Turtle Pond – Daniel Pecoraro

On Turtle Pond: A Brief History of a Central Park Landmark 

In the 1840s, calls for a park that would dramatically change the footprint of Manhattan were made. Writers such as William Cullen Bryant lobbied for a space that would stretch 843 acres, over 60 blocks from north to south (Gandy, 2002, p. 77) (Platt, 1994, p. 23). As this space – Central Park – changed over a period of over 150 years, so did the parts that formed the whole. This included the Turtle Pond, a landmark component of the park, which over time has gone from utilitarian to aesthetic, and from well-kept to derelict and back again.

 

Central Park was formed out of a need for open spaces for the working class to escape to from their crowded tenement buildings, along with, to a lesser degree, the conventional wisdom of creating “urban lungs” in large industrial cities (Platt, 1994, pp. 26-7). However, even though, as Gandy (2002) notes, “By 1863 [four years after it opened] the park was receiving more than four million visitors a year,” the city would not get its subway system, a vital part of transporting people uptown towards the park, for another 40 years; one has to wonder if the ‘working men’ for whom the park was ostensibly built actually enjoyed the park in great numbers upon its opening (p. 99). Combined with the lack of sports fields in Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s designs, in favor of more Picturesque simulacra of nature, and the fact that much of the Park’s political purpose was for speculation of the land around the park (according to Gandy (2002), Mayor Fernando Wood was a landowner on the West Side of the park, for one), the park seemed to serve a much more bourgeois focus than originally envisioned (p.86).

 

The Turtle Pond, on the other hand, had more populist importance. From 1842 to 1931, it was just a part of the larger receiving reservoir for the Croton Water System, one of the earliest reservoir systems in the city (Central Park Conservancy, 2004) (Central Park Conservancy, 2010). In the 1930s, however, the reservoir, save for the pond, was filled in order to construct the Great Lawn, which further rectified the issue regarding the lack of ballfields in Olmsted and Vaux’s original design (Central Park Conservancy, 2010). It was around this time that Turtle Pond earned its name, as city-dwellers would give up their pet turtles in this pond (Central Park Conservancy, 2010). Heavy use of the Great Lawn for concerts left both the lawn and the pond in a state of dilapidation; in 1995, the New York Department of Parks and the Central Park Conservancy began what would be a three-year project restoring the lawn and pond (Central Park Conservancy, 2004). Today, Turtle Pond remains the home to several species of turtles and other aquatic life, and serves as another part of the vistas provided by the nearby Belvedere Castle and Delacorte Theatre.

 

Works Cited:

 

Central Park Conservancy. (2004). A guide to the Great Lawn in Central Park. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20060614063333/http://www.centralparknyc.org/media/file/ag- greatlawn.pdf

 

Central Park Conservancy. (2010). Turtle Pond. Retrieved from http://www.centralparknyc.org /visit/things-to-see/great-lawn/turtle-pond.html

 

Gandy, M. (2002). Concrete and clay: Reworking nature in New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 

Platt, R.H. (1994). From commons to commons: Evolving concepts of open space in North American cities. In R.H. Platt, R.A. Rowntree, & P.C. Muick (Eds.), The ecological city: Preserving and restoring urban biodiversity. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

At your convenience, you can download a .doc file of this essay here: MHC_LabReport 2