Great Lawn and Turtle Pond, Central Park
Coordinates: 40°46′53″N 73°57′59″W / 40.78135°N 73.96648°W
The Great Lawn and Turtle Pond are two connected features of Central Park which are located in Manhattan, New York City.
The lawn and pond occupy the almost flat site of the rectangular, thirty-five-acre Lower Reservoir constructed in 1842, which was an unalterable fixture of the location of Central Park as it was first designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. The King Jagiello Monument stands at Turtle Pond's east end, the Delacorte Theater on its west end.
Within its schist walling, the reservoir filled the space between the 79th Street and 86th Street Transverse Roads. The Belvedere Castle, built in 1869, overlooked it from its southwest corner.
In Egbert Viele's rejected plan for Central Park, whose design inadequacies prompted the design competition of 1857-58, the civil engineer "considered the reservoir worthy of attention as a major engineering feat, and his plan emphasized it by adding a terrace to the walls, from which spectators could observe military drills". Proponents of the naturalistic plans in the competition "repeatedly recommended 'planting out' the park boundaries and the 'ugly', 'artificial', 'uncouth', 'horrid', and 'discordant' distraction of the reservoirs in order to reinforce the sense of natural expanse".
As the Croton-Catskill Reservoir system was completed, to satisfy New York City's need for water, the Lower Reservoir came to be redundant. In spite of years of prodding, the commissioners of the Catskill Aqueduct were loath to make over their real estate to the city; a number of projects in the City Beautiful manner were suggested for the site, epitomized by the Catskill Aqueduct Celebration Committee's commission of a design from the prominent Beaux-Arts "society" architect Thomas Hastings, who would have provided a grand formal space like a partly flooded version of the Paris Trocadéro, featuring a bronze casting of Frederick MacMonnies' Columbia in the Ship of State, the familiar fountain centerpiece of the lagoon at the World's Columbian Exposition of Chicago, 1893. Henry Fairfield Osborn lobbied instead for a formal carriage drive that would link his American Museum of Natural History with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After the war Hastings recast his plan as a memorial to the soldiers of World War I.
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