BGuthrie Photos: NY -- NYC -- Central Park -- The Mall and Literary Walk (Halleck, Burns, Scott, Shakespeare, and Columbus statues)

NY -- NYC -- Central Park -- The Mall and Literary Walk (Halleck, Burns, Scott, Shakespeare, and Columbus statues):

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Description of Subject Matter: The Mall and Literary Walk
The Mall, a quadruple row of American elms, is Central Park's most important horticultural feature, and one of the largest and last remaining stands of American Elm trees in North America.
The elms form a cathedral-like canopy above the Park's widest pedestrian pathway. and are one of the Parks most photographed features. The quarter-mile pedestrian path is the only intentional straight line inside the Park's walls.
Taking care of these trees is a full-time job for the Central Park Conservancy's tree crew. Each of the Park's thousands of trees are entered into a database, so they can be monitored by the Conservancy. The trees of Central Park have an important impact on the urban environment. They improve the quality of our air and water; reduce storm water runoff, flooding and erosion; and lower the air temperature in the summer. This is why Central Park is called the lungs of New York City.
The southern end of the Mall is known as Literary Walk. The statue of Christopher Columbus is the odd man out, since 4 of the 5 tributes here depict prominent writers. Nearby are Scottish poet Robert Burns and his compatriot, Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott. A little farther north is Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first statue of an American to be placed in the Park. Ten years after his death, he was still so beloved that over 30,000 adoring fans came to the unveiling of his statue by President Rutherford B. Hayes and his entire cabinet. Today hardly anyone knows his poetry or his name, but everyone remembers their visit to the Mall.
If you look down, you'll see engraved granite paving stones lining the southern end of Literary Walk in order to commemorate each endowed tree in the Park. To support Central Park Conservancy's efforts to care for the Park's trees, donate to the Tree Trust to endow the care of an existing tree or to fund the planting of a new tree.
The above was from http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and-do/attractions/mall-li ...More...
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. CPMALL_180824_001.JPG: Literary Walk, this historic mall, with its double rows of American elms, has been restored by Miriam & Ira D. Wallach 2006
2. CPMALL_180824_007.JPG: Fitz Greene Halleck
3. CPMALL_180824_018.JPG: Walter Scott
4. CPMALL_180824_032.JPG: Sir Walter Scott Central Park This larger-than-life-sized bronze portrait of Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was dedicated on the “Literary Walk” in Central Park in 1872. Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and had an early career in the legal profession. His literary endeavors were launched when he anonymously published translations of Burger’s Lenore and Der Wilde Jager, and Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichgen (1799). In 1802, Scott issued the first two volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of old ballads, which reflected his interest in the native language and traditions of his country. His first significant original work was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a narrative poem published in 1805. Over the next quarter-century, Scott established himself as the pre-eminent Scottish author, and helped transform contemporary literature. He is credited with inventing the historical novel, and was a prolific practitioner of this genre. Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1819) are some of the most famous examples of Scott’s romantic classics. Other well-known works include Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). In addition to his novels, he published a narrative poem, Lady of the Lake (1810), edited the author John Dryden’s (1631-1700) works (1808), published several plays, the nineteen-volume set of The Life and Works of Swift (1814), the nine-volume Life of Napoleon (1827), and a History of Scotland (1830). Yet at the height of his fame as a man of letters, Scott suffered enormous financial setbacks and declared bankruptcy. He suffered two strokes in 1830, and died as a result two years later. It was only after his death that his debts were paid through the proceeds received from his numerous publications. Throughout his career Scott’s work was marked with nostalgia and pride in Scotland’s past married with an acute awareness of its place in the modern world. It was Scott who rediscovered the country’s crown jewels, the Honours of Scotland, unearthing them from bricked-up chamber in Edinburgh Castle in 1818 after they had been