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Category: Best Central Park Tour

Emma Stebbins’ Spectacular Statue

Emma Stebbins

The “Central Park Experience: A Scenic & Historical Walking Tour” visits the most famous statue in the park, Emma Stebbins’ “Angel of the Waters,” at Bethesda Terrace. The statue was completed in 1868 and unveiled on May 31, 1873. The park’s co-designer, Calvert Vaux, envisioned the fountain at the terrace as the “centre of the the centre” of the park.” Henry Stebbins, Emma’s brother and president of the Central Park Board of Commissioners, obtained the commission for his sister. It is, notably, New York City’s first public work of art commissioned to a woman.

Stebbins’ work celebrates the restorative qualities of New York City’s momentous water system, the Croton Aqueduct, which was completed over thirty years earlier in 1842. The statue is based on a passage in the Gospel of St. John where an angel provided healing to the sick by troubling the waters of a pool known as Bethesda. In a pamphlet distributed on the statues’ unveiling, Stebbins noted that the aqueduct and the Gospel’s pool served a similar purpose:

“An Angel descending to bless the waters for healing seems not inappropriate in connection with the fountain; for, although we have not the sad groups of blind, halt and withered waiting to be healed by the miraculous advent of the angel, we have no less healing, comfort and purification, freely sent to us through the blessed gift of pure, wholesome water, which to all the countless homes of this great city, comes like an angel visitation, not at stated seasons, but day by day.”

Like the aqueduct and Central Park, the spectacular statue continues to provide healing and comfort to New York City!

Visit Bethesda Terrace and Fountain by taking one of the Best Central Park tours of the lower park, “The Central Park Experience: A Scenic and Historical Walking Tour.”

Central Park Walking Tour

The Appeal for The Central Park

Best Central Park Walking Tour

On August 19, 1853, the mayor, aldermen, and commonality of the City of New York announced an appeal to the state’s Supreme Court for the “opening and layout” of a “public place between 59th and 106th Streets and Fifth and Eighth Avenues in the [uptown] 12th, 19th, and 22nd Wards.”[1]  Earnest appeals for a public park first surfaced in 1844, when William Cullen Bryant—poet, journalist, and editor of the New-York Evening Post—called for an “extensive pleasure ground” in New York City, and one that matched “the greatness of our metropolis.”[2]  “Commerce is devouring inch by inch the coast of the island,” Bryant warned, “and if we would rescue any part of it for health and recreation, it must be done now.”[3]  “The only objection which we can see,” he prognosticated, “would be the difficulty of persuading the owners of the soil to part with it.”[4]  That remark proved to be prescient. 

            Four years later, Andrew Jackson Downing echoed the call for a park.  Downing was the foremost landscape designer in the young nation, a drafter of the prodigious grounds of the White House and the Smithsonian, and a contributor to the design of the Washington Mall.  The ambitious Downing also had his designs on New York City.  “What are called parks in New-York,” he scoffed, “are not even apologies for the thing.” [5]  A well-designed park in the divided and frenetic city would, he claimed, “soften and humanize the rude . . . and give continual education to the educated,” and thereby serve all classes.[6]  A park, he noted, could unite the class-conscious and divided city.

            The first plan for an urban oasis in 1853, was a $1.5 million conversion of a 153-acre privately owned plot of land.[7]  Jones Wood, as it was called, was on the East River between Sixty-Sixth and Seventy-Seventh Streets.[8]  It belonged to two affluent families, the Jones and Schermerhorns, so vehemently opposed to a coerced acquisition through eminent domain that they appealed to the courts.[9]  William C. Schermerhorn asserted that eminent domain was a “persecution” of him and his family.[10]  The government’s role, he argued, was to safeguard, not seize his private property.

            A New York County judge declared the bill to acquire Jones Woods unconstitutional.[11]  While some leaders continued their advocacy, others set their sights on a larger, more central location on the border of communities known as Harlem, Bloomingdale, and Yorkville—comprised mainly of immigrants and African Americans.[12]  The 778-acre rugged, swampy land was enormous, more than five times the size of Jones Wood.  Many believed the land could be acquired and converted into a spectacular parkland for roughly the same $1.5 million cost.[13]  Moreover, 135 acres already belonged to the Municipal Corporation of New York, and the rest could be acquired through the state’s right of eminent domain.[14] 

            The new Central Park board insisted that under eminent domain, the “citizen” is protected from “injustice.”[15]  “He is,” they continued,” protected in the enjoyment of his property, unless the public needs it.”[16]  Unlike the Jones and Schermerhorns who fought the surrender of Jones Woods, the African Americans and immigrants inhabiting the future Central Park—including those in Seneca Village—had little access to the court system to fight the justification of that  “need.”


