Riverside Park is a scenic waterfront park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, consisting of a narrow four-mile strip of land between the Hudson River and the gently curving rise-and-fall of Riverside Drive. When the park was first laid out, access to the river was blocked by the right-of-way of the New York Central RR Hudson Line ; it was covered over with an esplanade later.

Construction of the park began in the early 1870s. The concept plan was drawn by Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of the nearby Central Park. Primary construction was completed in about 1910, but there were subsequent expansions and alterations. Riverside Park was soon allowed to decay. In the early twentieth century, the young Robert Moses looked down from Riverside Drive at

"a wasteland six miles long, stretching from where he stood all the way north to 181st street...the 'park' was nothing but a vast low-lying mass of dirt and mud. Unpainted, rusting, jagged wire fences along the tracks barred the city from its waterfront...the engines that pulled trains along the tracks burned coal or oil; from their smokestacks a dense black smog rose toward the apartment houses, coating windowsills with grit...[a stench] seemed to hang over Riverside Drive endlessly after each passage of a train carrying south to the slaughterhouses in downtown Manhattan carload after carload of cattle and pigs." ( —Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, pp. 65-6)

The Riverside Park we see today owes as much to Robert Moses as it does to Olmsted.

The primary section of Riverside Park are the tiered slopes between the Hudson and Riverside Drive between 72nd St. to 125th St. There is also a northern section of the park from 145th St. to 158th St. and adjacent to Riverbank State Park . Paths along the river connect the park to Hudson River Park to the south and Fort Washington Park to the north.

Notable monument and statues in the park include the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument at 72nd Street (Penelope Jencks , sculptor), the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at 89th Street, the Joan of Arc statue at 93rd Street (Anna Hyatt Huntington , sculptor), and New York's version of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, Grant's Tomb at 122nd Street, where the modernist-gothic spire of Riverside Church dominates the skyline. The numerous recreational facilities include tennis, volleyball and basketball courts; soccer fields, and a skate park that opened in the summer of 1995 at 108th St.. There is a marina at 79th St. and also a kayak launch at 148th St. Before the park existed, Edgar Allan Poe liked to sit on rocky "Mount Tom" at 83rd Street.

Riverside Park almost received a children's playground designed by the great poets of Modernist style, the architect Louis Kahn and the sculptor/architect Isamu Noguchi working in collaboration. Despite their redesigning this playground five times, between 1961 and 1966, neighborhood resistance triumphed and the project was canceled by the new administration of Mayor John Lindsay.

• Noguchi's notes recall the unrealized project.

Riverside Park also almost received a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. All that has been installed is the granite placque set in the paving at the end of the Promenade near 84th St. on Sunday, October 19, 1947. It reads:

"This is the site for the American memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Battle April-May 1943 and to the six million Jews of Europe martyred in the cause of human liberty."

• Wayne Jebian, "The Missing Monument," 1995

External link

• New York City Parks and Recreation Dept.