New York playgrounds named after celebrities

Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, who died last year at age 47, isn’t the only musician to have a New York playground named in his honor.

Not far from his namesake park on Atlantic Avenue is Harry Chapin Playground, at Columbia Heights and Middagh Street.

Like Yauch, Chapin grew up in Brooklyn Heights. And just as Yauch spent his childhood playing at the park eventually named for him, so did Chapin.

Harry Chapin Playground was dedicated to the singer in 1987, six years after his life was cut short when the car he was driving on the Long Island Expressway collided with a truck.

How the west side of Central Park, at 81st Street, ended up with a Diana Ross Playground is an entirely different story.

According to this 1984 People article, Ross “had a dream” to create a playground for kids in the park. She planned to build it with cash raised from her July 1983 free concert on the Great Lawn. But after the show, she told the city she didn’t make any money.

Eventually, Ross put in $275,000 to fund the playground, which opened in the late 1980s.

Thankfully, these were not built in Central Park

New York City has a long history of grand, ambitious plans that never make it past the idea stage.

A few examples? Moving sidewalks in Mahattan, a subway tunnel to Staten Island, a bridge spanning 125th Street to New Jersey, and 100-story housing projects in Harlem.

But some of the wackier or just-plain-wrong proposals were focused on Central Park. And that’s just in the park’s first half-century of existence.

“If the various persons who have sought to invade Central Park in the last 60 years, for projects in themselves often worthy, oftener grotesque, and frequently purely commercial, had had their way, there would now be nothing left of the park except a few walks and drives, and a lake on which steamboats and full-rigged ships would be plying,” states an amusing New York Times article from 1918 (headline above).

Among the ideas, according to the article: a theater seating 100,000, a sports stadium, a burial ground for the city’s “distinguished dead,” Grant’s Tomb, the paving of the lower end of the park, free swimming baths, and a speedway that would encircle the entire park.

More outlandish: straightening the circular paths throughout the park so they made the park into a “checkerboard,” a “street railway” running through the park, and cutting up the park and turning it into building lots!

[Vintage postcards: NYPL Digital Gallery]

A sleepy, beachy view across Gravesend Bay

Gravesend, Brooklyn has changed a lot in its almost 400-year history.

Founded in the 1640s by a group of religious dissenters, it went from colonial-era English town to farm community to the site of late 19th century beach resorts and a racetrack—then a suburban-like neighborhood by 1930, states The Encyclopedia of New York City.

In View Across Gravesend Bay to Seagate, a 1905 painting by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, the shabby wooden pier and debris-strewn beach give this stretch of Gravesend the appearance of a sleepy fishing village.

Today, this beach might be part of Calvert Vaux Park, named for the designer of Central Park who mysteriously died off these waters.

A “Victorian folly” in the middle of Central Park

Aside from many beautiful churches, there’s not a lot of Medieval-style architecture in New York City.

But there is Belvedere Castle, a Gothic structure in the middle of Central Park with a stone facade and turrets that’s meant to invoke the idea of a romantic Medieval villa.

Like so much of the nature-inspired yet artificial park, it was created purely out of Victorian folly, with no other purpose than to enchant visitors.

“Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park, created the miniature castle in 1869 as one of its many whimsical structures intended as a lookout to the reservoir to the north (now the Great Lawn) and the Ramble to the south,” states the Central Park Conservatory.

Built as an open-air structure without doors or windows on a part of the park called Vista Rock, it almost looks as if the castle is rising out of the rock itself.

Belvedere Castle was called into service in 1919, when the United States Weather Bureau moved its observatory there. As the castle and the park fell into disrepair in the 1970s and 1980s, the weather bureau departed to another compound in the park.

It’s now a renovated and spiffed up visitor’s center and nature center, and climbing the winding stone steps leads to a wonderful vantage point to “take the view,” as Victorian-era New Yorkers would have said.

