Central Park (New York) and Mohawk Park Capstone Project

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Central Park (New York) and Mohawk Park (Tulsa, Oklahoma)

Municipal parks have a long history, and the importance of these invaluable green and open spaces to the people who live around them cannot be overstated. Perhaps the best-known pubic park in the United States is New York City's Central Park that provides the city's citizenry with an enormous green space in the middle of a concrete jungle. Although lesser known, Tulsa, Oklahoma's Mohawk Park is the third-largest municipal park in the country and provides a wide range of resources for the citizens of Tulsa and its surrounding communities. This paper provides a review of the relevant literature to identify the designs of these two municipal parks and their use of space for their patrons. A summary of the research and important findings concerning New York's Central Park and Tulsa's Mohawk Park are presented in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

New York's Central Park

The original specifications for New York's Central Park may appear fairly modest by modern standards, especially given the city's meteoric growth since the park was first envisioned more than a century and a half ago. In this regard, Carr reports that, "In the fall of 1857, the Central Park commissioners announced a design competition, and in the program statement they specified an array of outdoor spaces and facilities that indicated some of the activities foreseen for the park."

The activities foreseen by the Central Park commissioners included a parade ground, playgrounds, an exhibition hall, a flower garden, a large fountain, a prospect tower, and a skating pond.

The winning design for New York's 840-acre Central Park was submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) who, in collaboration with Calvert Vaux (1824-1895), crafted the designs for their famous Greensward plan for what would later become Central Park.

The Greensward plan was approved by New York City commissioners in April 1858 and Vaux and Olmsted were contracted to implement the plans.

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According to Kowsky, "Their association at Central Park formed the basis of a professional partnership and placed them at the vanguard of the nascent American park movement."

The designs by Olmstead and Vaux, though, were not the first for the Central Park area. A previous submission for the park design was dismissed by Vaux, however, because it "divided into six equal or nearly equal spaces and there is no central feature, each part is a good deal like each other."

In sharp contrast to this initial plan, the final design for Central Park was motivated by a desire to have discrete spaces that were not all visible simultaneously. For instance, Carr (1999) reports that, "Central Park created an important precedent because it assumed, through each visitor's experience, a picturesque mode of perception. The experience of scenery -- especially the cinemagraphic experience achieved on a winding park drive -- motivated the park's design."

In fact, the design submitted by Vaux and Olmstead was "outside the design box" and uniquely innovative because it deviated from the original specifications in significant ways. For example, Carr emphasizes that, "Many of the landscape gardeners and architects who submitted entries in the Central Park competition conceived their plans to some degree around the required program 'Greensward' seems to have differed from most of them in one essential aspect: the functional program elements were subordinated to an overall aesthetic conception of landscape art."

The design plans for Central Park that were submitted by Vaux and Olmstead made the optimal use of the available land by incorporating the stipulated design elements in innovative ways. For instance, Carr reports that, "The greenswards (or smooth, spacious meadows) of the plan, for example, doubled as the required playgrounds and parade ground. The park's serpentine lakes also served as the skating ponds."

In addition, the stipulated requirement for an exhibition hall was satisfied by placing it an arsenal building that….....

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