Emily Barton

  • Culture January 1, 1

    In 2003, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Central Park Act, which designated the land we now call Central Park a public place. It was a hidden jewel of a show, tucked away in a corner of the American Wing’s mezzanine, where a viewer could often find herself alone with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s thrilling drawings for the “Greensward” plan, as well as lesser-known entries in the 1857 competition for the park’s design. (My favorite: John Rink’s sublimely kooky “Competition Entry No. 4,” which appears less like landscape design than