Ancient Rome in Central Park

New York's Central Park was laid out in the 1850s by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. The employment was, by that day's standards, a revolutionary naturalistic plan which meant to evoke the fields and forests of an ideal landscape. The Romans and their successors, running through the English gardens, had not employed this kind of landscaping technique. And so, in that way, Central Park is not very Roman. Over the years, however, it's come to include many classical monuments, and we'll explore a few of these in this video. I'm standing by Columbus Circle at the park's southwest corner. In the circle, off to my left, is the Columbus Monument, an imposing column with a statue of Columbus on top, and it's studded, if you look closely, with rostra. These are ship's beaks. The Romans used them to commemorate their naval victories, but here they're employed to symbolize the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, Columbus's ships. To my right is the Maine Monument, which commemorates the men who died on the U.S. Maine in 1898 when that ship exploded in Havana Harbor. It's a fine neoclassical pile, crowned by a figure of Columbia and Surgeon Hippocampi. We are looking across the lake at the fantastic and awesomely expensive apartments of Central Park West. Here across from us is one of the most storied of these, the San Remo, finished in 1930. It's been home to many famous residents, but for our purposes, its most intriguing feature are its two 10-story towers, each crowned by a replica of the Trophy of a structure built in the 4th century BC and still standing today in Athens. This is the Central Park West facade of the American Museum of Natural History, one of America's greatest storehouses of natural wonders. Here in the center is the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, a confection designed by John Russell Pope, the architect of the Jefferson Memorial in DC, and also the National Archive building. It's modeled on the Arch of Constantine in Rome, but in place of the Dacians in the attic, we have great explorers and naturalists, Boone, Audubon, Lewis, and Clark. And finally, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That was designed piecemeal. The wings of the 5th Avenue facade are by McKim, Mead & White, New York's most storied firm of neoclassical architects. The center of the facade, built a short time before, is by Richard Morris Hunt, the guy who designed the base of the Statue of Liberty. The details matter less than the overall effect, which is thoroughly neoclassical. A final reminder, if anywhere needed, of the place of ancient Greece and Rome in Central Park.