[Photo: Central Park Conservatory]

A painter’s blurry, enchanting, elusive New York

Born in St. Louis in 1864 and trained in France, Paul Cornoyer made a name for himself in the late 19th century, painting landscapes and urban scenes in an impressionist style.

“In 1899, with encouragement from William Merritt Chase, he moved to New York City,” states oxfordgallery.com.

Here he opened a studio, became associated with the Ash Can school, and for many years was a beloved art teacher at the Mechanics Institute.

“Celebrated for his lyrical cityscapes and atmospheric landscapes, Paul Cornoyer crafted an indelible impression of fin-de-siècle New York,” explains this fine arts site.

[Above: "Winter Twilight Central Park"; below, "Flatiron Building"]

Well-known in his day, his typically rainy, muted depictions of New York City sold well and earned him fame, particularly “The Plaza After Rain” (below) and “Madison Square in the Afternoon” (top).

He’s not a household name, but his vision of a New York with soft edges and blurred borders still resonates—reflecting a moody city filled with mystery and enchantment.

Three little elephants at the Bronx Zoo

Cute, no? Pachyderms were a big hit when the Bronx Zoo (full former name: New York Zoological Park) built their original dome-capped elephant house in 1908.

More than 100 years later, zoo officials decided to follow the Central Park Zoo and Prospect Park Zoo and phase out their elephant exhibit.

The elephants currently lounging around the central Bronx will be the last ones to live in New York City.

Little sledders enjoying Central Park in winter

In his 1905 painting “Central Park, Winter,” Ashcan School artist William Glackens “portrays a group of well-behaved children sledding down a gentle slope in New York’s Central Park under the watchful eyes of adults who dot the perimeter of a snowy knoll,” states the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“The children are warmly dressed and the adults are fashionably clothed, signaling that this is a story of middle-class recreation.”

“Despite their nominal commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about modern life and urban hardship, Glackens and other Ashcan artists viewed their world through rose-colored glasses, presenting the city euphemistically and, as here, depicting people at leisure in quasi-rural surroundings rather than in their overcrowded home neighborhoods.”

Glackens often painted winter scenes in the city. Here he capture more fashionably dressed women and children on a slushy day in Washington Square Park.

The panther on the hunt in Central Park

Joggers and cyclists hurtling up East Drive near the Ramble are always mistaking this sculpture for the real thing.

Perched on top of a steep hill at about 76th Street and looking like he’s ready to pounce, it’s a ferocious panther in bronze, officially titled “Still Hunt.” Here’s the park from the panther’s point of view.

Created in 1883 by Georgia-born sculptor Edward Kemeys, it’s one of the few sculptures in Central Park meant to look natural and blend in—which is why it has no plaque and makes passersby do a double take.

Kemeys, who helped build Central Park and was inspired by the real-life animals at the Central Park Zoo (then called the Menagerie) was an animalier, and his jaguars, lions, and other creatures are on display in cities across the country.

The Central Park panther isn’t Kemeys’ only panther in New York City. His “Panther and Cubs” bronze sculpture belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about six blocks north.

What Columbus Circle looked like in the 1920s

The traffic around the circle seems chaotic, and the fountains that surround it now wouldn’t come for another 80 or so years.

The yellow Victorian-looking structure in the center is the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel, torn down and replaced by the much-maligned Lollipop Building. Redone in the 2000s, it now houses the Museum of Arts and Design.

I can’t figure out what the billboard on top of the white building says. United States something? Columbus Circle had big, bright billboards and signage for decades.

Celebrating Halloween in Central Park in 1936

Except for the pumpkin obscured in the background, there’s nothing particularly Halloween-esque about this poster, designed by the Works Progress Administration in 1936.

Though it looks like the carnival is geared toward adults, this poster for the same Halloween event clearly has kids in mind. I’d love to know what the prizes were.

Both are part of the Library of Congress’ excellent WPA poster collection from the 1930s and 1940s.