Bethesda Terrace. The heart of the park. Olmsted and Vaux broke their own rule here. Everywhere else in the park, the design principle was: nature first, second, and third — architecture after a while. At this one spot, they deliberately reversed it. Vaux called it an open air hall of reception. The center of the center.
If you're walking down the stairs, look up before you enter the arcade. That ceiling — those tiles — shouldn't exist. There are fifteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-six of them, and they are the only ceiling in the world made of encaustic Minton tiles. Encaustic tiles were invented by Cistercian monks in the twelfth century, and they were designed to be walked on. Floor tiles. Jacob Wrey Mould — the same man who designed the sheepfold — decided to put floor tiles on a ceiling. Nobody had done it before. Nobody has done it since.
The tiles were manufactured in Stoke-on-Trent, England, shipped across the Atlantic, and suspended from iron brackets in forty-nine pa
nels. By the early nineteen eighties, the iron had corroded so badly that the Conservancy took all forty-nine panels down and put them in a warehouse. They sat there for over twenty years. Starting in two thousand two, seven conservators cleaned and repaired approximately fourteen thousand original tiles by hand. The restoration cost seven million dollars. For a ceiling most people walk under with
