Sheep Meadow
Sheep Meadow is a 15-acre (61,000 m2) preserve located at the west side of Central Park from 66th to 69th Streets in Manhattan, New York City. It has a long history as a gathering place for large scale demonstrations and political movements. It is currently a favorite spot for families, sunbathers, picnickers, kite flyers, and other visitors to come relax and admire the New York City skyline.
The Sheep Meadow is open from April to mid-October dawn to dusk in fair weather. This open area is very popular and can draw up to 30,000 people a day, and in 2009, Doug Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy, stated that there have been lines to get into the meadow.
The Sheep Meadow was the largest open meadow feature in the original plan for Central Park, as it was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. The open space had been a requirement of the design competition for Central Park, which specified a parade ground for the civic function of militia drills and military exhibitions. Olmsted and Vaux's winning "Greensward", a nineteenth-century term for broad open lawns, offered a reduced parade ground, sited towards the western side of the proposed park.
When the location of the Sheep Meadow was decided, some small communities of poorer New Yorkers were uprooted: including Irish, Germans and African-Americans. To produce the almost 15 acres (61,000 m2) of "level or but slightly undulating ground" in the specifications, 10 acres (40,000 m2) poorly draining ground was filled to a depth of two feet with fill from New Jersey. Additionally, disruptive boulders and a rocky ridge that stood sixteen feet out of the finished grade were blasted out, and the reshaped landscape was covered with topsoil. Sheep Meadow was the most costly construction undertaken in the new park. Few sunbathers today realize the effort that created this "natural" grassy terrain. This meadow was the largest meadow in Central Park until the old reservoir was emptied in 1929 and made into the Great Lawn in 1935.
After the design competition was over, Olmsted and Vaux managed to convince the commissioners that a quiet park landscape was perhaps not the best place for military displays. After the expansive open area was created, visitors were usually not allowed to walk on it. Olmsted and Vaux believed that the introduction of sheep enhanced the romantic English quality of the park and to re-enforce the quiet nature of the "Greensward", 200 sheep were added in 1864. The flock of pedigree Southdown (and later Dorset) sheep were used and housed in a fanciful Victorian building or "Sheepfold" created by Jacob Wrey Mould under the direction of Calvert Vaux. The animals served a practical purpose as well—they trimmed the grass and fertilized the lawn. A sheep crossing was built across the drive in 1870 and twice a day a shepherd would hold up carriage traffic, and later automobiles, as he drove the animals to and from the meadow.
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