Conservatory Water Central Park sailboat pond
— — small sails on water the city forgot to hurry.
Not only on a wall.
“Conservatory Water is the model-sailboat pond on the east side of Central Park, just inside the Fifth Avenue wall at 74th Street. It was built in 1860 by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, who imagined it as the foreground for a glass conservatory that the city never built. The pond is roughly oval, ringed with stone, and on Saturday mornings the Central Park Model Yacht Club brings out radio-controlled sloops that lean to the breeze like the larger boats out in the harbour. The bronze Alice in Wonderland sits at the north edge. E.B. White set Stuart Little's first sail right here. from the studio
Conservatory Water Central Park sailboat pond, 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.
Conservatory Water sits in the East 70s of Central Park, between East 72nd and East 75th Streets, a short walk inside the Fifth Avenue perimeter. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted included it in the original 1858 Greensward Plan; the pond was built around 1860 as the formal foreground for a glass conservatory that was budgeted but never constructed. The Kerbs Memorial Boathouse, a small brick pavilion on the west bank, was given by the family of Edward and Elsie Kerbs in 1954. José de Creeft's bronze Alice in Wonderland group, an eleven-foot sculpture commissioned by George Delacorte, was installed at the north end in 1959.
The pond is shallow and oval, designed for model boats rather than swimmers or rowers. The Central Park Model Yacht Club, founded in 1916, sails radio-controlled sloops here on Saturday mornings from spring through autumn. Boats are kept in the lockers of the Kerbs Boathouse on the west side. The pond freezes most winters and is drained for maintenance; in the warm months its surface returns the colour of the surrounding plane trees and, in late afternoon, the Fifth Avenue stone. The setting inspired the opening sail of E.B. White's Stuart Little, published in 1945.
Central Park is open from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. daily, and Conservatory Water has no separate admission. The nearest subway is the 6 train at 77th Street, a six-minute walk east. The Alice in Wonderland statue, on the north shore, is the most visited piece of public sculpture in the park; children are encouraged to climb on it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a five-minute walk north along Fifth Avenue, and Hans Christian Andersen's bronze sits on the west bank, where storytelling sessions have run on Saturday mornings in summer since 1956.