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.
