I keep coming back to the idea that views containing past and present are inherently more interesting than those that contain a single era. In my opinion, the learning is in the contrast. Sometimes, like the photo above, you just get lucky with the view.
That shot was taken a couple of years ago from inside the main tower at Belvedere, looking northwest. The tower is a very small oval in plan, with a round window on each of the two main sides and a conical roof. Through the window you can see some of the masonry of the tower (with some dead creepers clinging to the stone) and two of the lower wood pavilions. So, as far as the title of this post goes, we’ve the got the park itself (circa 1860), Belvedere (1872), various apartment houses on Central Park West (1910s to 1930s), the 1980s window (from when Belvedere was converted from an open folly to an enclosed building), and the modern equipment in the foreground (see below). The wood on the lower right is the ladder up into the tower.
New York is quite large in area and has weather readings taken at many locations, but the public statement of weather has long been that of the recording station located in Central Park. That station was located at the Arsenal, the only building in the park older than the park itself, staring around 1870; the weather station was moved to Belvedere in 1919. The recording equipment is now located on the ground next to the building, but the wind vane and anemometer are exactly where you’d expect, up on top of the tower to catch wind from the wide-open expanse of park. The equipment in the photo is converting the mechanical movements of those two devices to electric signals sent down to the main equipment location below.
So we’ve got the massive solid ashlar masonry of the castle itself, the late-1800s wood pavilions, the mid-1800s hand-shoveled earthwork to create the park, the early 1900s steel-framed apartments, and the modern electronics. As I said above, I got lucky with the view.
Also, it’s pretty.
