bryant

Some lampposts from the Beaux-Arts era remain at entrances in Bryant Park, featuring rams' heads on their bases.

Two kiosks, modeled somewhat, it appears, on the old Queensboro Bridge trolley entrances, were placed on the Sixth Avenue end. 'wichcraft has the current food concession contract.

Ah, you didn't think you'd evade a lamppost discussion with Forgotten NY did you? The Bryant Park Restoration Corporation placed a flock of retro-Type 24 Twins on the streets bordering the park, 6th Avenue and West 40th and 42nd Streets.


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So, it was a week after I was hired at The World's Biggest Store in April 2000, and your webmaster strolled up 6th Avenue to Bryant Park and there, on stage before the lawn, defying her legendary stage fright, was Carly Simon. I thought that if I can stroll up the street from Macy's and see a free concert, how bad could it be to work there?

Well, it was pretty bad, but that's a story for another time. A long time.

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Butterfly detail, Bryant Park Carousel

When you stand in Bryant Park, you stand in a Native American hunting ground in the pre-colonial era; a public space commissioned by NY Governor Thomas Dongan as early as 1686; a potter's field in which unclaimed corpses were interred (1823-1840), and the "back yard" of the Croton Distributing Reservoir (1847-1890s). In your webmaster's experience, it's been both a haven for drug dealers, homeless and muggers, and also one of NYC's most beloved midtown oases...

Lost New York, Nathan Silver

1853 saw the construction of the massive iron and glass Crystal Palace (in response to London's own Crystal Palace built in 1851), to house the “Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations” opened July 14 of that year with an inagural speech by President Franklin Pierce. 4000 exhibitors displayed the cutting edge industrial, art and consumer goods of the era, and the Crystal Palace developed into NYC's premier tourist attraction. Despite all that the Palace lost $300,000 its first year. The building's design was derived from London's Crystal Palace by architects Georg Carstensen (1812-1857; a Dane, he assisted in the development of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens, Europe's first amusement park) and Charles Gildemeister. It's remembered today as the New York City grand edifice that melted in 15 minutes...after it caught fire October 5, 1858. London's Crystal Palace survived until 1936 when it too succumbed to a conflagration. However, all was not completely lost. Its intriguing use of iron helped convince a generation of architects, including NYC's James Bogardus, to use wrought iron in the construction of roofs and building fronts, and the fruits of this inspiration can still be seen in NYC's own flocks of iron-fronted buildings in Soho and other neighborhoods. The dome of the Enid Haupt Conservatory of the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, as well as several other greenhouse buildings around town, rather resemble the Crystal Palace dome.

America on Exhibition: the New York Crystal Palace [Johns Hopkins University Press; requires registration]

Military drills were held in Reservoir Square, as the yard was called, during the Civil War.

Fresh Start

In 1884 Reservoir Square was renamed Bryant Park in honor of recently deceased poet, editor and civic reformer William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). Famous since his teenage years for poems like "Thanatopsis" and the Civil War elegy "My Autumn Walk" he was for over 50 years the editor of The New-York Evening Post, which had been founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801. In those days the Post, in contrast to its tabloid style of today, was an erudite, literary publication rather like today's weekly The New Yorker.

Herbert Adams' sculpture memorial appeared in 1911, protected by Thomas Hastings' pedestal and columned dome. A stack of papers is on his lap, and a blanket draped across his knees makes him look like he is wearing a dressing gown. An inscription of Bryant's "The Poet" can be found on the pedestal.

The statue is at the east end of Bryant Park, adjoining Bryant Park Grill.

The memorial is flanked by two decorative urns featuring cow skulls.

The New York Public Library, meanwhile, was opened in 1912, replacing the reservoir; some of the reservoir walls can still be found in a basement area of the library, and some of the library stacks lie under the park. The front steps of the library, including the sculpted lions Patience and Fortitude, are officially part of Bryant Park.

Your webmaster has always sort of mixed up William Cullen Bryant with William Jennings Bryan, who three times was the Democratic nominee for President ... and lost each time, to William McKinley twice (1896, 1900) and to William Howard Taft (1908).

Memorialized

Bryant Park is full of statues of historic and literary personages, some old, some new; acre for acre, it has more than any other NYC park.


