An Unexpected Treat

There have been a few times in life when I’ve turned a corner and gasped. Coming through the long tunnel into Yosemite Valley for the first time and seeing Bridal Veil Falls, Half Dome and El Capitan all at once did it for me. Seeing the Fountains at Bellagio for the very first time did it, too.

Beyond that rare sort of experience, however, I’ve been pretty unflappable. Just a few weeks ago, however, gasping erupted again as I made my way through Central Park amid throngs of people enjoying a spectacular late-summer day. We’d entered the park at Strawberry Fields with the intention of walking across to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when I reached a prominence and saw the Bethesda Fountain for the first time.

It took my breath away.

The fountain itself is beautiful – perfectly scaled and impressive in height and fine detail – but what hit me was the totality of the setting, with the fine work of the balustrade and grand stairway in the foreground and Central Park Lake in the background. As I said to my wife at the time, people who knew what they were doing were involved here.

One of them was, of course, Frederick Law Olmstead, the great landscape architect who designed the terrace as the endpoint of the Central Park Mall, a grand pedestrian boulevard through the park’s southern end. Another was Emma Stebbins, a sculptor and the first woman ever to win a commission for a major public work of art in New York City.

Olmstead had planned on a fountain in his 1857 design, calling the space the Water Terrace in recognition of its access to the lake.

The base structure was designed by the architect Calvert Vaux with sculptural details by Jacob Wrey Mould. Stebbins entered the picture in 1868, sculpting an angel to stand atop a mushroom-shaped platform that spills water into Mould’s large bowl, which he supported with cherubs representing Peace, Health, Purity and Temperance – good mid-19th-century virtues all.

The eight-foot-tall top figure soon became known as the Angel of the Waters; the overall composition was soon restyled as the Bethesda Fountain and Terrace. “Bethesda” is a double reference, one to a gospel story about a healing pool in Jerusalem, the other to the 1842 construction of the Croton Aqueduct, which gave New York its first reliable supply of pure water. Take your pick as you watch Stebbins’ angel bless the waters around her.

As I mentioned above, my gasp wasn’t about the fountain, the terrace or even the identities of the people responsible for its placement and fabrication.

Rather, what struck me was the perfection of the space, the lift of the fountain, the encompassing stonework – and even the acoustical wonder of the tunnel leading from the mall to the lake. It’s simply awesome, and happening upon it unprepared is one of those signal life experiences I will never forget.

Here’s hoping I haven’t spoiled the surprise for you when you visit yourself!