Riverside Park

Riverside Park, one of only eight officially designated scenic landmarks in the City of New York, occupies a landscape of rugged bluffs and rocky outcroppings formed by prehistoric glacial deposits that once descended directly to the Hudson River shore. The area remained densely wooded until 1846, when the Hudson River Railroad cut through the forested hillside. In 1865, as the city expanded northward, Central Park Commissioner William R. Martin proposed a scenic drive and park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and over the next two years the City bought the land between the heights and the railroad. Frederick Law Olmsted, renowned co-designer of Central and Prospect Parks, was commissioned in 1873 and submitted a plan two years later that combined park and parkway into a synthesized landscape following the general topographical contours of hill and dale. During the next twenty-five years, designs were developed under a succession of landscape architects, including Samuel Parsons and Olmsted’s partner Calvert Vaux, creating a park stretching from West 72nd to 125th Streets with grand, tree-lined boulevards and an English-style rustic landscape of informally arranged trees and shrubs, contrasting natural enclosures, and open vistas. The park’s development encouraged the construction of mansions along the drive. At the turn of the century, the City Beautiful movement shaped the formal neo-classical detailing of the park’s extension from the 125th Street viaduct to 155th Street, and monuments placed along the drive during this era included Grant’s Tomb, the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, the Firemen’s Memorial, and Joan of Arc. Increased rail traffic and waterfront industries founded on shoreline landfill adjacent to the park later prompted wealthy residents to demand action against those uses. After decades of discussion, a major expansion plan by architect Clinton Lloyd and landscape architect Gilmore Clarke was carried out between 1934 and 1937 under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, widening the park westward by 148 acres and adding the Henry Hudson Parkway, ball fields, esplanade, 79th Street Marina, and Rotunda. At 72nd Street, a monument honoring humanitarian and First Lady Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was dedicated on October 5, 1996, in the presence of Hillary Rodham Clinton, with sculpture by Penelope Jencks and a new landscape by Bruce Kelly/David Varnell Landscape Architects on the site of a former West Side Highway access ramp.

New York, New York · United States