East:
This area was set aside as early as 1686 for public
use; from 1823 to 1840, like many of Manhattan's
parks, it was used as a
pauper's graveyard. In 1842, the Croton Reservoir
was built on the east side of the space, where
the New York Public Library is now, and the
remaining land became known as Reservoir Square.
The Crystal Palace was built
on the site in 1853, a marvelous seven-story
exhibition space made of glass and cast iron
that housed America's first world's fair before
burning down spectacularly on October 5, 1858.
After serving as a parade ground for Union troops
during the Civil War, Reservoir Square was designated a park in
1871, and was renamed in 1884 for
William Cullen Bryant, poet, lawyer, New York Post
editor, abolitionist and park advocate. It was not much
of a park, though, until it was landscaped
in French garden style in the 1930s, the object
of a contest for unemployed architects.
By the 1970s, the park had become chiefly
known as a drug market (dubbed "Needle Park"),
but since a re-landscaping
in 1992 occasioned by the creation of underground
stacks for the library, it's become a
highly valued urban space, with 2,000 chairs for urbanites to relax on.
It's the venue for popular outdoor movies
in the summer. A plan to use trained falcons to
control the pigeons was scuttled in 2003 when one attacked
a dachshund.
Sculptures in the park include an imposing Bryant,
Goethe, Gertrude Stein, copper maganate and YMCA founder
William Dodge (by John Quincy Adams Ward; originally
in Herald Square) and Brazilian liberator Jose de Andrada
--not to mention Big Crinkly by Alexander Calder.
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