Bow Bridge Central Park
— the cast-iron arch that bends like a longbow.
Not only on a wall.
“Bow Bridge crosses The Lake at the centre of Central Park, between Cherry Hill and the Ramble. Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould drew the design in 1859 and the bridge opened in 1862, eighty-seven feet of cast iron resting on stone abutments. The reflection in the water doubles the arc into a full circle on still mornings before the rowboats are out.
Bow Bridge 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.
Bow Bridge spans The Lake in Central Park between Cherry Hill on the west and the Ramble on the east, in the borough of Manhattan. It is one of seven original cast-iron bridges Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould designed for the park, and the second-oldest cast-iron bridge in the United States. The bridge was fabricated by Janes, Kirtland & Company of the Bronx and installed across The Lake in 1862, four years after Olmsted and Vaux won the park's design competition with the Greensward Plan.
The span runs eighty-seven feet from abutment to abutment, with the deck rising and falling in a long shallow arc that gives the bridge its name. Eight neoclassical urns once stood along the railings; six were replaced in the 1974 restoration led by the Central Park Conservancy. The cast-iron tracery carries Greek key, scroll, and arrow motifs picked out by hand each repainting cycle. The stone abutments are Manhattan schist quarried inside the park during construction. The bridge carries pedestrians only and has no electric lighting.
The Lake covers about twenty acres and was excavated between 1858 and 1861 from a swampy hollow Olmsted called 'the most dismal piece of ground in the city.' Loeb Boathouse, opened in 1954, rents rowboats from April through October, and the boats pass under Bow Bridge a few dozen times a day in summer. The Lake freezes over hard in cold winters and was used for public skating from the 1860s until the 1950s, when the Wollman Rink took up the work.