Central Park Mall

The mall, leading to Bethesda Fountain, provides the only purely formal feature in the naturalistic original plan of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for Central Park.

The Mall was designed so that a carriage could disgorge its passengers at the south end, then drive round and pick them up again overlooking Bethesda Terrace, whose view of the Lake and Ramble formed the "ultimatum of interest" in Olmsted and Vaux's vision.

With no need for redoubling their steps, fashionable New Yorkers, who in the first decades of the park's existence drove through it in their carriages but rarely walked in it, had their chance to mingle with the less affluent, a mix that was considered thoroughly "American" and picturesque enough to be illustrated repeatedly in the watercolors of Maurice Prendergast and Ludwig Bemelmans.

[5] Then Tachau's successful Naumburg Bandshell design was submitted for its location on the east side of the Concert Ground, centrally nestled between the two projecting scenic overlooks, and it was accepted.

Olmsted was strongly opposed to punctuating the carefully planned rural aspect of the park with statuary, but the pressure to memorialize cultural heroes has resulted in the Mall becoming a kind of "Literary Walk".

[14] The statue of Christopher Columbus centered at the south end of the Mall was financed by the elite New-York Historical and Genealogical Society; however, it "could be seen as an 'ethnic' assertion by native-stock Americans who felt beleaguered in a city more and more dominated by immigrants.