Description
Bryant Park is the green rectangle behind the New York Public Library, between 40th and 42nd Streets in Midtown Manhattan: lawns, tall plane trees, café tables and, all around, skyscrapers. It is the favorite lunch break for thousands of office workers, and a good place to rest from the city's pace.
The park is made for sitting. Thousands of green movable chairs are scattered on the lawn and under the trees, and you can move one wherever you like. There are chess and backgammon tables, ping-pong tables, a petanque court, and free classes from yoga to juggling.
Look for the carousel, Le Carrousel Magique, in the southern part of the park: it was installed in 2002, plays French music and has 14 animals. The open-air Reading Room, a tradition revived in 2003, lends books and magazines on the terrace.
In winter the park becomes the Winter Village, with an ice rink and little shops among the trees. Under the lawn, out of sight, run the library's shelves.
Before Bryant Park was a park, the ground was a potter's field, a graveyard for the poor, until 1840. Then came the New York Crystal Palace, a great exhibition hall that burned down in 1858, Civil War drills and, in the 1970s, drug dealers who made it a place New Yorkers avoided.
Since 1884 it has carried the name of William Cullen Bryant, poet, newspaper editor and abolitionist.
The rescue came from a private nonprofit, the Bryant Park Corporation, with the advice of the sociologist William H. Whyte. The recipe was simple: bring the park down nearly to street level, open it to the street so people could see in, and put out 2,000 movable chairs.
It reopened in 1992, and it worked: the park is now cited as a model of public and private partnership.
The park is made for sitting. Thousands of green movable chairs are scattered on the lawn and under the trees, and you can move one wherever you like. There are chess and backgammon tables, ping-pong tables, a petanque court, and free classes from yoga to juggling.
Look for the carousel, Le Carrousel Magique, in the southern part of the park: it was installed in 2002, plays French music and has 14 animals. The open-air Reading Room, a tradition revived in 2003, lends books and magazines on the terrace.
In winter the park becomes the Winter Village, with an ice rink and little shops among the trees. Under the lawn, out of sight, run the library's shelves.
Before Bryant Park was a park, the ground was a potter's field, a graveyard for the poor, until 1840. Then came the New York Crystal Palace, a great exhibition hall that burned down in 1858, Civil War drills and, in the 1970s, drug dealers who made it a place New Yorkers avoided.
Since 1884 it has carried the name of William Cullen Bryant, poet, newspaper editor and abolitionist.
The rescue came from a private nonprofit, the Bryant Park Corporation, with the advice of the sociologist William H. Whyte. The recipe was simple: bring the park down nearly to street level, open it to the street so people could see in, and put out 2,000 movable chairs.
It reopened in 1992, and it worked: the park is now cited as a model of public and private partnership.