Bryant Park. Nearly ten acres of green chairs, French plane trees, and the world's most aggressively pleasant public space.
It was not always this pleasant.
Stand where you are and picture this. Before there was a park, before there was a library, this was a four-acre man-made lake. The Croton Distributing Reservoir — built in eighteen forty-two — sat right here, surrounded by fifty-foot granite walls decorated in a vaguely Egyptian style. Monumental pylons, stone cornices, the whole thing designed to look like something Pharaoh would use to store the Nile. And here's the best part — the tops of those fifty-foot walls were public promenades. You could walk up there and stroll around the perimeter, looking out over the city. Edgar Allan Poe did exactly that. He wrote about it in the Columbia Spy in eighteen forty-four: When you visit Gotham, you should ride out Fifth Avenue as far as the distributing reservoir. The prospect from the walk is particularly beautiful.
Edgar Allan Poe's f
avorite recreational activity was walking on top of a giant water tank. Which — honestly — is the most Edgar Allan Poe sentence I've ever said.
When the reservoir was drained in the eighteen nineties to make way for the library, workers found a collection of over two hundred glass bottles at the bottom. Most were empty. But one, sealed with wax, contained a note in pencil: Threw this from the pro
