Early History: Potter’s Field

As far back as 1686, New York’s colonial governor Thomas Dongan designated as public property the land that is now Bryant Park. The area was still wilderness, and the hunting grounds of Native Americans. At the start of the Revolutionary War, in 1776, General Washington’s troops, after being routed by the British in the Battle of Long Island, raced across Manhattan, traversing the future site of Bryant Park. The city established a potter’s field on the site in 1823. The site of Bryant Park is in a part of Manhattan that was countryside well north of the populous city until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. The city decommissioned the potter’s field in 1840, when it was apparent that this countryside would soon be consumed by “urban sprawl.”

The Croton Distributing Reservoir

In 1847, following the construction of one of the city’s most imposing edifices, the Croton Distributing Reservoir, on the present site of the New York Public Library, the city designated the former potter’s field to its west as a public park called Reservoir Square, a simple Victorian greensward. The reservoir itself, built in 1839-43, was a man-made lake four acres in area, surrounded by massive, fifty-foot-high, twenty-five-foot-thick granite walls designed in a vaguely Egyptian style. Along the tops of the walls were public promenades, offering breathtaking views. It was an integral part of the first supply of fresh water carried by aqueducts into the city from upstate New York. This water-supply system was one of the greatest engineering triumphs of nineteenth-century America. Iron pipes carried water forty-one miles to the receiving reservoir in what is now Central Park, thence to the distributing reservoir at this site. The aqueduct system, constructed at a cost of $11.5 million, was officially opened on July 4, 1842. The Croton Distributing Reservoir was pulled down in the 1890s.

The Civil War years

During the Civil War, the Union Army held military drills in Reservoir Square. Shortly after that, the Civil War draft riots raged in the immediate vicinity of the park. One of the most horrendous acts of the riots of July 1863 was the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street. Throughout the late nineteenth century, many uses were suggested for the reservoir site and also the square, increasingly centrally located.

The Crystal Palace Exhibition

In 1853-54, New York’s first “world’s fair,” the Crystal Palace Exhibition, took place on the site of Bryant Park. The remarkable iron and glass structure erected to house the fair remained standing until 1858, when it burned down.

By the early 1850s New York had grown to sufficient size and prominence that the city decided to host a major exhibition of the type that London had recently pioneered. Such early exhibitions were forerunners of the later world’s fairs. The “Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations” opened on July 14, 1853, in a sparsely developed part of the city. Fortieth and Forty-second streets bounded the fair’s four-acre site to the immediate west of the Croton Distributing Reservoir—today’s Bryant Park.

President Franklin Pierce delivered a speech at the fair’s opening. Within New York’s Crystal Palace four thousand exhibitors displayed the industrial wares, consumer goods, and artworks of the nation.

The exhibition set off one of the first major tourism booms in New York, and many hotels were built to handle the influx of visitors. Over one million people visited the Crystal Palace Exhibition, which closed on November 1, 1854. (In spite of its popularity, the exhibition’s sponsors lost $300,000 on the venture.) The structure remained standing after the fair, and was leased for a variety of purposes.

Bryant Park is born

Bryant Park

In 1884, Reservoir Square was renamed Bryant Park, to honor the recently deceased poet and editor William Cullen Bryant. Bryant (1794-1878) was a poet, newspaper editor, and civic reformer. A major transformation occurred beginning in the 1890s, when the Croton Distributing Reservoir was pulled down to make way for the construction of the present New York Public Library building.

A Fallow Period

The Sixth Avenue Elevated Railway was constructed in 1878 and cast a shadow over the park until it was closed in 1938. In November 1934, Architecture magazine noted that Bryant Park had “become one of the most disreputable parks in the city.” During the construction of the subway that replaced the El, the park was used for storage of construction equipment and otherwise filled with debris.

The Robert Moses redesign

New York City’s powerful parks commissioner, the legendary public-works “czar” Robert Moses, undertook to rescue and redesign the park during the Great Depression. Queens-based architect Lusby Simpson won a competition for the park’s redesign, a classical scheme of a large central lawn, formal pathways, stone balustrades, and borders of London plane trees, together with an oval plaza, containing the Lowell Fountain, at the west end, separated from Sixth Avenue by a broad flight of steps. Moses’s staff, including the architect Aymar Embury II and the landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke, oversaw execution of Simpson’s plan

Bryant Park today

The modern Bryant Park

By 1979, New York seemed to have given up Bryant Park for lost as an urban amenity, as well as an historic site. In 1974, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Bryant Park as a Scenic Landmark, calling it “a prime example of a park designed in the French Classical tradition… an urban amenity worthy of our civic pride.” Five years later, however, William H. (“Holly”) Whyte wrote in a report solicited by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund: “If you went out and hired the dope dealers, you couldn’t get a more villainous crew to show the urgency of the [present Bryant Park] situation.”

But by the late 1990s, actual lunchtime head counts on a sunny day would reach the 4,000 range – and the drug traffickers had been gone for a decade. The Rockefeller Brothers created the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (BPRC), under the founding leadership of Andrew Heiskell, then Chairman of Time Inc. and the New York Public Library, and Daniel A. Biederman, a Harvard Business School graduate and systems consultant with a reputation as an innovator in downtown management. Heiskell and Biederman, in 1980, created a master plan for turning around the park. In the words of an Urban Land Institute case study, “Biederman began experimenting with a series of efforts to bring people back to the park, while also exploring how to generate revenue.”

A seven-year push combined supplementary park maintenance, temporary kiosks, and public events ranging from historical park tours to concerts, which reduced crime by 92 percent and doubled the number of annual park visitors.

Summer 1988 saw city agencies approve BPRC’s plans (drafted by Hanna/Olin Ltd.) to build new entrances for increased visibility from the street, to enhance the formal French garden design (with a lush redesign by Lynden Miller), and improve and repair paths and lighting. BPRC’s plan also included restoration of the park’s monuments, and renovation of its long-closed restrooms. That same summer, the city approved BPRC’s designs (by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates), for two restaurant pavilions and four concession kiosks, which were to generate off-peak activity and added revenue for operations. These facilities opened in stages in the 1990s.

Bryant Park reopened in April, 1992, to lavish praise from citizens and visitors, the media, and urbanists. And, as the Urban Land Institute wrote it in an award citation, “the success of the park feeds the success of the neighborhood.” Soon the chorus was joined by the business community, whose assessments helped fund the renewal and now benefit from higher rents and property values.