Great Lawn and Turtle Pond
The Great Lawn and Turtle Pond are two connected features of Central Park in Manhattan, New York City, United States.
The lawn and pond are located on the site of a former reservoir for the Croton Aqueduct system which was infilled during the early 20th century.
The lawn and pond occupy the almost flat site of the rectangular, 35-acre (14 ha) Lower Reservoir, which was incorporated into the Greensward Plan for Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.
[13] The community of York Hill was displaced for the creation of the reservoir, and the population moved to Seneca Village to the northwest, which itself was demolished when Central Park was constructed in the 1850s.
[13][17] In Egbert Viele's plan for Central Park, whose rejection prompted the design competition of 1857-1858, the civil engineer "considered the reservoir worthy of attention as a major engineering feat, and his plan emphasized it by adding a terrace to the walls, from which spectators could observe military drills".
[18] Proponents of the naturalistic plans in the competition proposed "'planting out' the park boundaries and the 'ugly', 'artificial', 'uncouth', 'horrid', and 'discordant' distraction of the reservoirs in order to reinforce the sense of natural expanse".
[22] This was epitomized by the Catskill Aqueduct Celebration Committee's commission of a design from the prominent Beaux-Arts "society" architect Thomas Hastings.
[24] Other plans for the site called for airplane landing pads, an opera house, a radio tower, sports arenas, underground parking.
[34] Simultaneously, during the land boom that filled Fifth Avenue and Central Park West with luxury apartment towers for the rich.
[39] That April the American Society of Landscape Architects, New York Chapter (ASLA) proposed a sunken meadow and lake within the former reservoir site.
[40] In June 1930 the city adopted a plan presented by the ASLA for a great oval of turf, its edges softened by trees planted in clumps within and outside the encircling pedestrian walkway.
The drainage was collected in a small receiving reservoir at the south end, the predecessor of the present Turtle Pond, which revealed its essentially rectangular shape, in spite of mild waggles in its concrete curbing.
Along its southern shore, the steep gradient that had impounded the reservoir was regraded and planted with trees and shrubs to mask its regularity.
[13][42][43] Following the destruction of the Hoovertown, parks commissioner John E. Sheehy proposed building running tracks and ball fields on the site of the reservoir.
It was strongly opposed by preservationists and advocacy groups, who argued that these would ruin the rural character of Central Park as originally envisioned by Olmsted and Vaux.
[47] Sheehy's successor Robert Moses, who would see the ASLA Great Lawn to completion, took office with mayor Fiorello La Guardia in January 1934.
Moses replaced Sheehy's plan with his own, which placed large playgrounds and children's recreational facilities on the perimeter of a proposed meadow.
[2][20] The renovation included the installation of 250 automatic water sprinklers and 2,000 new trees,[3] as well as a nature blind to observe the area's wildlife.
[56][58] Other events held in the Great Lawn included the New York opening of the Disney movie Pocahontas in June 1995,[59] and Pope John Paul II's open-air mass for 125,000 that October.
[56] During the 2004 Republican National Convention, NYC Parks denied protesters the right to organize in either the Great Lawn or North Meadow, citing concerns over possible damage to the turf.
[64] However, an independent report the following year recommended a 55,000-person capacity for the Great Lawn, implicitly supporting NYC Parks' initial proposal.
