New York City’s Central Park can feel like an untouched slice of nature in the heart of Manhattan, but every square foot of the 843-acre park was carefully planned and constructed. When New York legislators approved construction of a massive urban park in 1853—the first of its kind in the United States—they chose some of the least attractive land in the city.
“It was junk land,” says Cynthia Brenwall, a conservator at the New York Municipal Archives. “It was not nice, beautiful and hilly like it is now. It was rocky and full of bogs. There were gross tanneries and bone-boiling plants. It was attractive because it was easily attainable.”
The transformation of “junk land” into one of the most-visited and beloved parks in the world required one of the largest public works projects in 19th-century America. From 1857 to 1866, more than 20,000 laborers armed with pickaxes, carts and gunpowder removed and reworked nearly 7 million cubic feet of rock and soil to shape Central Park into the verdant work of public art it is today.
The People's Garden
From 1840 to 1850, the population of New York City grew from 327,000 to almost 600,000. The vast majority of New Yorkers still lived in the southern tip of Manhattan, but city planners predicted the growing metropolis would soon cover the whole island. If New York was going to be a world-class city on par with Paris and London, it needed an open green space like the Tuileries Garden or Hyde Park where residents could escape the noise and pollution of city life.
“Poor New Yorkers who lived in tenements weren't going out into the country on the weekends,” says Brenwall, author of The Central Park: Original Designs for New York's Greatest Treasure. “They didn’t summer in the Hamptons. They worked six days a week and had one day to recuperate. Central Park was supposed to be a way to be out in the ‘country’ without leaving the city.”
In 1853, the New York State Legislature set aside 775 largely undeveloped acres of the Manhattan grid—between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, from 59th to 106th Streets—to become “The Central Park.”
“New York City leaders were really ahead of their time by anticipating the city’s massive population growth,” says Anne "Dede" Neal Petri, president and CEO of the Olmsted Network. “A city with such a dense population would really need contact with the therapy of nature.”
The Forced Removal of Seneca Village: An African American Settlement
Some of the land acquired to create Central Park was already home to approximately 1,600 New Yorkers, including a predominantly Black settlement called Seneca Village. In 1825, a 25-year-old Black shoeshiner named Andrew Williams paid $120 for a parcel of land between West 82nd to West 89th Street. The area became a refuge for Black New Yorkers looking to escape the racial discrimination of unhealthy living conditions of Lower Manhattan.
By 1855, Seneca Village was home to 225 people, two-thirds of them Black. About half of Seneca Village’s Black residents owned their own home, which also gave them the right to vote. The government bought the land by the power of eminent domain and Seneca Village residents were forced to leave by 1857.
Olmsted Becomes Park Superintendent
In 1856, an initial plan for Central Park was drawn up by Egbert Viele, a cartographer hired as the first chief architect of the project. But Viele’s map of the park, while accurate and functional, wasn’t exactly inspiring. In 1857, the park commissioners announced a year-long competition to select a new and more innovative design for Central Park.
Before working on Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted was not an architect or even a “landscape gardener” (as landscape architects were known in the 1850s). The son of a wealthy Connecticut merchant, Olmsted didn’t go to college (an eye condition kept him from enrolling at Yale), but he amassed a variety of life experiences that uniquely prepared him for designing public green spaces.
With his father’s support, Olmsted operated a farm on Staten Island, where he experimented with different drainage and soil improvement methods. In 1850, Olmstead went on a six-month “walking tour” of Europe and Great Britain. Always a lover of nature, Olmsted was inspired by the scenic countryside, but also impressive private gardens and public parks.
One park in particular—Birkenhead Park in Liverpool—left a deep impression on Olmsted. Not only did the urban park capture the rolling hills and shady woods of the English countryside, but it provided a democratic space where Liverpudlians of all walks of life could gather, breathe fresh air and commune with nature.
“The visit to Birkenhead Park was an ‘aha!’ moment for Olmsted,” says Petri. “He came back to the States and started writing.”
In 1852, Olmsted wrote Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England and was hired by The New York Times to tour the American South and write about agriculture and slavery (Olmsted was an ardent abolitionist). Looking for his next gig, Olmsted learned in 1857 that the New York Parks Commission was hiring a superintendent of the Central Park project.
