Bryant Park

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.