ark commissioners.In 1857, the Central Park Commission held the countrys first landscape design contest and selected the Greensward Plan, submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted, the parks superintendent at the time, and Calvert Vaux, an English-born architect and former partner of the popular landscape gardener, Andrew Jackson Downing. The designers sought to create a pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition. Open rolling meadows contrasted with the picturesque effects of the Ramble and the more formal dress grounds of the Mall (Promenade) and Bethesda Terrace. In order to maintain a feeling of uninterrupted expanse, Olmsted and Vaux sank four Transverse Roads eight feet below the parks surface to carry cross-town traffic. Responding to pressure from local critics, the designers also revised their plans circulation system to separate carriage drives, pedestrian walks, and equestrian paths. Vaux, assisted by Jacob Wrey Mould, designed more than forty bridges to eliminate grade crossings between the different routes.The building of Central Park was one of nineteenth-century New Yorks most massive public works projects. Some 20,000 workers Yankee engineers, Irish laborers, German gardeners, and native-born stonecutters reshaped the sites topography to create the pastoral landscape. After blasting out rocky ridges with more gunpowder than was later fired at the Battle of Gettysburg, workers moved nearly 3 million cubic yards of soil and planted more than 270,000 trees and shrubs. The city also built the curvilinear reservoir immediately north of an existing rectangular receiving reservoir. The park first opened for public use in the winter of 1859 when thousands of New Yorkers skated on lakes constructed on the site of former swamps.By 1865, the park received more than seven million visitors a year. The citys wealthiest citizens turned out daily for elaborate late-afternoon carriage parades. Indeed, in the parks first d...
