The Great Lawn

The Great Lawn

An expansive honeycomb of ballfields and open lawn, the Great Lawn occupies much of the northern stretches of Central Park, though it was not originally even meant to be. Among the central and sustaining mythologies of the city, the auteuristic brilliance and foresight of designers Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux takes, perhaps, pride of place--two progressive civic masterminds who, unlike their ambiguous twentieth-century-counterpart Robert Moses, made choices and decisions that were only vindicated by history. But, though they deserve immense credit for the conception, planning, and landscaping of America's most bounteous artificial pastoralia, much of the park as we knew it today was remade by future generations. (Olmstead and Vaux detested baseball, for instance, so all diamonds -- and indeed all basketball and tennis courts as well -- were imposed on the park later on). What is now the Great Lawn was once the city's central reservoir, a 33-acre aquatic entrepot that held up to 180 million gallons of water, piped in from Croton, New York, awaiting distribution in the city. A new water tunnel designed in 1917 made this reservoir obsolete, and the city began filling in the pool (using, in part, rocks and stone discarded during the construction of Rockefeller Center, in west midtown). The ballfields were added in the 1950s. Today, the Great Lawn is perhaps best known as the biggest "event" concert space in the city, the site not of the everyday Summerstage events, but such record-breaking performances as the Paul Simon and Simon and Garfunkel concerts, which each drew crowds approaching 100,000, a large, outdoor preview of Pocahontas, and indeed a mass delivered by Pope John Paul II in his final visit to the city.