lost for over 100 years. His novels based on Scotland’s history made the country a tourist destination, and some credit him with popularizing the romantic view of the country’s geography and culture that endures today. In celebration of the centennial of Sir Walter Scott’s birth, a group of prominent Scottish citizens arranged for the placement of this sculpture in Central Park. They selected John Steell (1804-1891), a renowned sculptor from Edinburgh, to create a bronze replica of his marble of Scott (1845), the first such monument to a Scot to be created by a native artist. Steell was born in Aberdeen, and was the son of a wood carver. After studying at the Trustees Academy and also in Rome, he became a member of The Royal Scottish Academy, and was appointed in 1838 Sculptor of the Queen of Scotland. He produced numerous public and private art commissions, and managed a foundry, which introduced the art of bronze casting to Scotland. Steell’s effigy of Scott in Central Park eliminates the Gothic stone canopy - which critics have likened to “a spire without a cathedral” - of the original on Princes Street in Edinburgh. Scott is depicted seated on a rock, in a flowing cloak with workingman’s shoes, with book and pen in hand. Beside him sits his faithful hound. The completed statue was formally unveiled here on November 2, 1872, where it joined the sculpture of William Shakespeare, installed earlier that year. A legion of Highlanders from the 79th Regiment, the National Guard and the Caledonian Club were part of the festivities. Among the speakers was poet, editor, and civic leader William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), who commented, “and now as the statue of Scott is set up in this beautiful park, which a few years since, possessed no human associations, historical or poetic, connected with its shades, its lawns, its rocks and waters, these grounds become peopled with new memories.” In 1936 NYC Parks’ monuments crew repaired the base and repatinated the bronze. In 1993, both the pedestal and sculpture were again conserved through the Adopt-A-Monument Program, a joint venture of the Municipal Art Society, NYC Parks, and the New York City Art Commission (now the Public Design Commission). The restoration was funded by the Saint Andrew’s Society, which has also established a fund for ongoing care.
5. CPMALL_180824_039.JPG: Robert Burns
6. CPMALL_180824_048.JPG: Robert Burns Central Park This statue of Scottish national poet Robert Burns (1759–1796), companion to the 1872 Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) sculpture across Literary Walk, is by Sir John Steell (1804–1891), and was dedicated in 1880. Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, the son of a tenant farmer. His father died in 1784, and Burns became head of the household, but he had already started writing poetry. On July 3, 1786, he published his Poems, Chiefly in a Scottish Dialect, in nearby Kilmarnock, to enormous success in both countryside and city. Burns left his farm for Edinburgh on November 27, 1786, but the fame and attention he received there put him ill at ease; he never found a comfortable place in contemporary society’s class distinctions. Poems earned Burns fame in his lifetime, but little money. He published a second, enlarged, edition in Edinburgh in 1787, but by the summer of 1788 had taken up tenant farming again, in Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, where he struggled. He kept up an active literary and intellectual life, and obtained a post in the excise service in 1789. He moved to Dumfries in 1791, and lived there until his death on July 21, 1796, of chronic rheumatic heart disease. Burns is a national hero. Known affectionately as “Rabbie,” his works are unmatched by any other Scottish artist as a source of national pride. His birthday, January 25 (“Burns Night”), is celebrated throughout the country and by Scots and admirers around the world with a banquet - a haggis (a Scottish delicacy made from calf or sheep organ meat boiled in the stomach of the animal) as the centerpiece, ceremoniously addressed with Burns’s odes to haggis and whisky before being served. Burns’ genius was his poetic use of the rhythms and dialects of everyday speech, and it was his personal mission to revive traditional Scottish song. He traveled the country, collecting tunes, airs, fragments of expressions and songs, and created songs whole, even writing words to folk tunes which had never had lyrics. He captured something of the Scottish spirit which has endured, and each generation has claimed him again as its own, even as Scotland has struggled in a search for identity. He is credited with “Auld Lang Syne”, and his best-known poems include “Scots, Wha Hae,” “Tam O’Shanter,” and “To a Mouse.” Not long after the unveiling of Sir Walter Scott in 1872, a committee formed to erect a