Conservatory Water
A model-boat pond in Central Park with a history of water lilies.
Conservatory Water is a pond in a natural hollow of Manhattan's Central Park, located west of Fifth Avenue opposite East 74th Street. It is surrounded by landscaped hills and is known for its Kerbs Memorial Boathouse, where visitors can operate radio-controlled model boats. The pond also features bronze sculptures along its shore.
Quick Facts
- Location
- Central Park, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
Facts from the source article.
History
The name Conservatory Water derives from a planned glass-house for tropical plants, which was to be entered from Fifth Avenue by a grand stair. This garden was proposed in the Greensward Plan of 1857, the winning design in a competition for Central Park; other proposals did not include a formal garden. The plan's designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, suggested a conservatory on the site with a hard-edged reflecting pool, but only the reflecting pool was built.
Instead, a naturalistic pond for water lilies was excavated. The steep bank toward Fifth Avenue was densely planted with shrubs and trees, including birch and copper beech. Samuel Parsons, Vaux's assistant and later Superintendent of Plantings, described the pond as oval with winding, irregular shores, a high bank on the east side, and a willow drooping over the north end. The bottom was cemented, three feet deep, with eighteen inches of soil enriched with manure.
Water flowed in at one end and out at the other, supplied from the Ramble and Lake via the historic Sawkill stream. Hardy water lilies were naturalized in the mud, while tender ones wintered in the park's conservatory. Since the 1860s, children sailed model yachts there, and later the pond was reshaped as a model boat pond, loosely based on one in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris.
Surroundings
Conservatory Water seasonally hosts minute freshwater jellyfish, Craspedacusta sowerbyi. Overlooking the pond, a red-tailed hawk named Pale Male nested in the Beaux-Arts pediment of a window at 927 Fifth Avenue, watched by bird-watchers. Pilgrim Hill lies to the southwest, inside the park entrance at Fifth Avenue and north of 72nd Street. Its slopes are used for sledding after six inches of snow, for viewing Yoshino cherry blossoms in spring, and for picnics.
The hill is dotted with Prunus serrulata and other specimen trees, including a globose European Hornbeam and nine oak species, set in rolling lawn. Atop a knoll stands John Quincy Adams Ward's bronze statue The Pilgrim, nine feet tall, facing westward on a Quincy granite pedestal by architect Richard Morris Hunt. The pedestal has four bas-reliefs depicting the Mayflower, Bible and Sword, Cross-Bow and Arrows, and Commerce. The statue was donated to New York City in 1885 by the New England Society of New York.
Pug Hill, northwest of the Alice in Wonderland statue, was a gathering spot for pug owners from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, sometimes described as a fawn and black whirlpool of pugs, until heavy NYC Parks enforcement ended the gatherings. In 2006, Pug Hill inspired an eponymous book.
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