The winning entry in the competition of 1858 for Central Park in New York: a description of a pastoral park of meadows, woods and water on a strip of rocky land, crossed by sunken roads for the city’s traffic so that the park itself is never interrupted.
Olmsted (1822–1903), then superintendent of the clearing of the park site, and Vaux (1824–1895), an English architect who had come to America to work with A. J. Downing, submitted their plan under the motto “Greensward” on 1 April 1858; it won from thirty-three entries. Olmsted had visited England in 1850 and admired Paxton’s Birkenhead Park, which he called a people’s garden in his book Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852).
The text explains the design: the long, narrow site (then about 780 acres, extended in 1863 to 843) was to be crossed by four transverse roads sunk below the level of the park, so that carts and carriages crossing the city never cut through it; inside, separate drives, bridle paths and footpaths, crossing one another on bridges and in arches, would let each move without meeting the others. The southern park would be gentle and pastoral, with the Mall as its one formal feature; the northern rocky ground would be left wilder.
The book, part by part
I The site and the transverse roads
The long site between two avenues; the four sunken cross-roads; the reservoirs.
II The parts of the park
The parade ground (later the Sheep Meadow), the Mall and its terrace, the lake, the Ramble, the northern woods.