page_title: Riverside Park (Manhattan)
section_title: Late 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Riverside Park (Manhattan) / History / Construction / Late 19th century
context_page_description: Riverside Park is a scenic waterfront public park in the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and Hamilton Heights neighborhoods of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The park consists of a 4-mile strip of land with a width of between 100 and 500 feet, situated between the Hudson River/Henry Hudson Parkway and the serpentine Riverside Drive.
  Riverside Park was established by land condemnation in 1872 and was developed concurrently with Riverside Drive. Originally running between 72nd and 125th Streets, it was extended northward in the first decade of the 20th century. When the park was first laid out, access to the river was blocked by the right-of-way of the New York Central Railroad's West Side Line. In the 1930s, under parks commissioner Robert Moses's West Side improvement project, the railroad track was covered over with an esplanade and several recreational facilities. Very few modifications were made to the park until the 1980s, when it was renovated and extended southward as part of the Riverside South development.
  Riverside Park is part of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, a pedestrian and bicycle route around Manhattan's waterfront.
context_section_description: Initially, Riverside Avenue had been planned to run in a straight line, which would have required a retaining wall and extensive fill. However, the difficult topography of the area had come to the attention of the Manhattan park commissioners. In 1873 the commissioners selected Frederick Law Olmsted, a park commissioner who had also designed Central Park, to redesign the park and avenue. Olmsted devised a new plan that would create a main road extending from 72nd to 123rd Streets, with overpasses at 79th and 96th Streets, as well as "carriage roads" to serve the nearby neighborhood. The park and drive together would vary between 70 and 150 feet (21 and 46 m) wide. Olmsted's plan, which also included designs for Fort Washington Park and Morningside Park, called for these parklands to be designed around the existing landscape. Olmsted wrote in 1873 that Riverside Park "presented great advantages as a park because the river bank had been for a century occupied as the lawns and ornamental gardens in front of the country seats along its banks. Its foliage was fine, and its views magnificent."
  Construction on Riverside Park and Avenue started in 1874 or 1876, and Olmsted was ousted as parks superintendent in 1877. Designers such as Calvert Vaux, Samuel Parsons, and Julius Munckwitz laid out the stretch of park and road between 72nd and 125th Streets in a way that made the park look like the Hudson Valley.  Riverside Avenue was opened in 1880 and quickly became popular, though parts of the road, such as the 96th Street overpass, remained incomplete through the 1900s. There was no single plan that encompassed the entirety of Riverside Park, which meant that it would incorporate a number of separate designs. Olmsted wrote in 1886 that "in many important particulars the design has been mangled," saying that the park's terrain was too steep for recreation, and that Riverside Avenue's trees might block views of the river; despite this, Olmsted's offer to work with Vaux to create a unified park design was denied. Furthermore, the railroad cut the park off from the waterfront.
  With the construction of the park came land purchases in the Upper West Side.  However, development in the neighborhood was slow to come since most of the lots were too expensive for the middle-class to purchase, and the wealthy preferred to settle on the East Side of Manhattan. Development of low-density residences and small apartment buildings did not come until the 1880s. These residents formed an organization called the West End Avenue Association, which in 1888 published a booklet titled West End Avenue: Riverside Park in the City of New York extolling the benefits of the park. At the time, very few wealthy families had settled in the area. It would take until the 1900s and 1910s before Riverside Avenue and Park gained its present-day concentration of upscale houses.
  The park was not extensively developed, either. A temporary tomb for the late U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant was built at Claremont Hill in 1885, since Grant had indicated that he wanted to be buried in New York City. Additionally, paths between 72nd and 79th Streets were laid out in 1891. However, in an 1893 article, The New York Times mentioned that "but a small portion of the land thus acquired has been improved so as to be capable of public use." At the time, Riverside Park did not yet include the shorefront. In November 1893, a compromise was reached that would allow for the shore to be used for parkland while still allowing access to docks, and two months later, the park commissioners adopted plans to build docks at 79th and 96th Streets. Under an act of the state legislature, the city condemned an underwater area along the shore, which would allow for future land reclamation to expand the park. By 1895, paths had been laid out between 96th and 120th Streets. Notwithstanding the lack of park development, Riverside Park still contained nuisances such as outdoor sewerage, squatters' shacks, and coal emissions from the trains, as well as garbage dumps at 77th and 96th Streets. These conditi
caption: The future park site depicted in the King's Handbook of New York City, circa 1890
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