City Hall Park

“ But The Walk Up-town, as such, lies straight up Broadway, between the substantial old Astor House, the last large hotel remaining down-town, and the huge, obtrusive post-office building, as hideous as a badly tied bundle, but which leads us on because we know—or, if strangers, because we do not know—that when once we get beyond it we shall see the calm, unstrenuous beauty of the City Hall with its grateful lack of height, in its restful bit of park. ”

“ Their lodging-place is vast, consisting of the whole city. They are regular nomads, having no fixed abiding place, driven by the police or weather from one spot to the other. The City Hall Park is their usual headquarters by day. Many also visit the criminal courts to pass away the time, but the neighborhood of the City Hall appears to be their favorite resort. Whenever the sky is clear they can be seen sitting on the benches, vainly endeavoring to keep awake. ”

“ It is to be regretted that the necessity for general plans in parks is not appreciated by most people as is the necessity for a general plan for city hall or court house. Yet a park is apt to include more naturally incongruous purposes and objects than a city hall. ”

“ It is impossible to stand amid the whirl and uproar of New York to-day, and imagine men ploughing, and sowing grain, and carting hay into barns, where the City Hall now stands. The conception of nearly all the city lying below the Park, above it farms to Canal Street, beyond that clearings where men are burning brush and logs to clear away the fallow, and still farther on, towards Central Park, an unbroken wilderness, is so dim and shadowy, that we can hardly fix its outlines. ”

“ The growing business of the office has made it necessary to make so many additions to the structure, that it is hard at present to distinguish the original plan of the edifice. The building is much too small to accommodate the business required to be transacted within its walls, and efforts are being made to secure the erection of a larger and handsomer building, at the lower end of the City Hall Park. ”

“ In her childhood, the future poetess had a favorite walk over the bit of rolling ground to the south of Frankfort Street, the spot called Golden Hill, which a few years later was to be trampled by many soldiers, where the tall grass was to be reddened by the blood of patriots—the first blood shed in the Revolution. She strolled hand in hand with her father over the green Common, which was to become the City Hall Park. ”

“ These include the new Register Office or Hall of Records, a handsome building in the French Renaissance style, erected at a cost of six million dollars and faced with granite. The facade is adorned with sculptures, and the interior is also elaborately decorated. To the southwest of the City Hall, facing Broadway, is a statue of Nathan Hale.
Park Row, bounding the southeast side of the City Hall Park, contains the offices of many of the principal New York newspapers, the Pulitzer Building, with the World office, Tribune Building, New York Press, and Park Row Building with its lofty towers. ”

“ After twenty-seven years of hard work in it, during which I have been behind the scenes of most of the plays that go to make up the sum of the life of the metropolis, it exercises the old spell over me yet. If my sympathies need quickening, my point of view adjusting, I have only to go down to Park Row at eventide, when the crowds are hurrying homeward and the City Hall clock is lighted, particularly when the snow lies on the grass in the park, and stand watching them awhile, to find all things coming right. It is Bob who stands by and watches with me then, as on that night. ”

“ The theatre, the music-hall, the circus, the menagerie, the concerts, and the rest of the entertainments, were filling up. In the Amusements Park people shot down railways into water, slid down smooth slopes into mattresses, circled in great wheels, floated in the latest novelties of merry-go-rounds, ascended in the balloon, and practised all the other devices for frittering away eternity, just as though night had not fallen. ”

“ This large gathering of our citizens in Faneuil Hall is for some purpose: it is significant that the people want something. I do not understand that it is in any sense to re-affirm their conviction that their best interests will be served by adding to our public property a park or parks. That question has been fully discussed and decided by the people themselves for themselves: [Pg 32] they settled that by their, with remarkable unanimity, voting to accept the act of the legislature, giving power to the city government to purchase or take land for that purpose. ”

“ Near the Capitol are the State Hall and City Hall, and on the right, descending State Street, the Geological Hall, well worthy an extended visit. The present St. Peter's Episcopal Church, third upon the site, is of Schenectady blue stone with brown trimmings. Its tower contains "a chime of eleven bells and another bell marked 1751, which is used only to ring in the new year." Washington Park, consisting [page 185] of eighty acres and procured at a cost of one million dollars, reached by a pleasant drive or by electric railway, is a delightful resort. ”

“ Farther on the Apollo dancing-rooms were a Mecca for the youth of the town. Opposite the lower end of City-171- Hall Park was Scudder's, the first museum in the city, the forerunner of Barnum's, filled to overflowing with curiosities of earth and sea and air. Across the way, on the opposite side of the park, was the Park Theatre with its broad white front and its record as the chief playhouse of the city, although there were hosts of admirers and patrons of the Old Bowery, and of the National in Leonard Street, and of the Olympic in Broadway, where Mitchell was established as a great favorite. ”

“ For reasons rather difficult to explain there are in every city many more persons who consider themselves competent to direct the expenditure of public money on parks without plans prepared by experts than there are persons who would be willing to direct the expenditure of similar amounts on a large city hall, and yet, as a matter of fact, the ability to design landscape is very much rarer than the ability to design monumental public buildings. ”

“ The only developed parks are Pioneer and City Hall, both small, and Liberty Park (110 acres) , in which Brigham Young built a grist mill in 1852 and which was bought from his estate by the city in 1880. ”

“ Since January 1, 1951, the Independence Hall group of buildings has been administered by the National Park Service of the United States Department of the Interior as a part of Independence National Historical Park. Under the terms of a cooperative agreement made in 1950 between the City of Philadelphia and the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service assumed the administration and maintenance of the buildings and Independence Square, with the City retaining ownership of the property. ”