monument to Burns. A year later, specifying only the material and colossal size, it selected the same sculptor, John Steell, to create Scott’s bronze counterpart. Steell was born in Aberdeen, the son of a wood carver, and studied at the Trustees Academy, and in Rome. He became a member of The Royal Scottish Academy, and in 1838 was appointed Sculptor of the Queen of Scotland, producing numerous public and private art commissions, and managing a foundry, which introduced the art of bronze casting to Scotland. Steell’s melodramatic conception depicts Burns seated on a tree stump, quill pen in hand, eyes turned heavenward in a pose of inspiration. At his feet is a poem dedicated to his lost love, Mary Campbell, and a plough alluding to his agrarian origins. The sculpture was unveiled on October 3, 1880, and the ceremony was attended by 5,000 people, area Caledonian clubs in full Highland dress, and 100 distinguished guests, with music by Grafulla’s Band. Wallace Bruce wrote “Walter Scott’s Greeting to Robert Burns,” whose first lines read: “We greet you Rabbie here tonight; Beneath these stars so pure and bright; we greet you, Poet, come at last; With Will [Shakespeare] and me your lot to cast.” Robert Burns also joined the 1876 statue of American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), whose 1822 poem “Burns” read in part, “But what to them the sculptor’s art; His funeral columns, wreaths and urns? Wear they not graven on the heart, the name of Robert Burns.” In 1940, NYC Parks’ monuments crew reconstructed the statue’s unstable pedestal. It was rebuilt again in 1993; the quill, missing, was replicated; and the sculpture conserved through the Adopt-A-Monument Program, a joint venture of the Municipal Art Society, NYC Parks and the New York City Art Commission (now the Public Design Commission). The restoration was funded by the Saint Andrew’s Society, which established a fund for ongoing care. On October 26, 1996, hundreds gathered here for the bicentennial of Burns’ death; world-renowned folk singer Jean Redpath performed, and the event was supported by the Burns Society of the City of New York, the American-Scottish Foundation, the St. Andrew’s Society of the State of New York, the New Caledonian Club, and Scottish Heritage USA.
7. CPMALL_180824_058.JPG: The Mall Literary Walk The restoration of this landscape was made possible through the generosity of the Anne Burnett and Charles Tandy Foundation 1990
8. CPMALL_180824_063.JPG: William Shakespeare
9. CPMALL_180824_073.JPG: R. Wood & Co. Bronze Founders Phila
10. CPMALL_180824_076.JPG: William Shakespeare Central Park This full-standing portrait of celebrated playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was made by John Quincy Adams Ward (1830–1910) and unveiled here at the southern end of the Mall on May 23, 1872. William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April of 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glove-maker and commodities trader who rose to become a prominent local alderman and bailiff before suffering declining fortunes. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a prosperous landowner. Little is known of Shakespeare’s upbringing; he was locally schooled, likely at the King Edward VI School in Stratford, acquired a reasonable knowledge of Latin and Greek, and read the Roman dramatists. In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, and they had a daughter, Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet died in boyhood. The first account of Shakespeare’s professional accomplishments appears in 1592, when rival playwright Robert Greene, in his book A Groats-Worth of Witte, referred to the rising actor and dramatist as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers…” In 1594, Shakespeare was a charter member of a theatre company known as the Chamberlain’s Men (as of 1603, the King’s Men) who performed mainly at the Globe Theater in London. He held a one-tenth interest in the Globe, and it was there that many of his plays were performed before the theater burned in 1613 during a production of his Henry VIII; Shakespeare retired to Stratford around this time. Shakespeare was enormously prolific. In his relatively short career he authored 13 comedies, 13 historical dramas, 6 tragedies, 4 tragic comedies and 154 sonnets. Many of his plays have become classics of the stage, and his poems are revered for their mastery of language and verse. Thus this modestly educated man of the Elizabethan age left an indelible mark on the English language and Western culture. In 1864, coinciding with the tri-centennial of Shakespeare’s birth, a group of actors and theatre managers, among them noted Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth (1833–1893), received permission from Central Park’s Board of Commissioners to lay the cornerstone for a statue at the south end of