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Reservoir Square
In 1847, a former potter's field became a public park...
As far back as 1686, New York's colonial governor, Thomas Dongan, designed the land that is now Bryant Park as public property. At the start of the Revolutionary War in 1776, after being routed by the British in the Battle of Long Island, George Washington's troops raced across Manhattan, traversing the future site of the park.
The city established a potter's field on what is now Bryant Park, in 1823. Many small parks and squares in American cities once served the same function. As the city grew and surrounded the burial grounds, these open spaces were often converted into public parks. The potter's field was decommissioned in 1840 to enable construction of a new reservoir on adjacent land.
The Croton Distribution Reservoir was finished in 1841 and opened to the public a year later. An engineering marvel of its time, the reservoir was a man-made lake, four acres in area, surrounded by fifty-foot-high, twenty-five-foot-thick granite walls designed in the Egyptian Revival style. Along the tops of the walls were public promenades, offering breathtaking views. The facility was an integral part of the first supply of fresh water carried by aqueducts into the city from upstate New York. In 1846, the city designated the area to the west of the reservoir (formerly a potter's field) as a public park. Known as Reservoir Square, the land was left largely unattended until funding came through for a full-scale renovation in 1870. The lot was transformed into a Victorian greensward whose allure would grow as the site became increasingly more central to city life.
During the Civil War, the Union Army held military drills in Reservoir Square. Shortly after that, in the immediate vicinity of the park, the Civil War draft riots raged, and the "Croton Cottage," a nearby establishment offering billiards, entertainment, and refreshments to visitors of the reservoir promenades, was torched.
In 1884, Reservoir Square was renamed Bryant Park, to honor the recently deceased poet and editor, William Cullen Bryant. By the end of the nineteenth century the reservoir was obsolete and slated for demolition. The city selected the site for its new public library.
In one of the early proposals for a library on the site (1891), architect Ernest Flagg drew up plans for an enormous, fantastic structure that would have extended from Fifth to Sixth Avenues, with small amounts of parkland left open on the north and south sides. The park would not take on an individual identity until the turn of the century, and construction of the New York Public Library finished in 1911. |