Conservatory Water, Central Park
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Conservatory Water, Central Park lies in a natural hollow near Fifth Avenue in New York City's Central Park, centered opposite 74th Street. To the south lies the slope of Pilgrim Hill, surveyed by John Quincy Adams Ward's bronze of The Pilgrim set among Prunus serrulata and other specimen trees, notably a globose European Hornbeam and nine species of oak, all set in rolling lawn. The result is a somewhat manicured Park landscape, planned in deferential reference to the estate plantings of the owners of the mansions that once lined this stretch of Fifth Avenue.
Conservatory Water is named for another estate-garden feature, a glass-house for tropical plants, to be entered from Fifth Avenue by a grand stair[1] that was planned in the original "Greensward" plan, 1857, but never built. Instead a model boat pond similar to that in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, was built where a parterre display of tender annuals had been planned. The formally-shaped shallow basin set in a moulded curb of "Atlantic Blue" granite[2] is home water to a flotilla of model sailboats, made familiar in the pages of E.B. White's Stuart Little (1945) and recreated in the popular 1999 film. The Kerbs Boathouse (1954) in picnic Georgian taste houses resident model sailboats as well as the radio-controlled model yachts of the Central Park Model Yacht Club.
The waters of Conservatory Water shelter a seasonal population of unusual minute freshwater jellyfish, Craspedacusta sowerbyi. In the sculptured Beaux-Arts pediment of a Fifth Avenue penthouse window overlooking Conservatory Water, the Red-tailed Hawk named "Pale Male" set up a nest, under the binocular watch of the Park's numerous bird-watchers.
Bronze sculptural groups set in small terraces fronting the Water commemorate Alice in Wonderland (by José de Creeft, 1959) and Hans Christian Andersen (by Georg John Lober, 1955): see List of sculptures in Central Park.
Discreetly sited near the top of Pilgrim Hill is the white granite exedra seat commemorating Waldo Hutchins (1822–1891), a member of the original Board of Commissioners for Central Park. It was executed by the Piccirilli Brothers in 1932, with a sundial featuring a bronze sculpture by Paul Manship. Incised in the bench and paving are arced lines representing shadows on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Elizabeth Barlow Rogers et al. Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration plan, (MIT Press) 1987, p 124.
- ^ The granite curb replaced crumbling concrete in 2000. (Central Park Conservancy 1998-2002).
[edit] External links
[edit] References
See references at Central Park#References.
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