Download or read book The Central Park written by Cynthia S. Brenwall and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 958 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pictorial history of the development of New York City’s Central Park from conception to completion. Drawing on the unparalleled collection of original designs for Central Park in the New York City Municipal Archives, Cynthia S. Brenwall tells the story of the creation of New York’s great public park, from its conception to its completion. This treasure trove of material ranges from the original winning competition entry; to meticulously detailed maps; to plans and elevations of buildings, some built, some unbuilt; to elegant designs for all kinds of fixtures needed in a world of gaslight and horses; to intricate engineering drawings of infrastructure elements. Much of it has never been published before. A virtual time machine that takes the reader on a journey through the park as it was originally envisioned, The Central Park is both a magnificent art book and a message from the past about what brilliant urban planning can do for a great city.
Download or read book Central Park NYC written by Andrew Zega and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 2013 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Whether depicted as originally designed or in contemporary portraits, Central Park's architectural and ornamental highlights are delineated in ravishing watercolors rendered in exquisite detail. With chapters firmly grounded by extensive research and informed by a broad knowledge of architectural and social history--complemented by numerous contemporary and archival photographs, as well as maps of the park--the authors examine the actors, intentions and ideas guiding the creation and evolution of this national treasure and delve into its many extraordinary details, offering us a fresh vision of New York's beloved Central Park"--Dust jacket.
Download or read book Before Central Park written by Sara Cedar Miller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner - 2023 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes With more than eight hundred sprawling green acres in the middle of one of the world’s densest cities, Central Park is an urban masterpiece. Designed in the middle of the nineteenth century by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, it is a model for city parks worldwide. But before it became Central Park, the land was the site of farms, businesses, churches, wars, and burial grounds—and home to many different kinds of New Yorkers. This book is the authoritative account of the place that would become Central Park. From the first Dutch family to settle on the land through the political crusade to create America’s first major urban park, Sara Cedar Miller chronicles two and a half centuries of history. She tells the stories of Indigenous hunters, enslaved people and enslavers, American patriots and British loyalists, the Black landowners of Seneca Village, Irish pig farmers, tavern owners, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more. Miller unveils a British fortification and camp during the Revolutionary War, a suburban retreat from the yellow fever epidemics at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the properties that a group of free Black Americans used to secure their right to vote. Tales of political chicanery, real estate speculation, cons, and scams stand alongside democratic idealism, the striving of immigrants, and powerfully human lives. Before Central Park shows how much of the history of early America is still etched upon the landscapes of Central Park today.
Download or read book Birds of Central Park written by and published by . This book was released on 2005-10 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vornberger's spectacular photography, interspersed with his comments about birds, the park, and photography, will appeal to all bird-watchers, nature lovers, photography aficionados, and visitors to New York's Central Park. Packaged inside the book is a removable foldout pocket guide.
Download or read book The Park and the People written by Roy Rosenzweig and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Delineate the politicians, business people, artists, immigrant laborers, and city dwellers who are the key players in the tale. In tracing the park's history, the writers also give us the history of New York. They explain how squabbles over politics, taxes, and real estate development shaped the park and describe the acrimonious debates over what a public park should look like, what facilities it should offer, and how it should accommodate the often incompatible.
Download or read book Good Night Central Park written by Adam Gamble and published by Good Night Books. This book was released on 2011-11-04 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of North America’s most beloved regions are artfully celebrated in these board books designed to soothe children before bedtime while instilling an early appreciation for the continent’s natural and cultural wonders. Each book stars a multicultural group of people visiting the featured area's attractions and rhythmic language guides children through the passage of both a single day and the four seasons while saluting the iconic aspects of each place. From the statues to the street performers, the most interesting aspects and features of Central Park are explored in the colorful book, including the zoo, the various pools and ponds, Lasker Pool and Rink, and the Conservatory Garden. Visitors to the Big Apple or children that call New York City home will love reading about the famous urban park.
