One of New York’s most iconic destinations, Central Park, is a 24/7 monument to the city’s grandeur.
Lined by luxury condominiums and stretching a massive 840 acres through the center of Manhattan, the park is an oasis of calm in a city of bustle, from the majestic Belvedere Castle’s observatory to the Park’s famous zoo, home to over 150 different types of animals from around the world.
Part of the Park’s charm is its innate walkability, providing respite for city-weary travelers through its lush foliage, with winding roads and a network of charming bridges. Following in the monumental footsteps of New York’s slightly larger-scale infrastructure, like the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges to the south, Central Park’s bridges are tiny toasts to history, each a love letter from the architect to the city.
None of Central Park’s twelve bridges are alike. Architect Calvert Vaux created this mismatched network, beginning at 52nd Street’s Gapstow bridge, a 76-foot schist structure overlooking Wollman Rink, and ending 50 blocks north on 102nd street, where Glen Span bridge’s sturdy stone silently stands guard over the southern end of the Ravine. Between his bookend bridges, Vaux and his assistant, Jacob Wrey Mould, created an additional 10 structures — Bank Rock, Balcony, Bow, Dalehead, Eaglevale, Gothic, Pine Bank, two Reservoir Bridges, and Terrace — within a system of 35 arches that call the Park their home.
Vaux and Mould, striving for aesthetic complexity in their work, used of materials as diverse as marble, wood, brick, iron, and granite to complete their monuments, allowing for the creation of picturesque — and unique — scenes with each bridge. In addition to some of their derivative work, including 72nd street’s Terrace Bridge, designed to imitate Versailles’ elegant stonework, Vaux and Mould were inventive thinkers, combining an impressive knowledge of physics to their design. In building Huddlestone Arch, for example, Vaux used only boulders, without mortar, to hold the structure. This impressive feat, much like Vaux and Mould’s other staggering contributions to the beauty of Central Park, have added both form and function to the community and the city as a whole.
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