Sep 30, 2010 - Sale 2223

Sale 2223 - Lot 155

Price Realized: $ 15,600
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
AN ORIGINAL PROPOSAL FOR CENTRAL PARK, WITH OBSERVATORY AND WATERFALL (NEW YORK CITY.) [Graham, Charles K.; John A. Bagley; and Robert Leigh.] Designs for Improving the Central Park. 6 ink and wash sketches plus final blank. Oblong portfolio, 15 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches, original 1/2 calf and printed cover label, worn; some edge wear, foxing, and soiling, 2 leaves detached from stubs, 3 leaves apparently lacking. [New York?, 1858]
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From its inception, Central Park has been perhaps the defining feature of New York City. Its original transformation from a rocky pasture to a landscaped urban park was driven by an 1858 design competition won by Olmstead and Vaux. The rejected submissions have an appeal of their own, depicting an alternate city that never was. As documented in Morris Heckscher's 2008 exhibit catalogue Creating Central Park, only 4 of these alternate plans are known to survive. This portfolio represents a fifth.
Designs include 2 of the entrance gates, side and front elevations of the concert hall, the observatories, and a suspension bridge over a waterfall. The concert hall and observatories were mandated in the competition requirements, although the suspension bridge seems to be an original idea. Although several early leaves appear to have been removed from the portfolio, the drawings are numbered 1 through 5 and 7.
None of these six designs are signed, but they can be identified by the New York Public Library copy of the pamphlet "Catalogue of Plans for the Improvement of the Central Park," which describes all of the submissions in great detail and is annotated with identifications of most entries. From this source, we know the original submission also included a master design, a plan of roads, and a design for a fountain, all now lost. The annotation attributes the plan to "Graham & Bagley, formerly of the C.P." Charles Kinnaird Graham (1824-1889) and John A. Bagley (1833-1896) had served as the surveyors of the unimproved Central Park land in 1856 and 1857. Graham was then appointed as constructing engineer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a patronage appointment he secured through his friendship with U.S. Congressman Daniel Sickles, and he continued his private work with Bagley on the side. He was apparently not a skilled draftsman himself, and so hired one named Robert Leigh using Navy money, and ordered him to draft the Central Park plans on company time. As part of an 1859 investigation of corruption at the Navy Yard, a colleague testified about Graham's extra-curriculars: "There was a sort of sketch made of Central Park—copies of plans; and about a year since there was an exhibition plan made and colored by his draughtsman, which I saw in his office" (Naval Contracts and Expenditures, 1859, pages 184-7). Five years after creating this design, Graham would be wounded as a general at Gettysburg, a position he also received with Sickles's patronage.
See also Brandt, The Congressman Who Got Away with Murder, 33, 54, 203; Rosenzweig & Blackmar, The Park and the People, 111-2, 553-4; Stokes V:1875-6 and plate facing V:1791.