Bryant Park sits on just 9.6 acres behind the New York Public Library's Main Branch, whose book stacks run underground beneath the park's west lawn.
Small and hemmed by office towers, Bryant Park fills fastest at lunch on weekdays with the surrounding Midtown workforce, and its lawn is off-limits during ticketed events.
Few blocks in Manhattan have been recycled this hard. The site was a potter's field from 1823 until 1840, when the remains were moved to Wards Island. The Croton Distributing Reservoir — granite walls fifty feet high, faced in a loosely Egyptian manner, with a public promenade along the top — held the eastern part of the block until it was demolished in 1900 for the library. In between, the New York Crystal Palace stood here for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in 1853 and burned in 1858. Reservoir Square was renamed Bryant Park in 1884 for William Cullen Bryant, editor of the Evening Post and an abolitionist.
The bones a visitor walks on now date from 1934. Lusby Simpson won an Architects' Emergency Committee competition in 1933 with a formal axial plan — a great rectangular lawn, balustrades, hedging, allees of London plane trees — and Robert Moses built it, reopening the park on September 15, 1934. The design was handsome and, by the 1970s, unusable: raised above the sidewalk and walled in by shrubbery, it was invisible from the street and had been given over to the drug trade.
The repair is the most studied piece of small-park surgery in the country. The Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, founded in 1980 by Andrew Heiskell and Dan Biederman, hired Hanna/Olin — the landscape architect Laurie Olin — with Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, and took its diagnosis from the sociologist William H. Whyte, who had filmed how people actually use small urban spaces. They cut back the hedges, opened stairs and sightlines, brought the grade down toward the street and set out movable chairs instead of fixed benches, on Whyte's argument that being able to move your own seat is what makes a space feel like yours. The park reopened in 1992.
Underneath, the New York Public Library's Milstein stacks were excavated below the lawn between 1988 and 1991, adding roughly eighty-four miles of shelving. Above, the plane trees are what changes across the year: low and enclosing in leaf, bare enough in winter that the library's western facade returns to view through the branches.
New York, NY 10018 · Official site ↗
Bryant Park is a 9.6-acre (3.9 ha), privately managed public park in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is located between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas and between 40th and 42nd Streets in Midtown Manhattan. The eastern half of Bryant Park is occupied by the Main Branch of the New York Public Library. The western half contains a lawn, shaded walkways, and amenities such as a carousel, and is located entirely over an underground structure that houses the library's stacks. The park hosts several events, including a seasonal "Winter Village" with an ice rink and shops during the winter.
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