Entertainment at Central Park, Lake and Bow Bridge

Leisure on the shore of the lake in Central Park, with the Bow Bridge in the background. Illustration published in the New York Illustrated, 1877 (?). D. Appleton & Co.

Construction of the Central Park began in 1857. Lakes replaced old swamps. The park's first areas opened to the public in late 1858.

Here some text the accompanies this illustration in the magazine (1877 edition): «If there be any point in New York to which more than another there can be attached an enduring memory, it is the attractive and picturesque locality known as Central Park. Less than twenty years ago it was a wild, uncouth domain, the salient objects of which were swamps, bowlders, and huge, knotty projections of rocks, forbidding in their aspect, and promising any thing but that wonderful development of beauty which has since become manifest under the skill of the engineer, architect, landscape-gardener, and sculptor. Travelers, who have visited probably every famous park in the world, pronounce eulogiums upon this pride of the American metropolis, which leave no room to doubt that, if it is not already, it will eventually become the most beautiful park on earth. Its trees do not possess the grandeur of age, but its shrubbery has attained a luxuriant beauty not often excelled. Central Park, in its large proportions — embracing as it does some eight hundred and forty-three acres, an area which extends from Fifty-ninth Street to One-hundred-and-tenth— in its exquisite lakes, where in summer one may sail in gondolas, and almost be lost among the shady nooks and dells where the swans glide peacefully ; in its cozy recesses found by devious paths, its artificial caves, its springs of water flowing from rocks that have been tapped by the rods of modern prophets, its suburban views and villas, its luxurious resting-places for the weary, its rural decorations, its grand lawns and extensive drives on roads that are the perfection of art, its various amusements offered to the public for a mere trifle of expenditure, its bridges, restaurants, towers, tunnels, and sculptured works, surely there can be no place in Christendom more calculated to appeal to that taste for and sympathy with Nature which exists in the hearts of us all.

Visit it at any hour of a pleasant day, and you will find thousands gathered to enjoy their walks or drives...»