Site The Yorkville Reservoir of the Croton Aqueduct system, also known as the Lower Reservoir or the receiving reservoir, was built in 1842 to store the city's drinking water. The community of York Hill was displaced for the creation of the reservoir, and the population moved to
Seneca Village to the northwest, which itself was demolished when Central Park was constructed in the 1850s. The reservoir was filled to a depth of starting on June 27, 1842. The reservoir occupied the space between the 79th Street and 86th Street transverse roads, measuring with a capacity of at least . In
Egbert Viele's plan for Central Park, whose rejection prompted the
design competition of 1857-1858, the civil engineer "considered the reservoir worthy of attention as a major engineering feat, and his plan emphasized it by adding a terrace to the walls, from which spectators could observe military drills". Proponents of the naturalistic plans in the competition proposed "'planting out' the park boundaries and the 'ugly', 'artificial', 'uncouth', 'horrid', and 'discordant' distraction of the reservoirs in order to reinforce the sense of natural expanse". The southwestern corner of the reservoir was overlooked by Vista Rock, atop which
Belvedere Castle was built in 1869.
Design As the
Croton-Catskill Reservoir system was completed in the first decade of the 20th century, the Lower Reservoir came to be redundant. As early as 1903, there were plans to cover the reservoir to create additional recreational space, and in 1910, park commissioner
Charles Bunstein Stover started advocating for the removal of the reservoir. This was epitomized by the Catskill Aqueduct Celebration Committee's commission of a design from the prominent
Beaux-Arts "society" architect
Thomas Hastings.
Henry Fairfield Osborn lobbied instead for a formal carriage drive that would link his
American Museum of Natural History with the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other plans for the site called for airplane landing pads, an opera house, a radio tower, sports arenas, underground parking. and a film-storage mausoleum. The city approved Hastings's plan in 1917. However, with the growing intensity of World War I, Central Park cycled through five parks commissioners between November 1917 and February 1918, and Hastings's plan was dropped by the administration of mayor
John Francis Hylan. The issue became politicized. Hastings's World War I monument proposal, increasingly tied to Hylan's policies, was criticized by many of Hylan's opponents, and lost even more support when Hylan proposed a performing arts center on the site. Hastings stated that the space would be wasted if the memorial plan were to be dropped, and in 1925 the city's
Board of Estimate gave preliminary approval to the memorial. The Central Park Association, one of several groups to advocate for the improvement of Central Park, was created in December 1925. They opposed the memorial and subsequently succeeded in reversing the city's endorsement of the memorial. Simultaneously, during the land boom that filled
Fifth Avenue and
Central Park West with luxury apartment towers for the rich. the Fifth Avenue Association was created. That association also opposed a reservoir memorial because it was seen as contributory to the decline of Central Park. A third group, the Citizens Union, endorsed the city's proposal to fill in the receiving reservoir. In the meantime, Frederick Law Olmsted's son
Frederick Olmsted Jr. worked with Harvard librarian
Theodora Kimball Hubbard to compile Frederick Sr.'s papers. The resulting publication invigorated preservationists who wanted to see the reservoir redeveloped as a more natural area. This, combined with mayor
Jimmy Walker's increases to park budgets, resulted in a small general cleanup of Central Park, but also saw the cancellation of the memorial.
Construction and opening The reservoir began to be drained in January 1930. The project required the dumping of of dirt into the decommissioned reservoir, which was set to be completed within a year. That April the American Society of Landscape Architects, New York Chapter (ASLA) proposed a sunken meadow and lake within the former reservoir site. In June 1930 the city adopted a plan presented by the ASLA for a great oval of turf, its edges softened by trees planted in clumps within and outside the encircling pedestrian walkway. were to be screened by shrubs and trees. The drainage was collected in a small receiving reservoir at the south end, the predecessor of the present Turtle Pond, which revealed its essentially rectangular shape, in spite of mild waggles in its concrete curbing. Along its southern shore, the steep gradient that had impounded the reservoir was regraded and planted with trees and shrubs to mask its regularity. The former receiving reservoir was filled in with dirt from the
construction of Rockefeller Center. in Turtle Pond In the meantime, the city teetered on the edge of insolvency during the
Great Depression. A "
Hooverville" of improvised shacks developed in the dry bed of the reservoir, as the city began dumping fill. The homeless were initially evicted when they tried to move into the site in late 1930, but public sentiment gradually turned to sympathy. The few dozen shacks on the site were allowed to stay through April 1933, when they were evicted. Following the destruction of the Hoovertown, parks commissioner John E. Sheehy proposed building running tracks and ball fields on the site of the reservoir. The plan was controversial. It was strongly opposed by preservationists and advocacy groups, who argued that these would ruin the rural character of Central Park as originally envisioned by Olmsted and Vaux. The
Daily News, on the other hand, supported Sheehy's plan and denounced the objections as classist discrimination, since the opponents of the Sheehy plan were mainly wealthy residents of nearby areas. Sheehy's successor
Robert Moses, who would see the ASLA Great Lawn to completion, took office with mayor
Fiorello La Guardia in January 1934. Moses replaced Sheehy's plan with his own, which placed large playgrounds and children's recreational facilities on the perimeter of a proposed meadow. The Great Lawn was essentially completed in 1937. It was planted with pine oaks and European lindens, in the reduced range of trees in the current repertory.
Degradation and restoration The Great Lawn received its baseball diamonds in the 1950s. and the project was later postponed. Belvedere Lake was officially renamed Turtle Pond the same year. The
resodding of the Great Lawn commenced in October 1996, at which point officials replaced a ovoid patch of the Lawn, and nearby areas, with new sod for $18 million. The project was completed the following year. The project, completed in 1997, was designed so that at no position can a viewer take in all its perimeter. Shoreline plants such as
lizard's tail,
bulrushes,
turtlehead (Chelone glabra), and
blueflag iris were planted in submerged concrete shelving designed to offer each group of wetland plants their ideal water coverage. A small island provides sunning spots and secure egg-laying sites for the turtles. Sightings of numerous species of
dragon fly not previously noted in Central Park have been made. ==Use==