William Earl Dodge			Gertrude Stein

			Biographies of these folks, as well as information on the statues (and fuzzier pictures from an earlier web-saving incarnation of Photoshop), appear on my Who Are Those Guys Volume 4 page. I really have to reactivate that "Who Are Those Guys" franchise, since I've worked my way up from lower Manhattan and only got as far as Central Park. Your webmaster smelled another book at one time, but others have come up with similar efforts. Perhaps, if I can ferret out every statue in NYC...
Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva

Sprayed


Entering the park from 6th Avenue and West 41st Street, you are immediately greeted by a massive glazed granite fountain, which, thanks in part to an extraordinarily rainy April in 2007, was allowed to shoot great torrents the day your webmaster photographed it the next month. The fountain, designed by Charles Adams Platt, was installed and dedicated in 1912 to Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843-1905), a social worker and founder of the Charity Organization Society.

After the park was renamed for Bryant it suffered a steady decline. The year of his death, 1878, the park's western end was enshrouded by the Sixth Avenue El, which would remain in place for the next sixty years. During the el's construction the park was used as a storage area for construction equipment and debris, and by early 1934, when Architecture magazine named it "one of the most disreputable parks in the city" it was pretty much a vacant lot.

Friends Electric

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was a Serbian-born inventor, physicist, and mechanical engineer and is widely recognized as the greatest electrical engineer in history. He arrived in NYC in 1884, becoming a citizen in 1891. Tesla developed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric systems, pitting him in opposition with Thomas Edison, who championed direct current. Tesla experimented with X-rays and was an early radio pioneer. He founded the Nikola Tesla Company at 8 West 40th Street, on the south side of Bryant Park.

Tesla gained great fame but his last years were not happy ones. He had never married, not paid much attention to his finances and died destitute at the New Yorker Hotel at 8th Avenue and 34th Street, where a memorial plaque was dedicated to him a few years ago. He loved feeding the pigeons in Bryant Park.

A future FNY page will explore the many workshops and labs that Tesla maintained around town.

Rebirth from Needle Park

"The universe is based on sullen entropy," says Robyn Hitchcock, and, despite the best efforts of the Master Builder in the 1930s, Bryant Park gradually succumbed to the overall impetus toward decay and devolved into a mugger's and drug dealer's paradise as the decades went by. Despite the 1974 naming of the park by the Landmarks Preservation Commission as "a prime example of a park designed in the French Classical tradition… an urban amenity worthy of our civic pride” it was visited by very few law-abiding New Yorkers and tourists who ventured in beat a hasty retreat.

In 1980 a group of civic-minded New Yorkers, property owners, and neighbors decided to rescue the park, and set up the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation. They spent seven years negotiating with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation before they succeeded in getting a 15-year lease, which began in 1988. (The lease was subsequently renewed for another five years.) The BPRC immediately closed the park for five years of rebuilding...The new BPRC design aimed to re-people the park while raising revenues to pay for the expensive planned maintenance of several million dollars annually — far more than the city spent. The designers cut new entrances, tore down the iron fencing, ripped out high hedges, restored the fixtures, and added neoclassical kiosks for concessions.

Fixed benches were replaced with some 3,200 movable, pretty French chairs and 500 tables, providing what Mr. Biederman calls “freemarket seating.” The park’s Upper Terrace, which had been its most active drug market, was leased to the trendy Bryant Park Grill, which became an instant hot spot. "The Fall and Rise of Bryant Park," Julia Vitullo-Martin [New York Sun]

Bryant Park's large central lawn, formal pathways, stone balustrades, and borders of London plane trees are the work of Queens-based architect Lusby Simpson, the winner of a competition for the park's redesign instituted by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in the winter of 1934.


	The central lawn is ringed by two sets of walkways, a formal pavement ringed by stone balustrades, and an inner gravel walkway. Throughout the park we find green metal tables and folding seats, and the north side of the park near West 42nd Street features a daily magazine rack. The seats and magazines remain in the park mainly by the honor system, though I suppose cops and park workers have eagle eyes for anyone trying to remove them. Coliseum Books, which found a home on 11 East 42nd Street after moving out of its longtime location on Broadway and West 57th Street in 2004, maintained a book stand in the park until its closure in January 2007. Independent bookstores are finding it harder and harder to stay in business in NYC. The original Bryant Park Reading Room originally opened in 1935 and ran till 1944.

