Three Gardens in Central Park
Robert Moses came to work for New York City in 1934. He had earlier distinguished himself — indeed, become internationally renowned — for his parks and parkways on Long Island. For a city mired in depression and advanced physical decay, getting Moses was a coup. As Robert Caro told us in "The Power Broker," the city jumped through hoops to secure Moses's services. The man who got things done wouldn't sign on without a mandate to get things done.
Moses's initial mandate was to fix the city's parks. Mr. Caro is very good in describing the parks' rotten condition in 1934. Even in the affluent 1920s, the Tammany-run city government had neglected the parks, which were in desperate shape when the depression hit. We think we've seen dying parks. Central Park in the 1970s was a pitiable mess. But Central Park had fewer thriving plants in 1934 than it did in 1980 when the Central Park Conservancy began its rehabilitation of the park.
No one denies that much of what Moses added to Central Park over the years did great damage to it — such as destroying rather than restoring several of Calvert Vaux's felicitous structures. Yet so much of what people use most in the park, even if contrary to Frederick Law Olmsted's intentions, comes by way of Moses — for example, the perimeter playgrounds, the Great Lawn, the Wollman Rink, and a hugely upgraded zoo (which was upgraded again in the 1980s).
One of Moses's most effective interventions was the Conservatory Garden. It can be entered at Fifth Avenue and 104th Street through the "Vanderbilt Gate," the magnificent iron gate, designed by Bergotte & Bauviller of Paris, which once adorned the Fifth Avenue mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. His daughter Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney donated the gate to the city in 1939.
The Conservatory Garden borrows its name from the greenhouse that once occupied the site. Moses dismantled the greenhouse in 1934. The Conservatory Garden opened in 1937. We credit its design to Gilmore D. Clarke, a landscape architect who often served under Moses, and Clarke's landscape architect wife, the delightfully named M. Betty Sprout. (Moses was unafraid to give high-profile design jobs to women — he also put Maud Sargent in charge of the 1930s redesign of Carl Schurz Park.)
Central Park on the whole follows British precedents, drawing from John Claudius Loudon and Joseph Paxton, among others. It was chiefly designed by an Englishman, Calvert Vaux. The Conservatory Garden, by contrast, brings French and Italian traditions into Central Park. We should perhaps call it "Conservatory Gardens," for in fact it is three quite separate gardens.
The center garden is Italian in inspiration. The Italian is a classical tradition, without the contrived naturalism of the English garden though more relaxed than what we think of as the French formal tradition. For many people, Italian gardens (about which Edith Wharton wrote so well) are the most delectable of all gardens. Here, crabapple allées border a central lawn. When the crabapple trees bloom in April and May, the scene makes your heart leap.
The garden to the south is English in inspiration. Spring brings thousands of daffodils. Bessie Vonnoh's fountain is an original feature of the garden. It honors author Frances Hodgson Burnett and features characters from "The Secret Garden." Burnett's friends who financed the fountain found this to be the perfect "secret garden" setting for it.
The north garden is French in inspiration. Spring blossoms forth in thousands of tulips. They surround one of the city's most delightful works of public sculpture. The fountain, which once graced the Yonkers estate of Samuel Untermyer, dates to before 1910 and made its way to Central Park in 1947. Walter Schott, the sculptor of the delirious, dancing maidens (who put one in mind of Matisse's "Dance"), once ranked as Germany's most prestigious sculptor, the favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The Central Park Conservancy refurbished the Conservatory Garden along with the rest of Central Park. Indeed, while the conservancy rightly sought to restore as much of Vaux and Olmsted to the park as possible, it restored a lot of Moses, too.
