Bethesda Terrace - New York, NY, USA
Posted by: 
bluesnote
N 40° 46.433 W 073° 58.260
18T E 586836 N 4514165
The Bethesda Terrace includes the area that surrounds the Bethesda Fountain.
Waymark Code: WMTVJ9
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 01/10/2017
Views: 12
The plaque says, "Designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wery Mould These stairways, terrace and fountain were focal features of the original plan for Central Park by Vaux and Fredrick Law Olmsted. The fountain sculpture by Emma Stebbins inspired by the biblical account of the miraculous pool of Bethesda was installed in 1873."
Taken from Wikipedia, "Bethesda Terrace became a site for an outdoor luncheon restaurant at the end of the 1960s, then became a congregating spot for the Hair generation before devolving into a drug-trafficking venue in the 1970s. The fountain, which had been dry for decades, was restored in its initial campaign, in 1980 and 1981, by the Central Park Conservancy as the centerpiece of its plan to renovate Central Park.[1] The Terrace, designed by Calvert Vaux with sculptural decoration by Jacob Wrey Mould, was restored in the following season, its stonework disassembled, cleaned, deteriorated surfaces removed, restored, patched, and reset.
Resodding, and 50 new trees, 3,500 shrubs and 3,000 ground cover plants specified by Philip Winslow followed in 1986, most of which, having matured into dense blocks, were removed in 2008, to make way for plants native to the United States. The Minton encaustic tiles of the ceiling of the arcade between the flanking stairs, designed by Mould, were removed in 1987, cleaned, restored, completed with additional new tiles, and reinstalled in 2007.
Following an illustration in an 1891 book by the Superintendent of Planting in Central Park, Vaux's assistant and partner, Samuel Parsons, the lower basin once again has water lilies, lotus, and papyrus, grown in removable pots."
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