THE TERRACE—STEPS LEADING DOWN TO THE BETHESDA FOUNTAIN AND THE LAKE.
The provincial, who knows all about Central Park and regards it as the eighth wonder of the modern world, is more nearly right than the New Yorker, who is inclined to take it as a matter of course. There are comparatively few who remember the unpromising aspect of the rocky, swampy waste which, thirty five years ago, occupied the midmost portion of Manhattan Island. The designers of the park have been so signally successful in overcoming the difficulties that confronted them when they took their task in hand, that the visitor of today hardly gives them due credit for the remarkable result, or realizes the vast expenditure of money, labor, and skill that has here created the most beautiful park possessed by any of the world’s great capitals.
THE CENTRAL PARK MENAGERIE ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON.
For where can Central Park’s charms be matched? Not beneath the smoky sky of London, where vegetation cannot attain anything like the variety and luxuriance possible in our clear, pure atmosphere. Besides, little attempt at landscape gardening has been made in any of the parks of the British metropolis. They may be termed useful rather than ornamental, and are valued more for their practical hygienic effect as breathing spots in a vast and crowded city than as fields for the artistic reproduction of natural beauties. And in Paris, the allées of the Bois de Boulogne, prim and formal in their straightness, lack the charm of Central Park’s winding drives with their changing vistas of bordering woodland and meadow. Philadelphia and Chicago—if we admit those cities to a comparison—have parks of larger acreage, but inferior attractions. Quantity can never atone for defects of quality.
Central Park is not so very small, either. It is over half a mile in width, and more than two and a half miles in length. It covers 840 acres, which will hardly compare with Fairmount’s 2740 or the Bois de Boulogne’s 2150, but is enough to rank it with other large metropolitan parks, and to afford ample scope to the various arts that have contributed to make it what it is. Londoners call Hyde and Regent’s Parks large, but their united extent is but five acres more than that of Central Park.
Indeed, one of the most wonderful and attractive features of Central Park is the skill with which its apparent size has been magnified. A stranger driving or walking through it would never suppose that in his entire journey he had never been more than four hundred and fifty yards away from the streets of New York. The almost total exclusion of the outer world, and the production of effects of distance, are really remarkable triumphs of landscape gardening.