Contextuality

Part of the genius of the restoration has been that Bryant Park has been positioned as an organic unit in its surrounding neighborhood. You can see an interesting example of this by regarding one of the more notable buildings on the south side of the park, the distinctive black with gold trim American Radiator Building (later the American Standard Building and now the Bryant Park Hotel) designed by Raymond Hood and John Howells in 1924 for the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Company.


	The black and gold bricks symbolize coal and fire. The overall design is based on Chicago's Tribune building. Georgia O'Keeffe painted it the year after its completion.


	Rene Paul Chambellan (1893-1955) was employed by Hood and Howells for the ornamentation and sculptures. Chambellan's work also appears at other well-known NYC buildings such as the NY Life Insurance Building, the Chanin Building and the old NY Daily News building.


The Bryant Park Restoration Corporation echoes the American Radiator Building, using black and gold paint on the fleur-de-lis'ed fence that surrounds Bryant Park on three sides, and the motif even extends to the IND subway entrance on the 6th Avenue side.

Around and Around


		New York's first midtown carousel in the modern era, Le Carrousel of Bryant Park, produced by the Fabricon Carousel Company of Brooklyn, opened March 21, 2003. It features 10 brilliantly painted ponies, a frog, a cat, a deer and a rabbit. Oddly, for a company that has produced carousels worldwide, Fabricon has no web presence as of May 2007.

Hmmm...it seems Fabricon is in limbo. Forgotten Fan Mike Rosenthal cites a Daily News article from March 2, 2005:

Brooklyn's famed Fabricon Carousel Co. - one of a handful of custom merry-go-round businesses left in the country - has been sold and its founder has moved to Miami. The company, now smaller, has been renamed Brooklyn Carousel Co. and been moved from an enormous East New York industrial space to a Greenpoint shop.

"I owned it by myself, and it was just too much," Marvin Sylvor, 71, the company's founder, said from his home in Florida yesterday.

New owner Chris Tabeek continues to make carousels but, because business has become increasingly sporadic, he also is selling individual animal characters.

...
Midtown's cherub-adorned Le Carousel in Bryant Park is a Fabricon original and the Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel in Nashville was built by Fabricon and designed by artist Red Grooms.

Sylvor wouldn't say how much he got for his business and Tabeek could not be reached for comment.

Until October, the company was housed in a 10,000-square-foot space in East Brooklyn Industrial Park.

Sylvor, who moved it from Queens in 1998, said he did that to bring it home to where the original carousel carvers worked - in Brooklyn.

After buying the company, Tabeek moved it to Franklin St. in Greenpoint, which Sylvor said offers something East New York doesn't: a growing cadre of talented artists.

The closest carousel maker to New York is in Ohio and just one or two that still do custom work remain in the U.S., Sylvor said.


Karl Fischer's 1934 bust of playwright, essayist, translator and scientist Johann Volfgang von Goethe looks balefully at Le Carrousel. Johann....you're scaring the kids!




Though it's been de-emphasized in recent years, Sixth Avenue became the Avenue of the Americas in 1945, and later, medallions depcting member countries of the Organization of American States appeared on the avenue. Most of the medallions have disappeared, but statues depicting heroes of South American countries have taken up the slack somewhat. Moises Cabrera's statue of Mexican President Benito Juárez was installed and dedicated in October 2004. Benito Juarez (1806-1872) proclaimed the "Reforma Laws" and established the foundation for the Mexican Republic, thereby preserving the country's independence. Juarez, born of humble origins in Guelatao, Oaxaca, is known as "BenemErito de las Americas." Also a lawyer, he was governor of Oaxaca from 1847 to 1852. He served as president of Mexico from 1861 to 1863 and again from 1867 to 1872. Juarez was the first president of indigenous descent. NYC Parks


It's quite unusual to see a numbered "Street" sign in Manhattan without an E or W, but perhaps the Department of Transportation wanted to depict graphically that West 41st Street begins at 6th Avenue, not 5th like its parallel partners.

The AIA Guide to New York City by Norval White and the late Elliot Willensky has this to say about the 1985 HBO Building, seen at left in the above photo: "A tedious mirrored curtain wall sitting atop a thermal granite base..." and of the 1974 W.R. Grace Building, "A disgrace to the street." Call your webmaster a Philistine, but I have a soft spot for both of them.

Secrets of Central Park

Secrets of Prospect Park

Photographed May 6, 2007; page completed May 13.

erpietri@earthlink.net