Olmsted had influential friends in New York’s political and literary circles—including the author Washington Irving—who helped push his name to the top of the list for Central Park superintendent. Even though he lacked direct experience with park-building, Olmsted was able to parlay his time spent farming, traveling and writing into a winning résumé.
“Olmsted got the job partly because of who he knew, but also because he could talk the talk,” says Brenwall. “He was very much a leader of men rather than an architect.”
Olmsted and Vaux Team Up on a Park Design
In 1857, Olmsted went to work on the Central Park project under the direction of Viele, who was still the chief architect. This was around the same time that the park commissioners announced the design contest to replace Viele’s lackluster plan with a new vision for Central Park. Olmsted might never have thrown his hat in the ring if not for a man named Calvert Vaux.
Vaux was a British architect who came to America to work with Andrew Jackson Downing, considered one of the first true landscape architects. One of Vaux and Downing’s high-profile commissions was to landscape the grounds of the White House and Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
In 1857, Vaux approached Olmsted about partnering on a submission to the Central Park design competition. As superintendent, Olmsted knew every crag and bog in the park. Plus, Vaux and Olmsted shared a belief in the democracy of green spaces, and a love of pastoral landscapes.
“They both agreed on a ‘nature first’ design philosophy,” says Brenwall. “Vaux is known for saying, ‘Nature first, second and third—architecture after a while.’”
Minutes before the submission deadline on March 31, 1858, Vaux and Olmsted handed in the 33rd and final entry to the Central Park design contest. Their design, called the “Greensward Plan,” not only included detailed architectural plans drawn up by Vaux, but “before and after”-style paintings of how the transformed landscape would look and feel.
Olmsted and Vaux wrote that Central Park “should present an aspect of spaciousness and tranquility, with variety and intricacy of arrangement, thereby affording the most agreeable contrast to the confinement, bustle, and monotonous street-division of the city.”
The Greensward Plan won the design contest, and Olmsted was subsequently hired to replace Viele as the chief architect of Central Park. Vaux, whom Brenwall called the “unsung hero” of Central Park, stayed on as Consulting Architect.
A Herculean Construction Project
To realize Olmsted and Vaux’s design, the rocky and boggy land set aside for Central Park had to be completely transformed. To get a sense of just how rock-strewn and uneven the topography was, Brenwall points to the few remaining rock outcroppings that still dot Central Park.
“If you climb up one of those big, rocky knolls, look out and picture them everywhere throughout the lower part of the park,” says Brenwall. “Consider what it took to smash all of those rocks and clear them out. The human manpower that went into making Central Park is really amazing.”
More gunpowder (166 tons) was used to blast rocks in Central Park than in the entire Battle of Gettysburg. Every shattered piece of rock was either carted away or reused—for drainage systems, roadways or to level out a sunken area of the park. Teams of sledgehammer-wielding stone-breakers turned the larger boulders into paving stones.
One of the toughest jobs was “grubbing”—marching through thick underbrush and swampy bogs, and ripping out everything that didn’t conform with Olmsted and Vaux’s landscape design. Poison ivy was a constant menace.
According to the late historian Roy Rosenzweig, millions of cubic feet of topsoil and sand were carted into Central Park to sculpt its rolling hills and sprawling meadows. To enrich the barren soil, gardeners brought in tens of thousands of cubic feet of manure and sand. Nearly every tree in the park was planted as a sapling—some 270,000 of them.
One of the most innovative and brilliant components of Olmsted and Vaux’s design for Central Park was its transverse roadways—sunken and hidden roads that allowed horse-drawn carriages to cross the park without disturbing the park goer’s experience. There were also separate “ways” or paths through the park for pedestrians, horseback riders and carriages, ensuring both safety and serenity.
“I think people are surprised that Central Park didn’t always look this way, because it feels so natural,” says Petri. “It feels like it's been there forever. That was Olmsted’s goal, to sculpt and create a space that felt natural, but we’re really talking about a built environment.”
The first phase of Central Park’s construction was completed in 1866—at a cost $5 million, more than three times its original budget—but parts of the park, including the ice skating pond, were open to the public as early as 1858. Almost immediately, Central Park was a hugely popular addition to the city. In 1860, 2.4 million people visited the park—more than three times the total population of New York City at the time.
