As the Central Park historian, Sara Cedar Miller received a lot of calls from people who thought they had tips on new information about one of the most cherished and defining landmarks in New York City. She was used to them not panning out.
So, when a woman called her—Miller thinks it was in the late 1990s—to report the discovery of a drawing in her late mother’s house that she thought might be an important piece of park history, Miller didn’t get too excited.
“On this fateful phone call, I said ‘OK, let’s try to name your relatives,’” Miller, now Central Park’s Historian Emerita and author of Central Park, an American Masterpiece, told The Daily Beast. “[The woman] went on and on. She knew it was her mother’s [side of the family], but her mother had many names—her mother’s side, her father’s side. All of a sudden, she said, ‘Uh, Rink?’ And I went, ‘Oh my God!’”
In 1857, the Board of Commissioners for Central Park decided to get serious about creating the first public park in the United States. They launched a competition with a $2,000 prize for the winner, plus, of course, the honor of having the top design actually turned into a large gathering place in one of the predominant cities in the world.
Thirty-three entries were submitted — well, 32, says Miller; the second submission was quizzically (or not, Miller has some theories) a drawing only of a pyramid. Among them was design number four created by a park engineer named John J. Rink.
Rink’s plan was heavily inspired by French design. It was all manicured shrubs and decorative labyrinths; flourishes of green shaped into spirals and circles with only the narrowest of paths winding through them. Marie Antoinette would have been right at home ambling through one of Rink’s star-shaped gardens.
It was also highly improbable. Despite being a Cooper Union-trained engineer, Rink seemed to assume the acres of land that had been earmarked for public use were a flat and empty sheet on which to sculpt his greenery rather than a natural slice of earth filled with topographical variation.
While Rink’s plan didn’t even come close to winning the competition, it is interesting for anyone who has ever enjoyed a day lounging in Sheep’s Meadow to imagine what Central Park could have been like—and to thank their lucky topiary stars that the committee passed on the Rink plan.
Despite its excessive flourishes and its improbable design, the 8.5-foot watercolor Rink submitted to the Central Park commission and that is now owned by the New-York Historical Society is exciting to examine, and it’s discovery was a significant find in the effort to document the history of the park.
Out of the 33 submissions, only five of the original entries, in addition to the park itself, remain from that long ago competition.
“One of the greatest moments that ever happened to me in 34 years of being the Central Park historian was that phone call,” Miller says. When the woman told her there was a penciled “4” on the back of the canvas, corresponding with Rink being the fourth entry in the competition, “I burst into tears,” Miller says. “I knew she had found something that was extraordinary.”
As the 19th century neared its midpoint, some New York City denizens were starting to see the need for a public place for all locals to gather.
Immigrants were beginning to pour into the city, land was being snapped up for development, and the division between the haves and the have-nots was starting to grow.
Park proponents advocated for the city to set aside space that would both preserve a little spot of nature for future generations to enjoy and that would create a democratic gathering spot for all who sought to build a life in the Big Apple.
By 1856, the commission had adopted a plan by its engineer-in-chief and landscape design expert Colonel Egbert Ludovicus Viele, and they were preparing to start construction on the grand new park.
But their plan hit a road bump. An architect named Calvert Vaux had recently relocated to the city and had gotten a glimpse of the proposed design. It was a disaster.
Vaux went back to the commission, which was now filled with new members loyal to the new Republican government, and argued that they should hold off on implementing the Viele design and host a competition for a new plan instead. They were easily convinced.
In the end, it was a design named the “Greensward” plan submitted by the duo of Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted—who would become one of the most important landscape designers and park superintendents in the city’s history—that took the top prize and would become the Central Park beloved today.
“Olmsted is part of the good fortune of New York, our lucky break,” Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker in 1997. “That, of all the designs in the 1858 competition for Central Park, it was his “Greensward” plan that won; that it got built more or less as he and his partner, Calvert Vaux, intended; that the park they planned is still more or less intact: all these things are so firmly contrary to the general run of New York compromises and near-misses that the Park remains our around-the-corner miracle.”
In addition to keeping the natural feel of the land and creating the impression of wide open swaths of countryside in the middle of the city, the Greensward Plan also ensured that the park would be a democratic space. It was an area where all New Yorkers regardless of class or ethnic background, could come to enjoy nature and indulge in a little leisure.
“Most people don’t realize that there are three ways to get around the park,” Miller told the New York City blog 6sqft in 2014. “The carriage drives are the loop around the perimeter. The bridal paths loop up the west side. The pedestrian paths go everywhere. When Olmsted and Vaux were planning their design, they realized that if the elite didn’t want to mix, they would stay on the carriage or their horse. So, they designed the most beautiful parts of the park for pedestrians only. If you wanted to see these areas, you had to get out of your carriage or off your horse.”
Rink had other ideas.
While the park engineer wasn’t outwardly classist, he seemed to support the faction who thought the new landmark should be reserved for patriotic and military uses as well as the city’s high society.
Along with fanciful topiary designs, Rink reserved space for a large military parade ground and named the micro gardens and other important park features like entrances, exists, and roads after presidents, Revolutionary War heroes, and other important American men.
“The whole world was heating up when he did this,” Miller says. “The Civil War was moments away, and he was looking backwards at the Revolution and looking forwards obviously in some militaristic way to what was about to happen.”
With each entry to the competition, the hopeful designers also had to submit a written report explaining their plan. Miller says Rink’s written explanation was actually quite sensible. It harps more on the American and militaristic values the park elevates and fails to mention his more imaginative and ornate elements like the star and spiral-shaped gardens.
But in his explanation, Rink also quoted an editorial that had run in the local paper at the time that questioned whether William B. Astor and Edward Everett would really be able to enjoy the same spaces as “Sam the Five Pointer.”
“Is it not obvious that he will turn them out, and that the great Central Park, which has cost so much money and is to cost so much more, will be nothing but a huge beer garden for the lowest denizens of the city—of which we shall yet pray litanies to be delivered?”
Luckily, the Board of Commissioners for Central Park opted for a more democratic vision, one that included wide open spaces for families to picnic or start a pick-up game in, in addition to the more manicured gardens free for every visitor to wander.
The 33 designs were put on public exhibition in 1858 for an entry fee of 25 cents before the commission chose to award top prize to the Olmsted and Vaux plan. The top four finalists including the winners were each awarded a cash prize. The other 28 designs split the profits from the exhibition.
Rink was paid $10.25 for his fantastical dream of the Central Park that could have been.
Well, not really.
“It’s simply impossible to have built such a thing,” Miller said. “It looks like the park is a flat piece of ground, like it were in Kansas.”
But all hope is not lost. Rink’s plan, while impractical, is a beautiful piece of art to look at.
“I always think it would make a nice scarf,” Miller laughed.