The Ramble in Central Park: A Wilderness West of Fifth

Photographer’s Note by Robert A. McCabe
Introduction by Douglas Blonsky
Wood Thrushes in the Ramble by Marie Winn
Robert Moses & the Battle of the Ramble by E. B. White and C. Stevens

PLATES

EAST
The Picturesquely Romantic Ramble by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

SOUTH
The Birds of the Ramble by Carl Vornberger

GILL CREEK VALLEY
The Plants of the Ramble by Regina Alvarez

WEST
The Rocks of the Ramble by Sidney Horenstein

Index

Praise for The Ramble in Central Park

“Splendidly soulful photographs of my favorite part of Central Park”
—Dominique Browning, The New York Times

“Amply and beautifully illustrated”
—New York Daily News

“McCabe’s photographs show that even in the heart of the city, the desire to get lost in the wild, however briefly, remains strong.”
—ARTnews

A Foreword Reviews Nature Book of the Year

Robert A. McCabe’s other books include Weekend in Havana (Abbeville, 2007); DeepFreeze! A Photographer’s Antarctic Odyssey in the Year 1959; Metamorphosis; On the Road with a Rollei in the ’50s; Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land 1954–1965; Patmos: Pathways of Memory; and China-Greece: Ancient Peoples, Changing Worlds. His photographs have been exhibited in the United States, Greece, and France, and have appeared in numerous publications.

INTRODUCTION

Central Park is a great work of art, and most appropriately has been an inspiration to painters, photographers, and writers ever since its creation. The Ramble, completed in 1859, has been a particular focus of the photographer’s art, and Robert McCabe’s images are a valuable contribution to this venerable tradition. McCabe appreciates everything from the smallest detail of an unfurled leaf to the largest vista of the Lake and the New York City skyline beyond, and his scope leaves no leaf unturned.

A “ramble,” defined as both “a walk without a definite route, taken merely for pleasure,” or “an aimless amble on a winding course,” has been in the English language since the sixteenth century, though as an intentionally designed landscape it was first practiced in the nineteenth century, and perfected in Central Park by designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

Originally a barren stretch of rock outcrops abutting a vast swamp, the Ramble area was transformed into an intimate woodland to complement the infinite lakes and meadows and formal geometric settings such as the Mall and Bethesda Terrace. In planning for the main woodland, Olmsted fantasized “[t]here can be no better place than the Ramble for the perfect realization of the wild garden.” He instructed his superintendent of plating, Ignaz Pilat, to create a quasi-subtropical setting similar to those he had experienced in Panama and the South. These landscapes were characterized by the visual interplay of textures, colors, and materials—brushed with dappled light and shade—and combined with the sounds of babbling brooks, rushing streams, and chirping birds that were, in his words, meant to “excite the childish playfulness and profuse careless utterances of Nature” and to evoke mystery, obscurity, and rapture in the mind of the Ramble visitor.

With its twisting paths, meandering streams, dramatic shifts in topography, bold rock outcrops, intimate glades, dense plantings, and a fanciful variety of rustic benches, fences, shelters, stone and wooden arches—even a dark and forbidding cave—the Ramble is the best example of the designers’ “passage of scenery” that compose and recompose themselves as the visitor strolls through the landscape. In contrast to the Ramble’s internal obscurity and complexity, the visitor is teased by external views that open to completely different and breathtaking experiences—Bow Bridge, Bethesda Terrace, Hernshead, Balcony Bridge, the Lake, the bustling traffic on the Drive to the east, Belvedere Caste, and the Upper and Lower reservoirs (the latter transformed into the Great Lawn by 1937).

In 1866, the New York Evening Post declared that “The Ramble is at present the very soul of the Park.” Today, with the restoration of its Lake shoreline in 2009, and the ongoing restoration of its interior woodlands by the Conservancy, we believe that the Ramble is indisputably still the soul of Central Park. It is clearly the wold and dramatic place it was intended to be, as attested by McCabe’s photographs of its splendid landscapes in multiple seasons. Photography is one of the park’s major activities, and this book is a testimony to the countless individual visions that each of the thirty-five million visitors bring to their time in the park. With its detailed map and informative essays, this book offers armchair travelers anywhere in the world the opportunity to take a virtual ramble in the soul of our park.

The Central Park Conservancy is committed to the restoration of the entire Ramble. We invite you to join us as a member of the Conservancy, to ensure that our wilderness west of Fifth is as beautiful in the future as it is in the pages of this book.

—Douglas Blonsky
President of the Central Park Conservancy and Central Park Administrator