Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

In this tightly executed watercolor, the figures standing on Central Park's Gapstow Bridge have been identified as men dressed in the traditional garb of Orthodox Jews. The coloration of foliage in the foreground indicates the season as Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when the deeply observant perform the ritual of Tashlich. This prayer, recited at the start of Rosh Hashanah, signifies the "casting away of sin" and must be recited near a body of water containing live fish (fish, whose eyes never close, are a reminder to the devout that the Almighty continuously watches over all).¹The appropriation for religious purposes of so public a space -particularly of Central Park with its extensive rules of use -was probably unusual in this late-nineteenth-century period.²

The picturesque Gapstow Bridge was designed by Calvert Vaux both to span the Lake and to frame nearby landscape scenes. Built of wood with cast-iron railings in 1874, it had worn beyond repair in slightly more than twenty years. It was demolished in 1896 and was replaced by a bridge of the stone called Manhattan schist.³

The Museum owns several accomplished watercolors, some depicting other vistas and intimate corners of Central Park, by John Slaney, about whom little information has been found other than his consecutive listing as an engineer in the New York City directory from 1889 to 1892.⁴

Notes:

1 Conversation with an archivist at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, May 31, 1994, garnered this information about Orthodox Jewish practice.

2 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), discuss the rules governing visitors to the park on pp. 238 -240, 244 -246, 254 -256, 455, and 517 -518. Debates about who could use the park, and how and when it could be used, began while construction was under way, continued during the first decades after it opened, and have occasionally recurred ever since.

3 Henry Hope Reed, Robert J. McGee, and Esther Mipaas, Bridges of Central Park (New York: Greensward Foundation, 1990), p. 46.

4 The Museum of the City of New York owns eleven of Slaney's watercolors, including Old Mill, Bronx River, N.Y. (acc. no. 34.100. 797), Steps in Cave and Pool (acc. no. 89.4.5), and Stone Arch Near North Entrance to Cave (acc. no. 89.4.2).


Gapstow Bridge 1895 John M. Slaney (active 1890s) Watercolor, 7 3/4 X 9 1/2 Signed lower right: J. M. Slaney / 1895 The J. Clarence Davies Collection, 89.4.1
In this tightly executed watercolor, the figures standing on Central Park's Gapstow Bridge have been identified as men dressed in the traditional garb of Orthodox Jews. The coloration of foliage in the foreground indicates the season as Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when the deeply observant perform the ritual of Tashlich. This prayer, recited at the start of Rosh Hashanah, signifies the "casting away of sin" and must be recited near a body of water containing live fish (fish, whose eyes never close, are a reminder to the devout that the Almighty continuously watches over all).¹The appropriation for religious purposes of so public a space -particularly of Central Park with its extensive rules of use -was probably unusual in this late-nineteenth-century period.² The picturesque Gapstow Bridge was designed by Calvert Vaux both to span the Lake and to frame nearby landscape scenes. Built of wood with cast-iron railings in 1874, it had worn beyond repair in slightly more than twenty years. It was demolished in 1896 and was replaced by a bridge of the stone called Manhattan schist.³ The Museum owns several accomplished watercolors, some depicting other vistas and intimate corners of Central Park, by John Slaney, about whom little information has been found other than his consecutive listing as an engineer in the New York City directory from 1889 to 1892.⁴ Notes: 1 Conversation with an archivist at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, May 31, 1994, garnered this information about Orthodox Jewish practice. 2 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), discuss the rules governing visitors to the park on pp. 238 -240, 244 -246, 254 -256, 455, and 517 -518. Debates about who could use the park, and how and when it could be used, began while construction was under way, continued during the first decades after it opened, and have occasionally recurred ever since. 3 Henry Hope Reed, Robert J. McGee, and Esther Mipaas, Bridges of Central Park (New York: Greensward Foundation, 1990), p. 46. 4 The Museum of the City of New York owns eleven of Slaney's watercolors, including Old Mill, Bronx River, N.Y. (acc. no. 34.100. 797), Steps in Cave and Pool (acc. no. 89.4.5), and Stone Arch Near North Entrance to Cave (acc. no. 89.4.2).