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Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan is a quiet oasis on 42nd Street. Thousands of New Yorkers and visitors to the city sit or stroll among the old leafy trees that shield from view the encircling skyscrapers. This hushed public square with an old-world feeling and green grassy lawn brings moments or hours of peace to the frazzled urbanite.
We are aware only of the sky and trees above us and the green grass below, but of what lies beneath Bryant Park most of us have no idea.
It started with water.
In the Dutch and English colonial period, the city relied on the Collect for its public water supply. This was a 48-acre spring-fed pond near what is now City Hall. By the Revolutionary period, the water of the Collect was a polluted swill filled with garbage, dead animals, and industrial waste. By 1803, the city had begun to fill in the Collect and operate public wells and cisterns. In 1837, the city built the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, which stood until 1899.
In 1842, the Croton River in Westchester County was tapped and its water piped to Central Park, and from there, to 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where it was held in a great fortress-like bin or reservoir. The entire system was called the Croton Aqueduct. The reservoir was a steep, slope-sided, ivy-covered wall to the fashionably dressed passersby. It served as the city’s main source of water for the next 75 years.
The land behind the reservoir to 6th Avenue had been a potters’ field in use from 1822 to 1825. The cemetery was designated a park in 1847 and called Reservoir Square. In 1853, it was the site of the first world’s fair in America. Architects Georg J.B. Carstensen and Charles Gildemeister designed an exhibition palace after one in London, called the Crystal Palace, which housed the New York exhibition of the fair. Supposed to be fireproof, the domed building was destroyed by fire in fifteen minutes in 1858.
The land was used as a drilling field for Union soldiers during the Civil War. In 1871, it was re-designated a city park and called Reservoir Park and renamed Bryant Park after abolitionist editor William Cullen Bryant.
The reservoir was demolished in the late 1890s and construction begun on the New York Public Library, which opened in 1911. The library was established in 1895 out of the Astor and Lenox libraries. Built of white Vermont marble with 18th century French elevations, its design by Thomas Hastings of Carrere and Hastings was the winning entry in a competition funded by a bequest of Samuel J. Tilden, who was a governor of New York. At the foot of the grand exterior stairway sit the two stone lions, Patience and Fortitude.
The Bryant Park side of the building was less elaborate and contained the book stacks. The park at the library end held an outdoor reading room under the trees, in a time of no air-conditioning. The redesign of the park was done at the same time as the library, with a raised terrace overlooking the park and two stone park houses to serve as restrooms.
The park went into decline in the 1920s and after the Sixth Avenue subway was built, a new design competition was initiated during the Great Depression. Under parks Commissioner Robert Moses, architect Aymar Embury II implemented the winning design submitted by Lusby Simpson. A wrought iron fence surrounded the new park, which now had a Great Lawn with side avenues of London plane trees.
In 1974, Bryant Park was designated a scenic landmark, but by then it had deteriorated into a drug dealers’ haven and there was little scenic about it. The Bryant Park Restoration Corporation was formed in 1980 to wrest control of the space from the criminal element through private ownership and funding. Based on landscaping theories of William H. Whyte, Jr., the new park included a high-end restaurant, kiosks, and cafes.
Bryant Park has succeeded beautifully. The 9.6 acre public space draws daily crowds of people. Its design provides elbowroom enough for peaceful pleasures like reading or lunching on its old-fashioned park benches. Concerts, theater, opera, movies, and even the French bowling game boules are commonly held events. Once a year Seventh Avenue takes over with its “Seventh on Sixth” fashion show. Public events draw thousands of city residents, office workers on lunch hour or after work, tourists from out of town, and scholars from the public library. The two-acre lawn is like green velvet and its perennial gardens a wonder to behold.
And what’s down underneath? Why, 84 miles of bookshelves on two levels of library storage space.
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