pianoman11686
July 23rd, 2006, 01:00 AM
A Plaza Evolves From Oversight to Landmark
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/07/21/realestate/23scap2a.600.jpg
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Published: July 23, 2006
AT 58th and Fifth, there’s a crowd whichever way you turn: to the west, the Plaza Hotel swarms with workers as the condo conversion project grinds on; to the east, the elegant new glass cube of the Apple store, in front of the old General Motors Building, is attracting lines of people.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/07/21/realestate/23scap2b.jpg
About 1906, when the Vanderbilt mansion occupied the Bergdorf Goodman site carriages and pedestrians shared the plaza.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/07/23/realestate/23scap1b.jpg
The open space around the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza looked very bare in 1923, right. Today, trees almost obscure the fountain.
It is peculiar, in a way, that the stretch of open space between the buildings — on the west side of Fifth between 58th and 59th and part of what is formally known as Grand Army Plaza — is there at all.
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the Central Park design competition in 1858, but their entry was sketchy when it came to the park approach at 59th and Fifth. It appears to show a recessed open space with no special features between 59th and 60th.
Construction on their naturalistic design was in full swing in 1864 when some members of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park approved a plan for a much more formal entrance at Fifth Avenue. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt with iron gates, equestrian statues atop great plinths, a terrace and a high column, it had more in common with an urban square in Europe than with the picturesque landscape originally envisioned.
According to “The Park and the People,” by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar (Henry Holt, 1992), Vaux saw the design as “imperial,” compromising the democratic ideals of the park.
Hunt’s proposal was never adopted, but the perceived inadequacy of the original entrance area from 59th to 60th may have been what spurred the commissioners, in 1868, to acquire a matching square from 58th to 59th, as “a more capacious entrance,” in the words of the annual report of that year. Columbus Circle, on the park’s southwestern corner, was created at the same time, and it appears both had the consent of Olmsted and Vaux.
A map of the plaza at the time shows the area almost completely open to vehicular traffic, with a simple island in the form of a Greek cross in the southern half, and a larger circular island in the northern half. Fifth Avenue would be a two-way street well into the next century, and the map indicates that the greatest concern was to provide northbound carriage traffic easy access to the park drive.
The Tweed ring took over the administration of the parks in 1870, and the annual report the next year dwelt on the wastefulness of the acquisition of the southerly section.
“Why this square was ever laid out, no one has been able to determine,” the report says. “Of what special use it is to the park is beyond comprehension. The propriety of taking a square of ground for this purpose, at a cost of half a million of dollars, without any benefit, seems quite incomprehensible.”
But Boss Tweed took advantage of the opportunity: he and a group of colleagues filed plans for an eight-story hotel overlooking the square, on the east side of Fifth from 58th to 59th. The Brooklyn Eagle said the new Central Park Hotel would cost $1.5 million.
The project didn’t get very far before justice caught up with Tweed, and the hotel property — with its partly completed building — was sold at a bankruptcy auction in 1874. An 1888 article in The Real Estate Record & Guide noted that part of the building’s “hideous cast-iron shell” remained in place.
Early photographs indicate that the southern section of the present plaza was a stumpy half oval planted with a bit of grass and a few trees. Most of the area was open roadbed, for in a time of horse-drawn vehicles, pedestrians could share the road in relative safety.
By 1897, a proposal had surfaced to place a soldiers’ and sailors’ monument somewhere on the plaza. The Augustus Saint-Gaudens equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War general, which was originally supposed to be at 89th Street and Riverside Drive, went up on the northern part of the plaza in 1903.
Until that time the two squares were sometimes called the Central Park Plaza or the Fifth Avenue Plaza, but it was apparently with Sherman in mind that in 1923 the squares were renamed Grand Army Plaza, despite the fact that Brooklyn had a monumental public space of the same name.
In 1908, The New York Times reported on a proposal for a Lincoln memorial, apparently on the southern half, to harmonize with Sherman. Three years later, the publisher Joseph Pulitzer died and left $50,000 to build an ornamental fountain near the entrance of Central Park. What he had in mind, he said, was one like “those in the Place de la Concorde.”
In 1913, Landscape Architecture magazine said that the old open-space character of the plaza was no longer adequate: because most of the traffic was automobiles, the area needed to be redesigned “so that one may walk in safety.”
The southern part of the plaza was taken over by Thomas Hastings’s sumptuous tiered fountain in 1916. At that time there were also extensive stone balustrades and four tall ceremonial stone columns bearing torchiers in metal brackets. The stone began failing within a decade, and for a while the fountain mechanism was broken and the basin filled with litter. The site was not comprehensively rehabilitated until 1948, and further restoration was required in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
These days the northern half of the plaza fades away into Central Park. It is the southern half, conceived as an afterthought, that has evolved into the more important of the pair, combining the movement of traffic with an open public space, formal architectural treatment and a surrounding wall of buildings, to create New York’s closest approximation of a European square.
