Hilarious, In A Way

A very pretty view of the south end of Central Park, obviously from the top of or a high window in a skyscraper. The picture’s title at the NYPL site, which I’ll get to in a little bit, says it’s looking northwest from a hotel. The row of high-rise apartment houses on Central Park West looks particularly good here, I think.

Which hotel? Where are we? The paved area in the lower right corner is curved, so it’s not Fifth Avenue (the east edge of the park). If you include that and the other visible roads, we’ve got a big loop surrounding some baseball fields (just below the band of trees cutting left to right across the landscape) and some other grassy areas. If we look at an old – as in 1875 – map of the south end of the park

we’ve got a big drive that curves around the Ball Ground. The north-south part of that drive furthest west (near Eighth Avenue / Central Park West) is now called the West Drive; the north-south part of that drive just east of the ball fields (near the letters THE SOUTH PARK) is now the Center Drive. Based on our view in the photo, we appear to be standing somewhere between the line of the Center Drive and the line of Sixth Avenue.

That makes our location pretty clear: the high-rise Barbizon Plaza Hotel was completed in 1930 at 106 Central Park South, just a bit west of Sixth Avenue. Here’s a 1934 photo from the roof of the oh-so-close-to-finshed RCA Building at Rockefeller Center:

The Barbizon Plaza is the tower immediately to the left of the crane’s pulley block in the foreground in the center of the photo. You can make out the ball fields just to the left of the building, and see how the view in the first photo works.

So far, so good. Two problems: the top photo is listed as “Date Issued: 1887-1964”. The twin-towered building at the left end of Central Park West is the Century Apartments, completed in 1931. So whenever this photo was taken, it was after the Barbizon Plaza was completed. The second problem is why this blog posts exists. The title of the top photo is “Parks – Central Park – looking northwest from Bar Bizch Plaza Hotel.” Somehow, “Barbizon” got transcribed as “Bar Bizch.” Honestly, I’m happier not knowing how that happened.