



1 / 18 Chevron Chevron NYC Parks Photo Archive Music in the Park, Brooklyn, 1897.

On July 9, 1936, the weather station at Belvedere Castle, in Central Park, recorded its highest-ever temperature: a hundred and six degrees Fahrenheit. That simmering summer, the New York City Parks Department—centralized two years earlier, under its first commissioner, Robert Moses—opened eleven municipal swimming pools throughout the city. They were, as Thomas J. Campanella, a professor of urban planning at Cornell University and a historian-in-residence at the Parks Department, puts it, “easily the most sophisticated swimming pools in the world,” and their openings were often pageants of performances, speeches, and sweeping crowds. According to a Times article from the period, the “thunderous cheers” of forty thousand people accompanied the unveiling of the Red Hook pool, in Brooklyn.

Such grand openings were just one of many activities captured by the Parks Department’s official photographers, whom Moses hired, beginning in 1934, to record park creation and use. In the following three decades, park photographers produced thirty-three thousand negatives, which form the core of a roughly three-hundred-thousand-image photo archive. The collection covers the eighteen-sixties through the present. A small selection of the images can be found on the Parks Department’s Web site, but the majority—including prints, negatives, and digital scans of the first hundred years’ worth of material—are stored at the Olmsted Center, in Queens. Even a short ramble through the extensive holdings, both online and on site, offers an extraordinary view of the many lives of parks, and of the cultural and social history of the city.

The photographs document aspects of the vast amount of labor that went into the construction and reconstruction of parks, of the varied activities they have housed—as well as of the economic cycles of the city. The first photograph in the core collection, titled “Camp Dyckman,” was taken on February 9, 1934—at fifteen degrees below zero, the coldest day in the city on record. The photograph shows the snowy Palisades, a stretch of frozen Hudson, and several bleak, thin-walled houses in the shantytown that arose during the Depression in what is now Inwood Hill Park. More familiar to New Yorkers living in this era of intense park curation and cultivation is the remarkable variety of recreational activity: swimmers, marathon runners, dancers, roller-skaters, concertgoers and theatregoers, bocce players, boaters, and enthusiasts of the late-nineteenth-century biking rage, during which riders were required to register with the Parks Department and prominently display their license. (An image of Ocean Parkway from 1894 shows what is said to be the country’s inaugural bike path.) Other activities have faded away without renaissance: an annual Maypole dance in Central Park; the camel-powered mowing of Sheep Meadow. Christina Benson, who curated the archive for eight years until departing this spring, said that she has been struck by the intensity of civic engagement depicted in the photos: participatory art happenings in the nineteen-sixties that drew thousands, or parades of concessioners, lifeguards, park officials, and zookeepers. “The huge crowds and the excited faces that you see for these places opening up,” she said. “It is very moving.”

The images are often beautiful and beautifully composed; in no way are they perfunctory records of this or that happening. The Moses-era photographers “each had their own camera and their own size and format,” Jonathan Kuhn, the director of art and antiquities for the department, said. “They very much believed in what they were doing, and they were artists.” They were also instrumental in expanding the park system, shooting from airplanes and systematically walking neighborhoods in search of potential new park spaces. Today, fourteen per cent of New York City’s acreage is occupied by parks, which range from less than one-twentieth of an acre to more than twenty-seven hundred acres, from the largely concrete to the seemingly wild. In each park there is “incredible history and depth and a range of stories,” Campanella told me, even in “the most common little place that we take for granted and see every day.”