Postcard Thursday: Central Park's Lost Spur Rock Arch

This lovely view of the Bridle Path in Central Park, mailed in 1908, shows one of the few bridges and arches in the park that has been demolished. Called the Spur Rock Arch, it stood where today's Hecksher Playground was later built.

When Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted were planning the park's roadways, they incorporated an innovative series of bridges and arches to separate traffic. As we write in Footprints in New York:

Vaux and Olmsted came up with three categories of roadway that they simply called the “Walk” (for pedestrians), the “Ride” (for horseback riding), and the “Drive” (for carriages). All together, there are today about seventy miles of Walk, Ride, and Drive wending through the park. In the master plan, none of these paths ever touched. If the Drive crossed the Walk, a bridge was constructed to pass pedestrian traffic below the carriages. Similarly, the Ride was kept separate from the other paths so that horseback riders would never have to rear up suddenly when confronted with an obstacle.... 

On its face, Vaux and Olmsted’s traffic plan seems eminently practical, but there was more than simple engineering afoot. Since only the wealthiest New Yorkers could afford a carriage or the luxury of horseback riding, the Drive and the Ride were de facto upper-class thoroughfares. In most places, they were kept at a safe remove from the working-class Walk, though some- times the Drive was paralleled by walking paths, presumably so that poorer New Yorkers could see what they were missing—and so that the rich could set a good example.

Alas, the handsome Spur Rock Arch is no more. According to the book Bridges of Central Park,

Spur Rock Arch, sometimes called Oval Arch, was located on the longitude of Seventh Avenue and the latitude of 61st Street.... It was 25 feet long and rose 12-and-a-half feet above the bridle path.... 

The distinctive oval outline of its archway and the S-curve sides were repeated later with different dimensions for Gothic Bridge. The ornament of the spandrels was altogether different although both designs stemmed from the Gothic, with Spur Rock's spandrels filled and braced by large wheels with interior cusping, not unlike some church windows. The supporting members were wrought iron; the more finely drawn decorative members were cast iron.

Spur Rock was demolished because it got in the way of the expansion of the Heckscher Playground. Instead of being incorporated into the playground, Spur Rock, probably looking old-fashioned, rundown and unimportant in 1934, was destroyed.

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Read more about NYC history in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Available from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or from independent bookstores across the country. 

New York City Houses, Year-by-Year

The good people over at Property Shark have put together a slide show of houses in New York City, with examples of domestic architecture from 1821 to the present. (Looking through it, only one year appears to be missing--1827. We'll see if we can find a home from that year and append it to this post.)

The slide show is a wonderful way to see how housing styles changed--and didn't change--throughout the 19th century. Many of the slides from the middle of that century are homes in Brooklyn Heights, which has the best preserved array of townhouses anywhere in the city. We focus on these houses in our walking tour of Brooklyn Heights.

One caveat: take the years attached to the slides with a grain of salt. For most of the 19th century, there was no Department of Buildings or permitting process, so construction dates are often an estimation. Also, the dates on some of these slides--especially in the 1970s--are just inexplicably wrong. Still, it's a great tour of New York property and includes recent sale prices for many properties.

The slideshow can be found at http://www.propertyshark.com/Real-Estate-Reports/2012/06/11/nyc-homes-two-centuries-of-architecture-2/

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For more on the architecture of New York from the Dutch Colonial era to the present,
pick up a copy of

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Walking Tour of Stanford White's New York

So often when we commemorate anniversaries, it is of something tragic or terrible – and this week is no exception. Tomorrow, June 25, marks the 103rd anniversary of the murder of architect Stanford White at the theater at Madison Square Garden. White was killed by his ex-girlfriend’s husband, Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw.

(If you read press coverage from 1906, it always refers to Thaw as being from Pittsburgh – as if that explained everything somehow.)

Instead of rehashing the murder itself (which you can read all about in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City), we thought this week we’d provide a walking tour of some of White’s significant New York buildings. He was one of the greatest Beaux Arts architects and his firm, McKim, Mead & White, is responsible for much of the Neoclassical look of late 19th- and early 20th-century New York.

The tour can be found at http://www.insidetheapple.net/whitewalkingtour.pdf (note: PDF file!)

You’ll notice that some stops refer to chapter numbers; these are chapters in Inside the Apple where we tell the story of a particular Stanford White building in greater depth.

So print out the tour, grab a copy of Inside the Apple, and go explore the Gilded Age!

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