Calvert Vaux Lives on in His Designs of Two Tribeca Parks

The design for Canal Park at Canal and West streets from 1895. The triangular park was rebuilt in 2005 according to the original 1888 design. Inset: Designer Calvert Vaux

If the name Calvert Vaux rings a bell for New Yorkers, it is likely in connection with Central Park. For Vaux (pronounced Vox) is the architect who teamed up with Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1850s and ’60s to create Central Park, that magnificent triumph of city planning.

Indeed, although Olmsted went on to achieve far greater fame and has enjoyed almost mythic status among park enthusiasts, Vaux’s role in the endeavor, though less celebrated, was critical. The park’s salient features, such as the transverse roadways, emerged from the imaginations of both men, but Vaux was a trained architect (Olmsted was not) and, among other things, designed all the park’s bridges and most of its buildings. His special touch is still seen particularly in the park’s rustic benches and railings.

It turns out that Vaux’s name should ring a special bell for Tribecans, because he more than anyone else was responsible for the look of two of our successful local green spaces: Duane Park and Canal Park at Canal and West Street.

After Central Park was completed, both Olmsted and Vaux worked intermittently on other city park projects. It happened that in the 1880s, when Vaux was again a landscape architect for the Parks Department, Mayor Abram Hewitt decided that many of the city’s small parks, especially those Downtown, should be more accessible to the public, and ordered them redesigned. Fences were to be minimized and pathways made welcoming. This notion was heartily endorsed by Vaux, who had written that the city should provide “every few blocks, some reservation kept open that will tempt a man, woman, or child to sit down and rest, and look about for a while.”

Samuel Parsons, Jr., then the superintendent of parks, was put in charge of the project, with Vaux as his associate—which makes it look as if they were co-designers.

But as the author Francis Kowsky remarks in his 1998 biography of Vaux, Parsons was actually a protege of Vaux, having started his career in Vaux’s architectural office, and it can be assumed that he would defer to his mentor at every step. The new look of the park spaces thus undeniably sprang from the brow of Calvert Vaux.

No historical photographs of either Duane Park or Canal Park are known to exist, at least by this writer. In the case of Canal Park, we know what the space looked like. As bad luck would have it, construction of the West Side Highway and the Holland Tunnel in the 1920s led to the demolition of Canal Park and its disappearance for three-quarters of a century. When it was restored in 2005, the Parks Department designers did their best to replicate the earlier design, and so the layout is once again Vaux’s brainchild.

In Duane Park’s case the connection is not as straightforward, but is clear nonetheless. The look Vaux gave the small space was highly informal, with curving walkways entering from three sides. Parsons wrote that the renovated park was “a boon to the crowded neighborhood.”

Vaux’s design remained in place until 1940, when Parks substituted a more formal design with a much larger paved area and an unnecessary flagpole.

But 60 years later, in 1998-9, when the newly formed Friends of Duane Park raised money to renovate the space once again, it was resolved to go back to the spirit of Vaux’s design, which was more appropriate to the late-19th-century look of most of the surrounding buildings. Today’s Duane Park, designed by Signe Nielsen, does just that.

It’s true that neither of these two spaces is directly Vaux’s work. But something he did create is still in existence near us.

In 1895, at the end of his life, he designed Columbus Park at Worth, Mulberry and Baxter Streets, created when the city tore down the notorious Mulberry Bend slums that had long befouled the neighborhood.

The park’s informal layout has since been reconfigured, but the attractive pavilion at its northern end, which Vaux designed, is still there. You can go and look at it.

This article originally appeared in The Tribeca Trib in February, 2006.