When I was about 12 years old in 1966, I used to go by myself to spend time near what became known as "the Fountain" in Central Park. It's located right in the middle of the park at 72nd Street. There is a large bronze statue of an angel standing on the top of a round fountain. Around the fountain are red bricks laid out in a terrace.
There are two grand stone stairways leading down onto the terrace and a colonnaded tunnel with arches between the stairways.
It's an elegant and captivating looking place. Thousands of photo shoots for weddings, tv and films have taken place there.
Beyond the terrace is the boat pond, where people can rent dinghies and row around. Nearby to the west is John Lennon's Imagine mosaic. Nearby to the east is the boat house restaurant and where one can rent dinghies. A little further east is the sailboat pond where people who have sailboat toys can sail them and the amazing, large Alice In Wonderland bronze statue looking on.
To the south is the Naumburg Bandshell where many concerts of all kinds have played and still play. Just beyond that is The Mall and Literary Walk, a walkway between tall elm trees. And near The Mall is the huge open lawn, known as Sheep Meadow, where there have been all kinds of gatherings, up to 100,000 people.
Scattered around the Fountain are many different stretches of lawn, often on gentle hillsides, perfect for lolling, people watching but also great for frisbee and touch football.
It's a great part of Central Park. It became in the 1960s where all kinds of people gathered to hang out together. A place of friendship, community, belonging, fun, dance, music, playing frisbee, skateboarding, touch football. It was where people smoked pot, took their LSD trips, shared info about political rallies, learned about where concerts were happening, found girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, had conversations of all kinds.
This post is focused on the designer, Jacob Wrey Mould, who came up with the decorative details that embellished the stone work that framed the Fountain.
Walking around the Fountain, the grand stairways, the colonnaded tunnel, the balcony that overlooks the Fountain, there are these charming and beautiful works of art in stone created by Jacob Wrey Mould, embedded in the columns and walls.
This is a bird's eye view of the Fountain. The rowboat pond at the bottom and the skyline of Central Park South above.
For many young kids who were runaways, like I was, the area around the Fountain was a refuge, a place where for those who came regularly it felt like a found family. Many, many of the kids who gathered there came from seriously dysfunctional families. Those dysfunctional families could be fabulously rich, famous, powerful but also corrupted by alcoholism, drug and sex addiction. The dysfunctional families could be middle class or poor.
Lots of kids came to hang out near the Fountain from the various schools in the city. Private schools with only boys or only girls, public schools, alternative schools, like Quintano's or Performing Arts. Fashion designers came, lots and lots of photographers came, filmmakers came, political activists came, actors and actresses came, roving minstrels came, mimes, people with bongos, with guitars. People who would never have met otherwise because they lived in what became known as Soho, the Village, Harlem, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Stuyvesant Town. All came together at the Fountain and the areas around the Fountain.
These are some of the kids I met and hung around with then. Photo credit: Peter Niede, a photographer who also hung around there:
All of the people in this photograph are no longer living, except possibly Ralph.
I spent 4 years of my life, from early 1966 to the end of 1970 going to the Fountain almost every day. It was my refuge from a severely dysfunctional 'home'.
Initially pot was mostly the only recreational drug used by most of the kids there. Maybe Dexedrine (prescription speed) as many of the mothers in dysfunctional families were prescribed Dexedrine to eat less, be thinner. Then came various types of LSD, Orange Sunshine Owsley, Blue Cheer sold in increments of 500 "mics"(micrograms). Then, in 1969 heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, DMT and various prescription medications, barbituates, Quaalude etc flooded NYC. Many, many young kids became addicted. One could see right away that kids who were playing touch football or frisbee just a few months ago had lost several teeth, looked haggard or obviously like junkies. It was heartbreaking.
It was then I decided to leave NYC and went on my own as a runaway to live in England.
But before I left, I came to know that part of Central Park intimately. What I did not know until decades later was about the architects and designers of the area around the Fountain.
