Less than a year before the war broke out, Central Park bore little resemblance to the park many of us know today from film and pictures or, for many of us, the opportunity of having visited there.
Image information:
Winslow Homer, The Drive in the Central Park, New York, September 1860, from Harper’s Weekly, September 15, 1860, wood engraving on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Ray Austrian Collection, gift of Beatrice L. Austrian, Caryl A. Austrian and James A. Austrian, 1996.63.109 (Accessed 9-22-2020)
This image showing Central Park in Progress — simultaneously under construction and in use — suggests that it is not the formal aesthetic moves that make the landscape Central Park, but rather the array of instruments at work (carriage drives, horses, top hats, may poles, topograhic slopes) that constantly make and remake the landscape.
(Davis, Brian. “Landscapes and Instruments.” Landscape Journal 32, no. 2 (2013): 293-308. Accessed September 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/43323945.)
This image has not been adjusted or edited, just resized, from image downloaded from Smithsonian American Art Museum.