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Belvedere Castle
Sits upon Vista Rock in Central Park. It was designed as an additional feature of the Central Park plan by Calvert Vaux and the sculptor Jacob Wrey Mould, when the team of Olmsted, Vaux and Mould were reappointed to oversee the park's construction once again in 1865. It was built in 1869. The castle provided a feature that capped the natural-looking woodlands of The Ramble, as seen from the formal Bethesda Terrace. As the plantings matured, the castle has disappeared from its original intended viewpoint. When it was built, Belvedere Castle provided a vista over the rectangular receiving reservoir, which has been replaced by the Great Lawn, an oval of turf with baseball diamonds, and Turtle Pond, redesigned as a naturalistic planting. Belvedere Castle, the object of much vandalism and deterioration, was closed to the public. It was restored and reopened by the Central Park Conservancy on May 1, 1983. In 1995, the Conservancy's Historic Preservation Crew replaced the painted wooden loggia of the castle, working from Vaux's designs, on the granite piers and walls that had survived. The original design, represented in a published lithograph (Rosensweig and Blackmar 1992 p 203), had called for a more weighty granite structure with a corner tower with conical cap, to balance the mass of the main castle structure to the east, with the existing lookout over parapet walls between them. |
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- Central Park
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