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| The lovely flower pots on the balcony overlooking the Bethesda Fountain |
While Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted are recognized as the masterminds behind Central Park, one figure is often overlooked: Jacob Wrey Mould. Architect and Green-Wood permanent resident, Mould played a pivotal role in introducing High Victorian Gothic architecture to New York City, notably seen in the design of the Central Park’s Belvedere Castle and the intricately carved decorations and mosaics embellishing Bethesda Terrace. Join Francis R. Kowsky, author of Hell on Color, Sweet on Song: Jacob Wrey Mould and the Artful Beauty of Central Park, as he discusses Mould’s talents, idiosyncrasies, and impact on some of New York City’s most revered landmarks.
Jacob Wrey Mould was the designer behind some of New York's most revered landmarks
Photo credit: Victor Prevost on September 10, 1862
Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-86) was one of a number of English architects who emigrated to the US in the 19th century, though he was unusual in having personal reasons to leave the country.
In London in 1841, Mould was apprenticed to Owen Jones, an architect best known as an authority on coloured decoration, who designed the colour scheme of the Great Exhibition building in 1851 and in 1856 published the influential Grammar of Ornament. Wanting more varied architectural experience, Mould joined the office of Lewis Vulliamy (1791-1871), and worked on the designs for R.S. Holford’s palatial Dorchester House (built 1853) in Park Lane. His passion for music and friendship with musicians led him to translate many opera libretti. (Mould’s description of himself as “hell on colour” and “sweet on song”—the title of this new biographical and architectural study—refers to his great interest in music.) He married, but got a shock when his wife’s sister turned up with her little niece. Who the child’s father was never emerged, but relations between Mould and his abusive wife became so fraught that he decided to emigrate, despite Jones’s warning that “the Americans will wring you out like a wet rag, then drop you like a hot potato”.
In 1852 Mould and his mother arrived in New York, welcomed by his uncle. He put forward a scheme for the decoration of the New York Crystal Palace, which was not accepted, but in 1853 he received an important commission for a new church for a Unitarian congregation moving north in Manhattan. In the Romanesque style, with a dome, it was remarkable for its alternating stripes of cream Normandy stone and red Philadelphia stone. It became known as “the Church of the Holy Zebra” (a taunt later levelled at Keble College, Oxford). Francis Kowsky gives an authoritative account of this striking building. Sadly its tall tower remained unbuilt, the congregation moved out in 1929 and the church was destroyed by fire in 1931. Mould later built several other churches, most of which have gone, but the grand First Presbyterian church at Bath, New York, survives, as do the charming little timber Unitarian Church at Yonkers and the pretty Episcopal church at Lake Luzerne, both also in New York State. His domestic work has also largely disappeared, though the Trinity Chapel Schoolhouse in New York is an effective piece of urban Gothic.
However, his work in Central Park is rightly emphasised by Kowsky, who has benefited from access to the detailed research undertaken by the late Lucille Gordon, a Central Park docent. Mould’s input was mostly done in collaboration with Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, and principally concerned the decoration of Bethesda Terrace, with the Angel Fountain, the richly carved piers, and above all the remarkable polychrome decoration of the “arcade”. Here he showed himself a true disciple of Jones. He made a considerable number of other designs for the park, some of which remained unexecuted.
A Peruvian interlude
In 1860 Mould married again, but in 1866 his first wife arrived in New York and began proceedings for divorce. Mould was ordered to pay alimony, which worsened his already calamitous financial situation. Furthermore, several of his acquaintances refused to believe that he was really married to his new partner and ostracised him.
There was a curious interlude in Mould’s career when he spent four years (1875-79) in Peru, working in the Office of Public Works under the patronage of the crooked railway entrepreneur Henry Meiggs. He was well paid, which had not been the case in New York, but his only substantial architectural work was the large Casa Dubois in Lima. Meiggs’s death in 1877 led to his decision to return to New York.
Mould died in 1886, having achieved less than he might have done. Even so, he well deserves Kowsky’s careful and perceptive account of his life and works. As the author of books on Vaux and on Olmsted, Vaux and the Buffalo Park System, as well as a biography of Frederick Clarke Withers (another architect who emigrated from Britain to New York), Kowsky is qualified for his subject.
