reasons: first, in accord with their understanding of the park as a succession of landscape paintings, they wanted to create a “picture gallery” of the most celebrated American landscapes. Second, they wanted to provide those who could neither afford to go to galleries nor to make a trip to the Catskill Mountains with at least a suggestion of the famous landscapes en miniature. Their goal has been amply realized. To this day more than 25 million people visit this outdoor picture gallery, an oasis amid a chaotic, bustling, sensorily exhausting metropolis, each year.

Franziska Kirchner

See also Landscape Architects, German American

References and Further Reading

Beveridge, Charles Eliot, and David Schuyler, eds. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Vol. 3: Creating Central Park, 1857—1861. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Kirchner, Franziska. Der Central Park in New York. Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2002.

Miller, Perry. Nature’s Nation. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1967.

Miller, Sara Cedar. Central Park: An American Masterpiece. New York: H. N. Abrams, 2003.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.