[1] “Handbill declaring the intended construction of Central Park,” in “Seneca Village: A Teacher’s Guide Using Primary Sources in the Classroom,” New-York Historical Society, 2010, 13, Collection of The New York City Municipal Archives, Bureau of Old Records, https://nyhs-prod.cdn.prismic.io/nyhs-prod/05a15797-cc2c-4360-a804-0bae8d3cec80_Seneca_Village_NYHS.pdf.

[2] William Cullen Bryant, “A New Public Park,” Evening Post (New York, NY) July 3, 1844, 2, https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/32119902.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Andrew Jackson Downing, Rural Essays (New York: Leavitt & Allen, 1853), 485, Google Books, 2009, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rural_Essays/MSa8zQEACAAJ?hl=en.

[6] Ibid., 142.

[7] Rosenzweig and Blackmar, Park and the People, 45.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 45–49.

[10] Ibid., 50.

[11] Ibid. 50–53.

[12] Ibid., 60; Sara Cedar Miller, Before Central Park (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 193, Kindle; “A small branch” of the Methodist African Union met in the area slightly before 1846, but “with no distinct organization” of note. See: Jonathan Greenleaf, History of the Churches of All Denominations in the City of New York (New York: E. French, 1846), 328, HathiTrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t05x27q2p&view=1up&seq=5.

[13] Rosenzweig and Blackmar, Park and the People, 59.

[14] Ibid., 45; Besides the 135 acres of public land which accommodated a receiving reservoir, the rest belonged to 561 landowners.  Twenty percent of the property belonged to only three families.  The 34,000 lots ended up costing $5 million—more than three times the estimated $1.5 million cost for the entire park, including land and construction. See: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 792.

[15] “Report of Special Committee on Public Parks, January 2, 1852,” in First Annual Report on the Improvement of Central Park (New York: Chas. W. Baker, Printer, 1857), 104, Historical Vital Records of New York City, http://nyc.gov/html/records/pdf/govpub/4055annual_report_manhattan_central_park_1857.pdf.

[16] Ibid.

Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Calvert Vaux

Secret Places of Central Park Tour

The Creation of Central Park

In 1844, lamenting the lack of public areas in New York City for “health and recreation,” William Cullen Bryant, the romantic poet, journalist, and editor of the New-York Evening Post, advocated for “an extensive pleasure ground.”[1]  A few years later, the most prominent landscape gardener in the United States, Andrew Jackson Downing, wrote a public letter commenting that “What are called parks in New-York, are not even apologies for the thing.”[2]  Downing believed that a great park would boost New York’s standing with European cities and elevate the working man to a gentleman.[3]  Initially, the city looked to purchase a privately-owned 153-acre tract of land along the East River called Jones’ Wood, but in 1853, the city used eminent domain to acquire a less expensive, more centrally located 778-acre plot—expanded to 843 acres ten years later.[4]  The park would also protect wealthy, uptown landowners from further incursion by immigrants and African Americans and remove the approximately sixteen hundred “poor and wretched people” already settled there.[5]  An October 1857 advertisement in the New York Herald announced a design competition for the park.[6]  The winners were the team of journalist Frederick Law Olmsted, recently appointed Superintendent of the parkland, and the British-born architect Calvert Vaux, protégé of the recently deceased Downing.  Their plan was named “Greensward.”  Vaux wrote that their mission was to “translate Democratic ideas into Trees and Dirt” in creating a public park to serve the diverse, divided, and growing metropolis.[7]  In 1857, Olmsted was appointed Park Superintendent and Architect-in-Chief.  Construction began the following year during the Panic of 1857, providing work for thousands of unemployed laborers—20,000 by 1866.[8]  Together, Olmstead and Vaux managed the ambitious transformation of hundreds of acres of hilly, rocky, and swampy land into a fully-designed naturalistic landscape and the first large-scale urban public park in the United States.  Olmsted was confident that his artistic creation would alleviate many of the ills of urban life and calm the “rough element of the city.”[9]

