The Ramble and Lake, Central Park
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The Ramble and Lake in Central Park together form an inseparable central feature of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's "Greensward" plan (1857) to provide a Central Park for New York City. The Ramble was intended as a woodland walk through highly varied topography, a "wild garden" away from carriage drives and bridle paths, to be wandered in, or to be viewed as a "natural" landscape from the formal lakefront setting of Bethesda Terrace (illustration below) or from rented rowboats on the Lake. The 38-acre Ramble embraces the deep coves of the north shore of the Lake, excavated between bands of bedrock; it offers dense naturalistic planting, rocky outcrops of glacially-scarred Manhattan bedrock, small open glades and an artificial stream, The Gill, that empties through the Azalea Pond, then down a cascade into the Lake. Its ground rises northwards towards Vista Rock, crowned by Belvedere Castle, a lookout and eye-catching folly.
The Park's most varied and intricately-planted landscape was planted with native trees— tupelo, white, red, black and scarlet oaks, Liriodendron, Nyssa sylvatica— together with some American trees never native to the area, such as Kentucky coffee tree, Yellowwood and Cucumber magnolia, and a few exotics, such as Phellodendron and Sophora.[1]
The twenty-acre Lake unified what Calvert Vaux called the "irregular disconnected featureless conglomeration of ground".[2] It was excavated, entirely by hand, from unprepossessing swampy ground transected by drainage ditches and ramshackle stone walls.[3] where the Sawkill flowed sluggishly from sources under the present American Museum of Natural History and in the prospective park south of Seneca Village, exiting the park about 74th Street, where Conservatory Water lies today, on its way to the East River.[4] To create the Lake the outlet was dammed with a broad, curving earth dam, which carries the East Carriage Drive past the Krebs Boathouse (1954), at the end of the Lake's eastern arm, so subtly that few visitors are aware of the landform's function. After six month's intensive effort, the Lake was ready in the winter of 1858 for its first season of ice-skating. Its center was seven feet deep, with terraced shorelines to lower levels for skaers' safety.[5] Originally, in other seasons a tour boat picked up and dropped visitors at five landings with rustic shelters: four have been rebuilt.
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[edit] Bird-watching
The Ramble is one of the major centers of bird-watching in Central Park: 230 species of birds have been spotted over the years, including more than twenty species of warblers that pass through during spring and fall migration in April and October.[6].
A misguided sense that the plantings of the Ramble were progressing in some way towards a "climax forest" and should be left alone, coupled with heavy urban use, has degraded the landscape, which has been partially renovated more than once. The current on-going renovation of The Ramble and the shorelines of the Lake began again in 2006. The present goal of the woodland restoration and management program is gradually to restore the undergrowth of a healthy forest floor and to control off-path trampling and bike-riding.
[edit] Notes
- ^ A census of The Rambles' trees, taken by Bruce Kelly, Philip Winslow and James Marston Fitch, 1979, found 6000 trees, including sixty specimen trees of landscape value. (Rogers 1987:119).
- ^ Quoted in Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992:132
- ^ Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992:134 photograph.
- ^ Egbert Viele's 1856 survey forms the "Pre_Park Site, 1857" map in Rogers1987:14-15.
- ^ Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992:164-65.
- ^ Central Park Conservancy: The Ramble
[edit] References
- Rogers, Elizabeth Barlow et al., 1987. Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan (MIT Press for the Central Park Conservancy).
- Rosenzweig, Roy and Elizabeth Blackmar, 1992. The Park and the People (Cornell University Press)
