Another Detail

From the Wurts Brothers, in 1900, a view of the Lake in Central Park:

The photographer did something quite clever: he reversed the usual view. Most photos of Bethesda Terrace and the Lake are taken from the Terrace side, looking past the fountain to the boats on the water. In this case, we’re standing on the other side of the Lake (which has an irregular shape, so it is narrow here but much bigger than this picture suggests) looking past the fountain to the Terrace staircases. Nice and civilized bucolic.

I was startled by the boat on the left, which has a whole bunch of people. For as long as I can remember, the only boats available are rental rowboats that seat four people if they are very good friends and two people otherwise. It turns out that, almost from the beginning, the park had “passage boats” which were a kind of professionally-rowed ferry that carried up to twelve people around the lake from one landing to the next. The fare was 10 cents, which was a decent amount of money in the 1860s, something like three or four dollars today. There’s not a whole lot of information readily available on the passage boats, and I doubt they survived very far into the twentieth century, but that sure looks like one on the left.

From the 1870, “Thirteenth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park”:

“Call boats” were similar to the small row boats available for rent today. I’m going to assume that half passengers were either children or people who paid for only a trip halfway around the lake, because any other explanation is unnerving. I’m not sure when the Harlem Lake, as it was called on Olmstead and Vaux’s original plan, was renamed the Harlem Meer.