Development of Central Park By the 1840s, members of the city's elite were publicly calling for the construction of a new large park in
Manhattan. At the time, Manhattan's seventeen squares comprised a combined of land, constituting less than one percent of Manhattan's total area. An initial bill to acquire
Jones's Wood, a tract of land on the
Upper East Side, was nullified in 1851, and a subsequent bill to approve the purchase of Jones's Wood was also defeated in 1854. The second possible site for a large public park was a area labeled
Central Park, which was bounded by 59th and 106th Streets between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. In July 1853, the New York State Legislature passed the Central Park Act, authorizing the purchase of the present-day site of Central Park. Viele's plan was disregarded by the Central Park commission, who started a landscape design contest in April 1857 to find a suitable design for the park.
Acceptance of Greensward Plan Central Park superintendent
Frederick Law Olmsted worked with
Calvert Vaux to create the "
Greensward Plan", which was eventually decided as the winner of the contest. The Greensward Plan distinguished itself from many of the other designs in the contest by including four sunken "transverse" roadways, which carried crosstown traffic through Central Park and were not intended to be seen or heard from the rest of the park. The transverse roadways were the most difficult to construct, as they were to run below the rest of the park, but engineer J. H. Pieper devised several designs for bridges and retaining walls for each roadway. Along with the transverse roads, the plan envisioned three categories of park paths: "carriage" roadways for pleasure vehicles;
bridle paths for horses; and pedestrian walkways. These paths would cross each other, necessitating bridges and arches interspersed through the park, each with unique designs ranging from rugged rock spans to
Neo-Gothic cast iron. Many of the bridges would be designed by Vaux.
Bridge types There were three types of bridges and arches constructed in Central Park. The spans across the sunken transverse roads were made of natural-looking
schist, with
vaults of
brick underneath; Seven of the "ornamental" spans were made of iron; all except one of these bridges spanned bridle paths, the exception being the
Bow Bridge, which spanned
the Lake. "Rustic" bridges were smaller and usually spanned small walkways or streams. Initially, the bridges were all given numbers, mostly in the order that they were to be constructed. Twenty-three bridges were completed before 1861, and eleven were completed from 1862 to 1865. By 1872, there were thirty-three spans. Claremont and Mountcliff Arches, as well as Eagledale Bridge, were finished in 1890. Three spans were demolished in the 1930s: the Marble Arch, the Spur Rock Arch, and the Outset Arch. == Arches ==