the Mall between two elms. Nothing further was done until the end of the Civil War. In 1866, a competition was held and Ward was selected as the sculptor. Later referred to as the “Dean of American Sculptors,” he contributed nine sculptures to the parks of New York – among them Roscoe Conkling (1893), Alexander Holley (1888), William Earl Dodge (1885), Horace Greeley (1890), Henry Ward Beecher (1891), The Indian Hunter (1869), The Pilgrim (1885), and the Seventh Regiment Memorial (1874). The last three can be found in Central Park. The committee raised funds through several benefits, including a performance of Julius Caesar. Jacob Wrey Mould (1825–1886), a principal designer of the structures and ornament within Central Park, designed the elaborate pedestal for this statue. Ward combined a classical pose with many details of Elizabethan dress, and he relied on numerous images of Shakespeare, especially a bust in Stratford. The sculpture was cast in Philadelphia in 1870 at the Robert Wood & Co. foundry. Due to delays in procuring and cutting the granite pedestal in Scotland, it was unveiled on a temporary base in 1872. Some commentators found the work a noble effigy, and others derided it as a costume piece. In 1986 a replica was cast by Tallix Fine Art Foundry for the Carolyn Blount Theater in Montgomery, Alabama, home to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. In exchange, Montgomery benefactor Winton M. Blount established a maintenance endowment for the original here in Central Park. Using funds generated by this endowment the Central Park Conservancy restored the sculpture in 1995. Central Park has other Shakespearean associations as well. In 1890, Eugene Schieffelin released 80 starlings into the park, because they were mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays (there are now over 200 million of them in America). In 1915, the Shakespeare Society assumed maintenance of a rock garden, built in 1912, in the park near West 79th Street. In 1934, the Shakespeare Garden, which features particular plants named in his writings, was relocated to the hillside between Belvedere Castle and the Swedish Cottage, and in 1989, a new landscape design by Bruce Kelly and David Varnell was implemented. In 1958, after two seasons at the East River Amphitheater, Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival moved to Central Park. The Delacorte Theater became its permanent home, opening in 1962.
11. CPMALL_180824_078.JPG: Erected by the Citizens of New York April 23, 1864 The three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare
12. CPMALL_180824_085.JPG: JQA Ward 1870 John Quincy Adams Ward From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia John Quincy Adams Ward (June 29, 1830 – May 1, 1910) was an American sculptor, who may be most familiar for his larger than lifesize standing statue of George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial in New York City.
13. CPMALL_180824_095.JPG: Christopher Columbus
14. CPMALL_180824_106.JPG: J. Sunol Jeronimo Su�ol From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jeronimo Su�ol y Pujol (13 December 1839–16 October 1902) was a Spanish sculptor born in Barcelona. His early training was in the atelier of Agapit and Venanci Vallmitjana, perfecting his art at Rome where he maintained a studio for many years. Never prolific, he was among the front rank of Spanish sculptors of his generation, moving sculpture by his example away from neoclassical abstractions towards realistic depictions. He died in Madrid.
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Directly Related Pages: Other pages here that have content directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]
- 2017_NY_CP_Mall: NY -- NYC -- Central Park -- The Mall and Literary Walk (Halleck, Burns, Scott, Shakespeare, and Columbus statues) (11 photos from 2017)
- 2011_NY_CP_Mall: NY -- NYC -- Central Park -- The Mall and Literary Walk (Halleck, Burns, Scott, Shakespeare, and Columbus statues) (5 photos from 2011)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [(NYC) Central Park] [Display ALL (NYC) Central Park photos] [Natural Beauty] [Park (Local)]
2018 photos: Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Trips this year: (February) a Civil War Trust conference in Greenville, NC, (May/June) anual American Battlefield Trust conference in Newport News, VA, (July) my 13th consecutive trip to San Diego Comic-Con via Reno, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, (August) 2 two-day trips to New York City, (September) an American Battlefield Trust dinner in Chicago, IL with on-route visits to Charleston, WV, Louisville, KY, Saint Louis, MO, and Toledo, OH, (October) another two-day trip to New York City for the New York Comic Con. Number of photos taken this year: about 535,000.
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].