Bethesda Terrace Central Park
— the staircase that opens onto water.
Not only on a wall.
“Bethesda Terrace sits at the centre of Central Park, where the formal axis of the Mall opens onto The Lake. The Angel of the Waters has stood at the fountain since 1873, lily and all. Beneath the terrace, the arcade keeps a ceiling of nearly sixteen thousand encaustic tiles. Buskers play under that ceiling on warm afternoons and the sound climbs back to the angel.
Bethesda Terrace Central Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Bethesda Terrace and Fountain anchor the centre of Manhattan's Central Park, between 72nd and 74th Streets at the south end of The Lake. The terrace was part of the original Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who won the 1858 design competition for the park. Construction of the terrace ran from 1859 through 1864, with the fountain dedicated in 1873. The terrace is the only formal architectural feature Olmsted and Vaux allowed inside their otherwise pastoral landscape.
The lower terrace arcade carries the only Minton tile ceiling of its kind installed outdoors in the United States. The ceiling holds 15,876 patterned encaustic tiles, hand-set in iron panels manufactured by the Minton works of Stoke-on-Trent and shipped across the Atlantic between 1869 and 1872. The tiles were removed for safety in the 1980s as the iron framework rusted, then reinstalled, panel by panel, in a seven-million-dollar restoration completed in 2007. The sandstone balustrades and stairs are carved with native flora, including apples, grapes, and goldenrod.
At the centre stands Emma Stebbins's Angel of the Waters, dedicated 26 May 1873. Stebbins was the first woman commissioned for a major public artwork in New York City. The angel's outstretched hand blesses the water below, a reference both to the Pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John and to the Croton Aqueduct, which brought clean water to the city in 1842 and ended a generation of cholera. The fountain runs from April through October, then drains for the winter.