Central Park
Central Park
Change from hunting-gathering lifestyle to Agrarian society forced people to learn how to live in closer proximity with others, this development gave birth to public and private space. This essay will be focusing on Manhattan’s Central Park, a well documented public space with more than 25 million visitors each year from world wide.
New York City’s Central Park is the first and most visited urban landscaped park in the United States and one of the most famous in the world (thanks to television shows and movies). The 843-acre of green oasis covers about 6 percent of Manhattan Island which also has the distinction of being the nation’s first major metropolitan park built specifically for the enjoyment of the entire community. Designed in 1857 by Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux, the sites landscape was innovatively and artfully painted with sweeping meadows, lush woodlands, pristine lakes, and secluded ponds to pertain that natural appearance that can easily fool even the most skilled unsuspecting visitors. To fulfill the goal of creating an oasis for the public Olmsted and Vaux’s design plan had to compete with leading urban public spaces of its era, like London’s Hyde Park and Paris’s Jardin des Tuileries. ‘The purpose was to refute the European view that Americans lacked a sense of civic duty and appreciation for cultural refinement and instead possessed an unhealthy and individualistic materialism that precluded interest in the common good’ (Waxman. 1994)
Olmsted and Vaux combined there interest in ‘rural life with a sense of democratic idealism to create a new kind of civil engineering that synthesized function and beauty’ (lbid). There vision for Central Park proved to be extremely time consuming with ‘topsoil imported from Long Island and New Jersey’ (Slavicek.2009) not to mention expensive “The city of New York had only been able to afford the huge mid- Manhattan plot in the first place because the tract’s rocky,
Change from hunting-gathering lifestyle to Agrarian society forced people to learn how to live in closer proximity with others, this development gave birth to public and private space. This essay will be focusing on Manhattan’s Central Park, a well documented public space with more than 25 million visitors each year from world wide.
New York City’s Central Park is the first and most visited urban landscaped park in the United States and one of the most famous in the world (thanks to television shows and movies). The 843-acre of green oasis covers about 6 percent of Manhattan Island which also has the distinction of being the nation’s first major metropolitan park built specifically for the enjoyment of the entire community. Designed in 1857 by Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux, the sites landscape was innovatively and artfully painted with sweeping meadows, lush woodlands, pristine lakes, and secluded ponds to pertain that natural appearance that can easily fool even the most skilled unsuspecting visitors. To fulfill the goal of creating an oasis for the public Olmsted and Vaux’s design plan had to compete with leading urban public spaces of its era, like London’s Hyde Park and Paris’s Jardin des Tuileries. ‘The purpose was to refute the European view that Americans lacked a sense of civic duty and appreciation for cultural refinement and instead possessed an unhealthy and individualistic materialism that precluded interest in the common good’ (Waxman. 1994)
Olmsted and Vaux combined there interest in ‘rural life with a sense of democratic idealism to create a new kind of civil engineering that synthesized function and beauty’ (lbid). There vision for Central Park proved to be extremely time consuming with ‘topsoil imported from Long Island and New Jersey’ (Slavicek.2009) not to mention expensive “The city of New York had only been able to afford the huge mid- Manhattan plot in the first place because the tract’s rocky,
Bibliography: Books Slavicek, L (2009) New York City’s Central Park (Building America: Then and Now) New York: Chelsea House Publications Calvino, I (1972) Invisible cities, Pan-picador Websites Greg. (2010) How Social Media Changes the Nature of Relationships http://onthespiral.com/how-does-media-changes-the-nature-of-re (Accessed on: 24.04.2011) Hampson, R (Accessed on: 27.04.2011) Laurin, D Unknown. (2008) http://www.wikimapia.org/1427/central-park (Accessed on: 14.04.2011) Waxman, S