E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/07/21/realestate/23scap2a.600.jpg
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Published: July 23, 2006
AT 58th and Fifth, there’s a crowd whichever way you turn: to the west, the Plaza Hotel swarms with workers as the condo conversion project grinds on; to the east, the elegant new glass cube of the Apple store, in front of the old General Motors Building, is attracting lines of people.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/07/21/realestate/23scap2b.jpg
About 1906, when the Vanderbilt mansion occupied the Bergdorf Goodman site carriages and pedestrians shared the plaza.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/07/23/realestate/23scap1b.jpg
The open space around the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza looked very bare in 1923, right. Today, trees almost obscure the fountain.
It is peculiar, in a way, that the stretch of open space between the buildings — on the west side of Fifth between 58th and 59th and part of what is formally known as Grand Army Plaza — is there at all.
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the Central Park design competition in 1858, but their entry was sketchy when it came to the park approach at 59th and Fifth. It appears to show a recessed open space with no special features between 59th and 60th.
Construction on their naturalistic design was in full swing in 1864 when some members of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park approved a plan for a much more formal entrance at Fifth Avenue. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt with iron gates, equestrian statues atop great plinths, a terrace and a high column, it had more in common with an urban square in Europe than with the picturesque landscape originally envisioned.
According to “The Park and the People,” by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar (Henry Holt, 1992), Vaux saw the design as “imperial,” compromising the democratic ideals of the park.
Hunt’s proposal was never adopted, but the perceived inadequacy of the original entrance area from 59th to 60th may have been what spurred the commissioners, in 1868, to acquire a matching square from 58th to 59th, as “a more capacious entrance,” in the words of the annual report of that year. Columbus Circle, on the park’s southwestern corner, was created at the same time, and it appears both had the consent of Olmsted and Vaux.
A map of the plaza at the time shows the area almost completely open to vehicular traffic, with a simple island in the form of a Greek cross in the southern half, and a larger circular island in the northern half. Fifth Avenue would be a two-way street well into the next century, and the map indicates that the greatest concern was to provide northbound carriage traffic easy access to the park drive.
The Tweed ring took over the administration of the parks in 1870, and the annual report the next year dwelt on the wastefulness of the acquisition of the southerly section.
“Why this square was ever laid out, no one has been able to determine,” the report says. “Of what special use it is to the park is beyond comprehension. The propriety of taking a square of ground for this purpose, at a cost of half a million of dollars, without any benefit, seems quite incomprehensible.”
But Boss Tweed took advantage of the opportunity: he and a group of colleagues filed plans for an eight-story hotel overlooking the square, on the east side of Fifth from 58th to 59th. The Brooklyn Eagle said the new Central Park Hotel would cost $1.5 million.
The project didn’t get very far before justice caught up with Tweed, and the hotel property — with its partly completed building — was sold at a bankruptcy auction in 1874. An 1888 article in The Real Estate Record & Guide noted that part of the building’s “hideous cast-iron shell” remained in place.
Early photographs indicate that the southern section of the present plaza was a stumpy half oval planted with a bit of grass and a few trees. Most of the area was open roadbed, for in a time of horse-drawn vehicles, pedestrians could share the road in relative safety.
By 1897, a proposal had surfaced to place a soldiers’ and sailors’ monument somewhere on the plaza. The Augustus Saint-Gaudens equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War general, which was originally supposed to be at 89th Street and Riverside Drive, went up on the northern part of the plaza in 1903.
Until that time the two squares were sometimes called the Central Park Plaza or the Fifth Avenue Plaza, but it was apparently with Sherman in mind that in 1923 the squares were renamed Grand Army Plaza, despite the fact that Brooklyn had a monumental public space of the same name.
In 1908, The New York Times reported on a proposal for a Lincoln memorial, apparently on the southern half, to harmonize with Sherman. Three years later, the publisher Joseph Pulitzer died and left $50,000 to build an ornamental fountain near the entrance of Central Park. What he had in mind, he said, was one like “those in the Place de la Concorde.”
In 1913, Landscape Architecture magazine said that the old open-space character of the plaza was no longer adequate: because most of the traffic was automobiles, the area needed to be redesigned “so that one may walk in safety.”
The southern part of the plaza was taken over by Thomas Hastings’s sumptuous tiered fountain in 1916. At that time there were also extensive stone balustrades and four tall ceremonial stone columns bearing torchiers in metal brackets. The stone began failing within a decade, and for a while the fountain mechanism was broken and the basin filled with litter. The site was not comprehensively rehabilitated until 1948, and further restoration was required in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
These days the northern half of the plaza fades away into Central Park. It is the southern half, conceived as an afterthought, that has evolved into the more important of the pair, combining the movement of traffic with an open public space, formal architectural treatment and a surrounding wall of buildings, to create New York’s closest approximation of a European square.
E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company