“ THE PARKWAY, HENRY FORD AND BILLY THE BEAN MAN
I walked down the Parkway yesterday morning visualizing that splendid emptiness of sunshine as it will appear five or ten years hence, lined with art galleries, museums and libraries, shaded with growing trees, leading from the majestic pinnacle of the City Hall to the finest public estate in America. It is a long way from those open fields of splintered brick and gravel pits, where workmen are now warming their hands over bonfires, to the Peace Conference in Paris. ”

“ The congested capitals of Europe had already learnt this lesson; traveled Americans, like William Cullen Bryant, brought it home; and Central Park, planned in 1853, was the first of the great landscape parks to serve as a people’s pleasance. Conceived in contrast to the deflowered landscape and the muddled city, the park alone re-created the traditions of civilization—of man naturalized, and therefore at home, of nature humanized, and therefore enriched. And even today our parks are what our cities should be, and are not. ”

“ The Town-hall, situate at the base of the Park, which is a triangular piece of land, well laid out and neatly kept, is a light edifice of some taste and architectural merit, its chief attraction being the white marble of which it is constructed, and which is brought from the quarries at Sing-Sing, some miles up the river Hudson. ”

“ Almost as soon as you have entered the park, the tower of the church is seen on the left, rising in a most picturesque manner above the lofty trees which encircle it, and as the hall is approached, the drive continues between trees of the most striking beauty; indeed, the beech-trees are esteemed as some of the most remarkable in the kingdom, and are of an extraordinary size and circumference. The hall is a large and handsome mansion, built in the Elizabethan style, on a commanding eminence, and stands in a park comprising about two hundred acres of land. ”

“ It is the Hall Point; the grounds lying between it and Hawthwaite, and extending from the water side to the tops of the heights more than a mile to the westward, form the ancient deer-park, which possesses such a luxuriant and widely-extended covering of natural timber, as might gladden the hearts of those who affect to hold that any utilitarian interference with nature tends grievously to degrade or destroy the romantic characteristics of lake scenery. The Hall itself is concealed by the upper arm of the bay, with the trees and neat, but singular and high, steep-roofed edifice upon it. ”

“ There are now thirty-five such centres, which, without paralleling or infringing upon the work of other social agencies, greatly widen the scope of the city’s social service. These parks comprise a playground with baseball diamond, tennis-courts, an outdoor swimming-pool, playgrounds for young children, and a field-house containing a large assembly-hall, club-rooms, a branch library, and shower-baths with locker-rooms for men and women. Skating is offered as a winter diversion, and the halls may be used for dances, dramatic, musical, and other neighborhood entertainments. ”

“ Many an active school-boy there has more than once temporarily bit the dust. But now rows of street lamps run through that part of the Common, and the precious grass must be protected at all hazards. New York city is scarcely better off. Central Park, miles away from the great majority of the boys in the city, is elegant enough when they get to it; but let them once set their bounds and start a game of ball, or hares-and-hounds, or try a little jumping or running, on any one of those hundreds of beautiful acres, save in one solitary field, and see how soon the gray-coats will be upon them. ”

“ Only twenty years ago, Union Square was “out of town;” twenty years hence, the town will have enclosed the Central Park. Let us consider, therefore, what will at that time be satisfactory, for it is then that the design will have to be really judged.
No longer an open suburb, our ground will have around it a continuous high wall of brick, stone, and marble. The adjoining shores will be lined with commercial docks and warehouses; steamboat and ferry landings, railroad stations, hotels, theatres, factories, will be on all sides of it and above it; all which our park must be made to fit. ”

“ Them that didn't have oil stoves brought along plenty of blankets, so as not to be upset with the cold and discomforts of sleeping outdoors. By building fires of the shade trees and huddling together in the bridle paths, and burrowing under the grass where the ground was soft enough, the likes of 5,000 head of people successfully battled against the night air in Central Park alone.
"Ye know I live in the elegant furnished apartment house called the Beersheba Flats, over against the elevated portion of the New York Central Railroad. ”

“ She gives them breathing-room in a dozen civic parks, the largest of which both Nature and Art destine to be the noblest popular pleasure-ground of the civilized world, as it is the amplest of all save the Bois de Boulogne. Central Park covers an area of 843 acres, and, though only in the fifth year of its existence, already contains twelve miles of beautifully planned and scientifically constructed carriage-road, seven miles of similar bridle-path, four sub-ways for the passage of trade-vehicles across the Park, with an aggregate length of two miles, and twenty-one miles of walk. ”

“ The rest of the large space encircled by the "Crystal Palace" is a public park, containing 145 acres, which includes ample recreation grounds within very easy access of all the people.
Running all round the Central Park (except where it Ward and Centre is intersected by the boulevards) is a wide glass arcade called the "Crystal Palace," opening on to the park. This building is in wet weather one of the favourite resorts of the people, whilst the knowledge that its bright shelter is ever close at hand tempts people into Central Park, even in the most doubtful of weathers. ”

“ The park, with its huge palace-like, barrack-like house, not a castle, and too great to be called merely a hall, lies almost immediately outside the town. From streets and shops the visitor passes straightway through the gates of the great enclosure. Every stranger who has seen the house is taken at once to see another object of interest. ”

“ Unless a special and intelligent effort is made to secure individuality in the improvement of each of the public squares, parks and boulevards of a city, they are liable to repeat each other too much. The West Side parks of Chicago resemble each other to a regrettable degree. Each has its little, crooked lake, its green house and flower beds, its little lawns, its curving level drives and walks, its bridges and statues, its plantations mainly of the same selection of trees crowded and slim and only partially screening out surrounding houses. ”