Download or read book House of Outrageous Fortune written by Michael Gross and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Michael Gross’s new book…packs [in] almost as many stories as there are apartments in the building. The Jackie Collins of real estate likes to map expressions of power, money and ego… Even more crammed with billionaires and their exploits than 740 Park” (Penelope Green, The New York Times). With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, penthouses that cost almost $100 million, and a tenant roster that’s a roll call of business page heroes and villains, Fifteen Central Park West is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. In this “stunning” (CNN) and “deliciously detailed” (Booklist, starred review) New York Times bestseller, journalist Michael Gross turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that’s sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross “takes another gossip-laden bite out of the upper crust” (Sam Roberts, The New York Times), which includes Denzel Washington, Sting, Norman Lear, top executives, and Russian and Chinese oligarchs, to name a few. And he recounts the legendary building’s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially déclassé Manhattan neighborhood. More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New York’s rich and famous—and is a bellwether of the city’s changing social and financial landscape.
Download or read book The Central Park Zoo written by Joan Scheier and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2002-08-21 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countless New Yorkers, as well as visitors from all parts of the world, have experienced an oasis just a few feet off Fifth Avenue in the heart of Manhattan. Since the 1860s, Central Park has been the home of three different zoos: the menagerie, the zoo of 1934, and what is today known as the Central Park Zoo. The Central Park Zoo begins with the menagerie of the 1860s, an impromptu public zoo begun when citizens and circuses started donating animals to the city. It continues in 1934, when Robert Moses-perhaps the most influential man in the city's planning history-built a newer zoo, remembered to this day for its lions, tigers, elephants, and gorillas. It ends with the brand new zoo and exhibits built in 1988 under the supervision of the Wildlife Conservation Society. With stunning, rarely seen images, The Central Park Zoo not only is a treat for the eyes but also comes alive with the barking of sea lions, the soft fur of snow monkeys, the sweet smell of peanut butter, and the taste of "ice cakes"-treats for the zoo residents, of course.
Download or read book Central Park Trees and Landscapes written by Edward S. Barnard and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The splendor of New York’s most famous green space comes alive in this essential companion for nature lovers and travelers to New York. In more than 900 color images, a leading nature writer and a long-time Central Park naturalist detail the park’s tree species and their place in the park’s iconic landscapes. They show how to identify trees by their needles and leaves as well as by their flowers, fruits, and bark. Historical maps illustrate Manhattan’s changing vegetation and depict the various stages of the park’s construction. Beautiful photographs of the park’s most outstanding trees and landscapes accompanied by historical vignettes conjure the people and events that brought the trees to the park and helped create this urban oasis. More than a botanical guide, this book cultivates an appreciation of the park as both a natural triumph and an embodiment of the city’s varied spirit.
Download or read book A Green Place to Be The Creation of Central Park written by Ashley Benham Yazdani and published by Candlewick. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Central Park become a vibrant gem in the heart of New York City? Follow the visionaries behind the plan as it springs to green life. In 1858, New York City was growing so fast that new roads and tall buildings threatened to swallow up the remaining open space. The people needed a green place to be — a park with ponds to row on and paths for wandering through trees and over bridges. When a citywide contest solicited plans for creating a park out of barren swampland, Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted put their heads together to create the winning design, and the hard work of making their plans a reality began. By winter, the lake opened for skating. By the next summer, the waterside woodland known as the Ramble opened for all to enjoy. Meanwhile, sculptors, stone masons, and master gardeners joined in to construct thirty-four unique bridges, along with fountains, pagodas, and band shells, making New York's Central Park a green gift to everyone. Included in the end matter are bios of Vaux and Olmsted, a bibliography, and engaging factual snippets.