• Francis R. Kowsky with Lucille Gordon, Hell on Color, Sweet on Song: Jacob Wrey Mould and the Artful Beauty of Central Park, Fordham University Press, 304pp, 120 colour and b/w illustrations, $39.95, published
30 May
• Peter Howell’s latest book is The Triumphal Arch (Unicorn Publishing 2021)
Jacob Wrey Mould
Jacob Wrey Mould (7 August 1825 – 14 June 1886)[1] was a British architect, illustrator, linguist and musician, noted for his contributions to the design and construction of New York City's Central Park. He was "instrumental" in bringing the British High Victorian style of architecture to the United States,[2] and was a founding member of the American Institute of Architects.[3]
Biography[edit]
Born in Chislehurst, Kent in 1825, Mould attended King's College School in 1842. For two years, he studied the Alhambra in Spain under Owen Jones, the "master of polychromy,"[4] with whom he later co-designed the "Turkish Chamber" of Buckingham Palace. Mould's subsequent designs were often influenced by his appreciation of the Moorish style of architecture.
Mould designed decorations for The Great Exhibition in London in 1851. He moved to the United States in 1852,[3] and worked on the Crystal Palace Exhibition in Manhattan. He was invited by Moses H. Grinnell in 1853 to design and build Unitarian Church of All Souls,[5] and then was brought in on early plans for the great urban park in the heart of the city, Central Park. Working closely with creators Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, he designed many of the park's notable landmarks, including the "graceful" and "richly decorated" old Bandstand,[6] Belvedere Castle,[7] a great number of bridges,[8] and the carvings on the Bethesda Terrace.[9][10]
Though described as eccentric and ill-mannered,[11] Mould was hired full-time as an assistant city architect in 1857, and from 1870 to 1871 was architect-in-chief for the Department of Public Works.[3] In the 1860s, he had also built two notable country homes in Long Island on Hempstead Bay, both of which were lavish and ornate buildings for rich clients from New York.[3] Mould also collaborated with Vaux on the design of the original Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, and designed the fountain at City Hall Park (1871).[12]
Mould's reputation was severely damaged in 1861 when it became public knowledge that he was living with a woman who was not his wife. Many of his friends stopped associating with him, including well-known lawyer and civic leader George Templeton Strong. Despite facing rejection from his old social circles, Strong and others tempered their criticism of Mould's character with acknowledgements of his artistic talent. Fortunately for Mould, the scandal did not damage his professional relationships with Olmsted or Vaux.[13]
In 1874, Mould went to Lima, Peru, with Henry Meiggs, where he helped design a public park. He returned to New York in 1879, and resumed his duties for the Department of Public Works until his death in New York City on 14 June 1886.[3] He built the Morningside Park promenade in 1883, and his final design in the United States was a temporary tomb for President Ulysses S. Grant in Riverside Park, replaced later by the permanent monument known as Grant's Tomb.[14]
Besides being an accomplished architect and designer, Jacob Wrey Mould was an avid pianist and organist, and employed his talent for language in translating numerous foreign opera librettos into English.[15] He is interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
Bethesda Terrace Arcade is the arched, interior walkway in the center of Central Park that links the Mall to Bethesda Fountain and the Central Park Lake.
Designed by Jacob Wrey Mould and created in the 1860s, the Arcade features a stunning tiled ceiling with more than 15,000 colorful, patterned encaustic tiles from England’s famous Minton Tile Company. These elaborate tiles were originally used on the floors of European cathedrals. Bethesda Arcade is the only place in the world where these special tiles are used for a ceiling!
Over time the 50-ton ceiling weakened and deteriorated. In the 1980s, the tiles were removed for cleaning. The beautifully restored Bethesda Terrace Arcade re-opened to the public in 2007.
https://olsonfarlow.com/editorial-images/grand-staircase-in-central-park-olmsteds-plan-bethesda-terrace
Bethesda Terrace in New York City’s Central Park is an architectural marvel featuring two grand stone stairways that lead from the upper terrace down to the lake and fountain named ‘Angel of Waters.” Decorative elements carved into the stone represent nature and seasons and are symbolic of day and night.
In their master plan for Central Park, the 1858 “Greensward Plan,” Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux proposed an architectural “heart of the Park” defined by a sweeping promenade that would culminate into Bethesda Terrace. The entire terrace is constructed primarily of New Brunswick sandstone, paved with Roman brick, and boasts granite steps and landings.
The Terrace Arcade is "Bridge #1" in the Greensward Plan.
Bethesda Terrace before the statue of the angel was included in the fountain
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