Creating Central Park
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Creating Central Park
Author: Morrison H. Heckscher
language: en
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Release Date: 2008
The year 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the design of Central Park, the first and arguably the most famous of America’s urban landscape parks. In October 1857 the new park’s board of commissioners announced a public design competition, and the following April the imaginative yet practicable "Greensward” plan submitted by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted was selected. This book tells the fascinating story of how an extraordinary work of public art emerged from the crucible of New York City politics. From William Cullen Bryant’s 1844 editorial calling for "a pleasure ground of shade and recreation” to the completion of construction in 1870, the history of Central Park is an urban epic--a tale not only of animosity, political intrigue, and desire but also of idealism, sacrifice, and genius.
The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way
An extensive history of the American Museum of Natural History and Hayden Planetarium, featuring a cast of colorful characters. The American Museum of Natural History is one of New York City's most beloved institutions, and one of the largest, most celebrated museums in the world. Since 1869, generations of New Yorkers and tourists of all ages have been educated and entertained here. Located across from Central Park, the sprawling structure, spanning four city blocks, is a fascinating conglomeration of many buildings of diverse architectural styles built over a period of 150 years. The first book to tell the history of the museum from the point of view of these buildings, including the planned Gilder Center, The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way contextualizes them within New York and American history and the history of science. Part II, "The Heavens in the Attic," is the first detailed history of the Hayden Planetarium, from the museum's earliest astronomy exhibits, to Clyde Fisher and the original planetarium, to Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and it features a photographic tour through the original Hayden Planetarium. Author Colin Davey spent much of his childhood literally and figuratively lost in the museum's labyrinthine hallways. The museum grew in fits and starts according to the vicissitudes of backroom deals, personal agendas, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Chronicling its evolution?from the selection of a desolate, rocky, hilly, swampy site, known as Manhattan Square to the present day?the book includes some of the most important and colorful characters in the city's history, including the notoriously corrupt and powerful "Boss" Tweed, "Father of New York City" Andrew Haswell Green, and twentieth-century powerbroker and master builder Robert Moses; museum presidents Morris K. Jesup, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Ellen Futter; and American presidents, polar and African explorers, dinosaur hunters, and German rocket scientists. Features a new preface by the author and a new foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson. "This is, in many ways, a particularly American story, and anyone interested in history or museums will find this a very satisfying read. Author Colin Davey had a life-long love affair with the museum, growing up in New York and spending many, many hours happily lost in the museum collections, and that shines through in his writing as does his fine, in-depth research. Plenty of excellent graphics and photographs support this fascinating history." —Seattle Book Review
Imperial Premises
Author: Kevin Coffee
language: en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date: 2025-11-17
Colonial capital and imperialism have shaped and redefined built environments in both metropole and periphery. Apparitions of trans-Atlantic colonialism and neo-colonialism haunt those societies and bound an important field of ideological and political contest, repudiation and resistance. Most of those actions have targeted commemorative monuments, object collections, and museum interpretation. Below and beyond those blatant ideological examples of imperialism, however, are the landscapes and structures that reinforce a habitus of imperial life, inferring rather than explicitly declaring its hegemony. This collection of historical archaeological studies, centered in the long nineteenth century, examines and reinterprets a series of architectural remnants – structures and landscapes – that continue to ideologically reinforce neo-colonial social and power asymmetries. Examples include the failing Spanish mission and colony in New Spain; the bombastic reconstruction of imperial Paris; the nascent imperium centered in an expanding New York City; the failed cooperative utopia of the Oneida religious community; and the wide-area effects of early industrialization in New England.