Everything about The Ramble And Lake Central Park totally explained
The Ramble and Lake in Central Park together form an inseparable central feature of
Frederick Law Olmsted and
Calvert Vaux's "Greensward" plan (1857) to provide a
Central Park for
New York City. The Ramble was intended as a woodland walk through highly varied topography, a "wild garden" away from carriage drives and bridle paths, to be wandered in, or to be viewed as a "natural" landscape from the formal lakefront setting of
Bethesda Terrace (
illustration below) or from rented rowboats on the Lake. The 38 acre Ramble embraces the deep coves of the north shore of the Lake, excavated between bands of bedrock; it offers dense naturalistic planting, rocky outcrops of glacially-scarred Manhattan bedrock, small open glades and an artificial stream, The Gill, that empties through the Azalea Pond, then down a cascade into the Lake. Its ground rises northwards towards Vista Rock, crowned by
Belvedere Castle, a lookout and eye-catching
folly.
The formed landscape
The Park's most varied and intricately-planted landscape was planted with native trees—
tupelo (
Nyssa sylvatica),
American sycamore, white, red, black, scarlet and willow
oaks,
Hackberry and
Liriodendron, — together with some American trees never native to the area, such as
Kentucky coffee tree,
Yellowwood and
Cucumber magnolia, and a few exotics, such as
Phellodendron and
Sophora. Smaller natives include
Sassafras. Aggressively self-seeding
Black cherry and
Black locust have come to dominate the Rample.
The twenty-acre Lake unified what Calvert Vaux called the "irregular disconnected featureless conglomeration of ground". It was excavated, entirely by hand, from unprepossessing swampy ground transected by drainage ditches and ramshackle stone walls. Through the low-lying site the Sawkill flowed sluggishly from sources under the present
American Museum of Natural History and in the prospective park south of
Seneca Village, originally exiting the park under
Fifth Avenue about 74th Street, where
Conservatory Water lies today, on its way to the
East River. To create the Lake the outlet was dammed with a broad, curving earth dam, which carries the East Carriage Drive past the Krebs Boathouse (1954), at the end of the Lake's eastern arm, so subtly that few visitors are aware of the landform's function. After six month's intensive effort, the Lake was ready in the winter of 1858 for its first season of ice-skating. Its center was seven feet deep, with terraced shorelines to lower levels for skaters' safety. Originally, in other seasons a tour boat picked up and dropped visitors at five landings with rustic shelters: four have been rebuilt and rowboats are rented at the boathouse.
The Hernshead
Overlooking the Lake at the rocky promontory that Olmsted called The Hernshead stands the
Ladies' Pavilion, a wrought iron shelter in a playful gothic style. It provides a classic atmospheric view, changing with light and weather, of Midtown skyscrapers rising from a belt of trees, with the Lake as foreground. The Ladies' Pavilion was built, probably to designs of
Calvert Vaux, to shelter ladies waiting to change streetcars at the
Columbus Circle corner of the park. When the
Maine Monument was installed on its site, the cast-iron elements were disassembled and stored, to be re-erected on the Hernshead in the 1950s. The Ladies' Pavilion was almost lost to rust and vandalism when it was restored in 1979 as a project funded by Arthur Ross, one of the first projects in the restoration of Central Park.
Bird-watching
The Ramble is one of the major centers of bird-watching in Central Park: 230 species of birds have been spotted over the years, including more than twenty species of warblers that pass through during spring and fall migration in April and October..
A misguided sense that the plantings of the Ramble were progressing in some way towards a "
climax forest" and should be left alone, coupled with heavy urban use, has degraded the landscape, which has been partially renovated more than once. The current on-going renovation of The Ramble and the shorelines of the Lake began again in 2006. The present goal of the woodland restoration and management program is gradually to restore the undergrowth of a healthy forest floor and to control off-path trampling and bike-riding.
The Ramble as a gay icon
Since at least the early 20th century, the seclusion of the Ramble has been used for private
homosexual encounters. In the 1920s, the lawn at the north end was referred to as the "fruited plain" and in the 1950s and 1960s the Ramble was feared by many as a haven for "anti-social persons". In the early 1960s, under Mayor
Robert F. Wagner, Jr., the parks department proposed building a senior center in the ramble with the hope of curbing gay encounters and anti-gay assaults. Today, the Ramble's strong reputation for
cruising for sex has given way somewhat to nature walks and environmentalism. However, some in the gay community still consider the Ramble to be "ground zero for outdoor gay sex", enjoying the "retro feel" of sneaking off into the woods. A tradition much older than
Christopher Street and
Fire Island, the Ramble continues to be a gay icon even in the more open environment of modern New York.
Restoration project, 2007-09
The Lake was the last of Central Park's bodies of water to be renovated by the Central Park Conservancy, in a project to enhance both its ecological and scenic aspects. In the summer of 2007 the first phase of a restoration of the Lake and its shoreline plantings commenced, with replanting using native shrubs and understory trees around the northern end of the Lake, from Bank Rock Bay— a narrow cove in the northwest corner that had become a silted-up algae-covered stand of aggressively invasive
Phragmites reeds— to Bow Bridge, which will receive replicas of its four original cast-iron vases towards the end of the project. In the earliest stages, invasive non-native plants like
Japanese knotweed were eradicated, the slopes were regraded with added humus and protected with landscaping burlap to stabilize the slopes while root systems become established and leaf litter develops.
Bank Rock Bridge across the mouth of the cove will be recreated in its original materials— carved oak with cast-iron panels and pine decking— following
Calvert Vaux's original design of 1859-60. The cascade, where the Gill empties into the lake, will be reconstructed to approximate its dramatic original form, inspired by paintings of
Asher B. Durand. Sections of the Lake will be dredged of accumulated silt— topsoil that has washed off the surrounding slopes— and the island formerly in the lake, which gradually eroded below water level, was reconstructed in the summer of 2007 with rugged boulders along its shoreline, graded wetland areas and submerged planting shelves for water-loving native plants, like
Pickerel weed.
Restoration of further sections of the Lake's shoreline landscapes will be undertaken once this first segment is complete.
The first renovated sections were opened to visitors in April 2008.
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