Download or read book Central Park written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the park's construction and history written by newspapers and people who worked on it. *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "I just want to go through Central Park and watch folks passing by. Spend the whole day watching people. I miss that." - Barack Obama Of all the great cities in the world, few personify their country like New York City. As America's largest city and best known immigration gateway into the country, the Big Apple represents the beauty, diversity and sheer strength of the United States, a global financial center that has enticed people chasing the "American Dream" for centuries. Given that background, it's fitting that the city's most unique landmark, Central Park, sits at the heart of Manhattan and provides a stark contrast to the hustle and bustle surrounding it. As actor Haley Joel Osment once put it, "My favorite place is Central Park because you never know what you're going to find there. I also like that when I look out the windows of surrounding hotels, it's seems like I'm looking out over a forest." In 1811, an ambitious plan was laid out that would transform Manhattan's grid into 2,028 blocks, from Houston Street to 155th Street. Forests would be cut down, hills razed, ponds and streams filled. It took years to survey, and years to complete: at different points in time, one might have seen a long avenue laid out, unpaved, with a scattering of as-yet-unattached six-story buildings amid boulders yet to be cleared and soon-to-be-demolished shantytowns. Ironically, almost no parks were incorporated into the plan, and Central Park would not be built until the end of the 19th century. When Central Park was designed, however, it was an ambitious project on an almost unprecedented affair. As serene as Central Park is today, it's hard to imagine that its creation was an entirely manmade affair consisting of dynamite blasts, tons of imported topsoil, and the labor of thousands of workers. Before the area's transformation, the land was swampy terrain used by impoverished squatters and people who let their livestock roam the grounds, but after nearly 15 years of work, the metamorphosis was nearly complete. Of course, New Yorkers soon came to understand that such a large park required serious upkeep; as historian Robert Caro noted, "Lawns, unseeded, were expanses of bare earth, decorated with scraggly patches of grass and weeds, that became dust holes in dry weather and mud holes in wet...The once beautiful Mall looked like a scene of a wild party the morning after. Benches lay on their backs, their legs jabbing at the sky..." With city resources being pumped into maintaining Central Park, it has become the most visited urban park in the world, and it is a cultural touchstone that draws not only tourists but events. Locals commonly walk or run through the park, and others play sports or simply picnic, but Central Park is also home to monuments of all sorts, including statues dedicated to artists and playwrights, the Strawberry Fields tribute to John Lennon, and an Ancient Egyptian obelisk known colloquially as Cleopatra's Needle. On top of all that, Central Park has a diverse array of wildlife thanks to a sizable reservoir, over 1,000 different species of trees, a zoo, and more. Put simply, Central Park is the most unique place in one of America's most unique cities. Central Park: The History of New York City's Most Unique Landmark chronicles the construction and history of the Big Apple's most famous park. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Central Park like never before, in no time at all.
Download or read book Central Park written by Edward J. Levine and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2008-02-18 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since it opened in 1858, Central Park has been one of New York's most-photographed landmarks. However, while some of the park remains as it was then, much of the park's landscape has changed over the years. Through historic images and contemporary photographs by Denise Stavis Levine, Central Park provides a previously unseen glimpse of the park's hidden history and brings it up to date.
Download or read book Saving Central Park written by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how one woman's long love affair with New York's Central Park led her to organize its rescue from a state of serious decline, returning it to the beautiful place of recreational opportunity and spiritual sustenance that it is today. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers opens with a quick survey of her early life--a middle-class upbringing in Texas; college at Wellesley, marriage, a master's degree in city planning at Yale. And then her move to New York, where she starts a family and, when she finds being a mother and a housewife is not enough, pours herself into the protection and enhancement of the city's green spaces. Interwoven into her own story is a comprehensive history of Central Park: its design and construction as a scenic masterpiece; the alterations of each succeeding era; the addition of numerous facilities for sports and play; and finally, the "anything goes" phase of the 1960s and 70s, which was often fun but nearly destroyed the park. The two narratives continue to entwine as she finds a job in the administration of Central Park, founds the Central Park Conservancy, and transforms both the park and herself--a transformation that has led to the writing of her many books, to travels that have taken her to parks and gardens around the world, and to solidifying the prestige of one of New York's most conspicuous landmarks.
