A 9.6-acre park, once a graveyard and a world's fair site
Bryant Park, a 9.6-acre public park in Midtown Manhattan, began as a potter's field where more than 100,000 skeletons were later uncovered. The ground went on to hold a reservoir, the first American world's fair, and the New York Public Library, before a 1930s rebuild and a 1980s–90s restoration gave it its present form.
A potter's field held the city's poor and unidentified dead
Bryant Park is now a 9.6-acre public park, a green rectangle framed by Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Before any of that, this ground was a potter's field, a burial place for the city's poor and unidentified dead. The burials began in 1823 and continued until 1840, when the bodies were moved to Wards Island. Construction on the site turned up more than 100,000 skeletons, many stacked on top of each other. Historians credit the deaths to epidemics that swept the city in those years.
A reservoir and a world's fair occupied Reservoir Square
The answer was water, not grass. Between 1839 and 1842, the city built the Croton Distributing Reservoir next to the burial ground, a four-acre basin ringed by granite walls fifty feet high. A public promenade ran along the top, and Edgar Allan Poe reportedly walked it. In 1847, the city laid out a park beside the reservoir and called it Reservoir Square.
Six years later, the square hosted the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, the first major world's fair held in the United States. President Franklin Pierce opened it on July 14, 1853. Thousands of exhibitors filled the New York Crystal Palace, a cast-iron and glass building modeled on London's. Beside it stood the Latting Observatory, a 315-foot wooden tower built the same year, tall enough to see Staten Island and New Jersey. Both buildings burned within a few years of each other. The square kept functioning afterward, serving as a Union Army encampment during the Civil War, and as a flashpoint in 1863, when draft riots tore through the city and a nearby orphanage for Black children burned to the ground.
The square was renamed for an abolitionist editor
In 1884, the city renamed the square for William Cullen Bryant, who had died six years earlier. Bryant had edited the New York Evening Post for decades and campaigned for abolition and civic reform. The new name stuck, though the reservoir still loomed over the eastern edge. By the late 1890s the Croton Distributing Reservoir had outlived its purpose. The city tore it down in 1900, clearing the way for something new on the same ground.
The public library rose where the reservoir once stood
Construction began that year on the New York Public Library's main branch, designed by John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings. The Beaux-Arts building opened in 1911, connected to the park by a raised terrace. A bronze statue of Bryant, by sculptor Herbert Adams, went up the same year under a domed arch facing the library. Subway construction interrupted the park itself in the 1920s, when workers digging the IRT tunnel beneath Sixth Avenue closed the northern half for five years and used the space to store equipment. In 1932, for George Washington's bicentennial, a temporary replica of Federal Hall rose at the park's east end, beside the library.
A department store site became a corporate tower's lot
The ground on the park's western edge, mapped by the city as 1060 Avenue of the Americas, holds a different kind of record. The building there went up in 1920, on a lot that now runs to more than four and a half acres. For decades the block to the immediate west held Stern's department store, which had relocated there in 1913. Stern's stayed until 1970, when the site was cleared for the W. R. Grace Building, the slab-sided tower that now looks down on the park's carousel and lawn. The lot's own history runs separately from the park's: a department store's home, then a corporate tower's, standing just outside the gates Robert Moses rebuilt.
Robert Moses rebuilt the park on New Deal funding
Parks Commissioner Robert Moses rebuilt the park from the ground up, using New Deal labor and funding. The new design, drawn up by landscape architect Lusby Simpson, borrowed its formal lawns and gravel paths from the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. That layout gave the park the shape it still has today, even after later changes.
Drug dealers turned the park into Needle Park
By the 1970s, the park's hedges and sunken lawn had made it easy to hide in, and Bryant Park earned the nickname Needle Park. Drug dealers worked openly among the benches, and much of the city avoided the place after dark. The Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, a private nonprofit, took over management in 1980 and spent the next decade rebuilding it again, raising the lawn, cutting sightlines, and adding movable chairs. The park reopened in 1992, and the turnaround became a model cited by park planners elsewhere in the country. A redesign completed in 1995, funded by grants, bond money, and private capital, finished the job.
A winter village now rises where the Crystal Palace burned
Bryant Park is now run year-round by its restoration corporation, drawing an estimated 12 million visitors annually. It became one of the city's first wireless parks in 2002, with free Wi-Fi across the lawn. Each winter the western half turns into a Winter Village, with an ice rink and market stalls standing where the Crystal Palace once burned. The Bryant Park Hotel, in the old American Radiator Building designed by Raymond Hood, rises at the park's southwest corner, a few hundred feet from the library steps.
The lawn where fairgoers once walked through a glass palace is now a patch of grass locals use for lunch, framed by a library that replaced a reservoir and a tower that replaced a department store.
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