In the 1973 FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, Laura Wood Roper, with cooperation from Olmsted’s son, set out to revive the co-designer’s status after it had “fallen upon neglect.”[10]  She describes his “almost religious belief in democracy” and his desire for “communicativeness,” which “distinguished the civilized man from the barbarian.”[11]  According to Roper, communicativeness involved creating community “regardless of regional, class, economic, color, religious, or whatever differences.”[12]  For Olmsted, this union of diverse people was “the essence of democracy,” a justification for the park’s creation, “and the last, best hope of earth.”[13]  By Roper’s account, Olmstead believed that government should play a role in encouraging “taste and refinement,” and public parks and gardens could serve that purpose.[14]  Besides being a pleasure ground for the wealthy, the park would be a means of cultivating genteel standards of good taste and behavior in the working class.[15]  According to Roper, under Olmsted’s guidance, landscape design went from “decorative to social aims,” and his work in civilizing urban life for the benefit of all people “constituted a heroic undertaking.”[16]  The biography set a standard for other works in the 1970s in telling the story of the park from Olmsted’s perspective.

Elizabeth Barlow’s Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York, published in 1972, and the companion to a retrospective celebrating Olmsted’s work, also adheres to the narrative of the designer’s reformer and democratic ambitions.  In Jeffersonian terms, Olmsted wrote that the government’s primary responsibility was to protect citizens in their “pursuit of happiness” against impediments “otherwise insurmountable.”[17]  Barlow states that he believed that public parks could serve that purpose and “humanize the city.”[18]  Both Roper and Barlow take a “great man” approach to Central Park’s history.  In the following decade, historians responded to the 1970s biographies, separating the park from Olmsted’s stated democratic ambitions and exploring it through social history.

Explore this history and more on the Secret Places of Central Park walking tour!


[1] William Cullen Bryant, “A New Public Park,” Bryant Library, last modified October 24, 2020, https://www.bryantlibrary.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=158:wc-bryant-and-the-origins-of-central-park&catid=15&Itemid=181.

[2] Morrison H. Heckscher, Creating Central Park, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 2011), 12.

[3] Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 790-791.

[4] Heckscher, Creating Central Park, 15.

[5] Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 791-792; Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 67.

[6] Heckscher, Creating Central Park, 21.

[7] David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 9.

[8] Rosenzweig, Blackmar, Park and the People, 150.

[9] Geoffrey Blodgett, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architecture as Conservative Reform,” Journal of American History 62, no. 4 (March 1976): 878; Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 176.

[10] Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983 Reprint), xiii.

[11] Roper, FLO, 157, xiv.

[12] Ibid., xiv.

[13] Ibid. 

[14] Ibid., 344.

[15] Ibid., 93.

[16] Ibid., xiii-xiv.

[17] Elizabeth Barlow, Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 30.

[18] Ibid., 8, 20.

Central Park’s Lake

Best Central Park Walking Tour NYC

The Central Park Lake is a 20-acre man-made lake incorporating an existing water body but enlarged for Olmsted and Vaux’s design. In the winter of 1858, after only six months of work on Central Park, the Lake had its first season of ice-skating. The still photo above is from a 1900 movie. While skating is now prohibited on the Lake, there are two formal skating rinks in the Park. Rowboats can also be rented at the boathouse.

Central Park’s Secret – A Loaded Revolutionary War Cannon

Secrets of Central Park Tour

Secrets of Central Park TourWhile exploring the Revolutionary War/War of 1812 forts on the Secret Places of Central Park tour you’ll come upon a fortification which includes a genuine British cannon from the Revolutionary War.  Salvaged from the H.M.S. Hussar after shipwrecking off the East River in 1780, it was eventually donated to Central Park.  After being put into storage for a number of years, the Central Park Conservancy, in their plans to restore the Revolutionary War/War of 1812 fortifications, planned to put the artillery piece back on display.  While restoring it in 2013, they found a cannonball, wadding, and frighteningly enough, over a pound of gunpowder, making this, in theory, a still-loaded cannon since 1780.  The Bomb Squad were called to remove the explosive material, and eventually, it was put back on display for you to see!

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