Download or read book Windows on Central Park written by Betsy Pinover Schiff and published by Schiffer Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique perspectives on New York's 843-acre Central Park viewed exclusively from windows and terraces surrounding it. One hundred forty-three photographs range from intimate fourth-floor scenes to sweeping vistas from 64 stories above the Park. The principal photographer of six books on gardens and landscape architecture, the author concentrates on the landscape of Central Park, revealing its beauty from above during all four seasons, from early morning to night. The photographer's journey took her to more than 100 apartments, offices, hotels, and museums over the course of five years. This book includes quotes by sixteen notable individuals about their experiences of looking down from their windows to the Park, including Giorgio Armani, Candice Bergen, Paul Goldberger, Evelyn Lauder, Donald Trump, and Elie Wiesel. Windows on Central Park will strengthen one's sense of the grandeur and beauty of America's most visited park, and reveal the Park as a towering example of both urban ecology and landscape architecture.
Download or read book Hidden Waters of New York City written by Sergey Kadinsky and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the forgotten waterways hidden throughout the five boroughs Beneath the asphalt streets of Manhattan, creeks and streams once flowed freely. The remnants of these once-pristine waterways are all over the Big Apple, hidden in plain sight. Hidden Waters of New York City offers a glimpse at the big city’s forgotten past and ever-changing present, including: Minetta Brook, which ran through today's Greenwich Village Collect Pond in the Financial District, the city's first water source Newtown Creek, separating Brooklyn and Queens Bronx River, still a hotspot for urban canoeing and hiking Filled with eye-opening historical anecdotes and walking tours of all five boroughs, this is a side of New York City you’ve never seen.
Download or read book Central Park s Adventure Style Playgrounds written by Marie Warsh and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In New York’s Central Park, some of the playgrounds constructed as part of the midcentury experimental “playground revolution” still remain. In Central Park's Adventure-Style Playgrounds, Marie Warsh tells the engrossing history of these playscapes built in the 1960s and 1970s, exploring their connections to the art, recreational design, urbanism, grassroots movements, and child-development theories of the period. She further details the Central Park Conservancy’s efforts decades later to preserve and renew these playgrounds. So-called adventure-style playgrounds featured interconnected forms including pyramids, mounds, and steps, and basic materials such as water and sand, encouraging new levels of creativity and interaction. By the end of the 1970s, ten of Central Park’s twenty-two existing playgrounds—formerly paved, sterile, standard-equipment-filled lots dating to the 1930s—had been transformed according to the new design ideals. With time, deterioration prompted concerns about safety, and much of the equipment was removed. However, community interest led the Central Park Conservancy to update and preserve the playgrounds that remained in the park. Building on successful aspects of the playgrounds, designers incorporated new technologies, materials, and equipment that reflect contemporary ideas about children’s play and approaches to urban park management. They also developed strategies to better integrate them into the landscapes of the park. Today, Central Park’s adventure-style playgrounds represent significant works of renewed modern landscape architecture as well as models for new thinking about playground design.
Download or read book Central Park in the Dark written by Marie Winn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-06-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love and loss, life and death, among the nighttime creatures of the city that never sleeps Like her bestseller Red-Tails in Love, Marie Winn’s Central Park in the Dark explores a once-hidden world in a series of interlocking narratives about the extraordinary denizens, human and animal, of an iconic American park. Her beguiling account of a city’s lakes and woodlands at night takes the reader through the cycle of seasons as experienced by nocturnal active beasts (raccoons, bats, black skimmers, and sleeping robins among them), insects (moths, wasps, fireflies, crickets), and slugs (in all their unexpected poetical randiness). Winn does not neglect her famous protagonists Pale Male and Lola, the hawks that captivated readers years ago, but this time she adds an exciting narrative about thirty-eight screech owls in Central Park and their lives, loves, and tragedies there. An eye-popping amount of natural history is packed into this entertaining book—on bird physiology, spiders, sunsets, dragonflies, meteor showers, and the nature of darkness. But the human drama is never forgotten, for Central Park at night boasts a floating population not only of lovers, dog walkers, and policemen but of regulars young and old who, like Winn, hope to unlock the secrets of urban nature. These “night people” are drawn into a peculiar kind of intimacy. While exploring the astonishing variety of wildlife in the city park, they end up revealing more of their inner lives than they expected.
