The “Tavern on the Green”: How a Central Park Landmark Epitomizes Colonial New York City’s Urban Development
By Vaughn Scribner
The Tavern on the Green restaurant is an icon of New York City. Nestled in the seemingly-rustic, yet carefully-planned confines of Central Park, the building began life in 1870 as a shelter for the park’s grazing sheep.[1] In 1934, park officials transformed the building into a restaurant. Since then, various families bought into the business, and made renovations like a dance floor, glass-enclosed Crystal Room, and a new patio.[2] Beyond offering a diverse array of cocktails, main courses, and appetizers, however, much of the restaurant’s enduring popularity owes itself to setting: the Tavern on the Green is a carefully-crafted combination of urban and rural life; a “hybrid” space where customers feel like they’re escaping the gray, crowded confines of the city, but still have access to the entertainment and sociability for which New York City is famed.[3] But the Tavern on the Green does not just represent fantasy, or a New York that “never was.” On the contrary, the Tavern on the Green harkens back to the second half of the eighteenth-century, when New York City’s residents fostered an urban culture predicated upon a thriving network of taverns and green spaces which offered residents the hospitalities of city life within a bucolic, relaxing, and intentionally-constructed “natural” environment.
Figure 1: J. Montrésor, A Plan of the City of New-York & its Environs... (London, 1775), retrieved from the Library of Congress. Note the surplus of green in the city.
With around 20,000 people and a smattering of stone buildings and paved roads, eighteenth-century New York City was hardly a city by modern standards—or by early modern standards, for that matter. English visitors, in fact, usually likened it to one of their “country towns” back home. Huddled at the tip of Manhattan Island (SEE FIGURE 1) and 3,000 miles from London, eighteenth-century New Yorkers might not have enjoyed the vast variety of urban outlets as their London peers, but they had green space in spades. One visitor described the city and its environs as forming a “beautiful prospect…the situation is extremely pleasant,” while another exclaimed that New York City residents “lived in the lap of the most beneficent Nature.”[4] Yet “nature” harbored its own dangers, as white colonists often associated the “wilderness” with “savage” Indians and their environs. Both, colonists believed, must be defeated and developed into “safe,” “natural” spaces which might heal European bodies and minds more than harm them. This is where green leisure spaces and taverns came in.[5]
New York City’s wide array of commercial pleasure gardens, farms, promenades, private gardens, and orchards defined colonists’ efforts at transforming their “natural” environs into healthy, accessible, urban spaces by the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1765, New Yorkers with a couple of shillings in their pocket could take a quarter-mile jaunt north to John Jones’ “Ranelagh Garden,” a 300 by 750-foot commercial pleasure garden which boasted a pastoral arrangement of paths, shrubs, and flowers, not to mention alcohol, cakes, music, and musical shows. They might also visit Samuel Fraunces’ “Vauxhall Garden,” which was just west of Ranelagh and offered all of the same amusements, in addition to a river view. Both, unsurprisingly, were named after much bigger, older, and more popular pleasure gardens in London.[6] But New Yorkers’ opportunities hardly stopped there: a fresh water lake rested a stone’s throw from Ranelagh; an open-space bowling green helped to define the southern tip of Manhattan (you can still visit it today, albeit in smaller form); farms overlapped with the city’s northern limits; and William Prince’s “Garden and Tea House” became famous for offering New Yorkers “the greatest variety & best fruit in this Country.”[7]
But it wasn’t all trees and shrubs. As the most numerous, popular, and accessible public spaces in colonial America, taverns were bedrocks of New York City’s urban identity. New York harbored twice the number of drinking establishments per capita compared to other major colonial American cities.[8] This was critical, as drinking spaces ranging from seedy disorderly houses to genteel “City Taverns” offered New Yorkers a seemingly-endless array of services, including alcohol, entertainment, food, lodging, loans and clubs. In 1757, New York City booster William Smith Jr. boasted that his city was “one of the most social places on the continent.” After a bout of “excessive drinking” in New York City, similarly, the traveling Scotsman, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, remarked in 1744 that in New York City’s taverns “you may have the best of company and conversation.”[9]
Beyond drinking, entertainment, and sociability, taverns were critical in the multiplication of New York City’s green spaces. Often times, gardens, springs, and orchards “sprouted” from taverns. One of New York City’s earliest pleasure gardens, the “Spring Garden,” began life as a combination tavern/garden in 1740. Roughly 120 feet wide and 300 feet long, the Spring Garden (which would now be bounded by Broadway, Fulton, Nassau, and Ann streets) offered visitors gravel paths, carefully-cultivated shrubs and trees, and a main tavern structure. The Spring Garden’s tavern hosted everything from balls, to feasts, to a “famous posture-master” who entertained New Yorkers in 1752 with music, magic shows, and tumbling acts.[10] The City’s “Vauxhall” pleasure garden, similarly, originated as a “Mead House” (i.e. a tavern with correlated green space). It was no coincidence that Samuel Fraunces—owner of one of the city’s most popular taverns, the “Queens Head” (which still stands in downtown Manhattan on Broad Street, see Figures 2 and 3)—converted the Mead House into the more elaborate Vauxhall commercial pleasure garden in 1765. The Mead House was already thriving as a tavern. It just needed someone with the business acumen of Fraunces to fully realize its true rural-urban potential.[11]
Figure 2: Francis Guy, Tontine Coffee House, N.Y.C., c. 1797, retrieved from New-York Historical Society. The Tontine Coffee House is on the far left of the image, while the Merchants’ Coffee House rests in the center.
Figure 3: The Fraunces Tavern (on Broad Street, NYC) in April 2008, retrieved from Wikipedia.
Fraunces was not alone. Adam Vandenberg opened his own “Mead House” next to the Hudson River in 1730, and soon thereafter converted the surrounding grounds into a pleasure garden and horse racecourse. Around the same time, tavernkeeper Francis Child established his “Catiemuts Garden” at the top of Fresh Water Hill (current Park Row, south of Pearl Street), while in 1772 John Brandon advertised his Corlear’s Hook Tavern (on the East River), as “a pleasant Walk from Town, the House and Gardens fitted up in a neat commodious Manner…the best of Wines, Arrack, Rum, Taunton Ale, Porter, and other Liquors are provided.”[12] The list could go on.
Just because eighteenth-century New York City had so many taverns and green spaces didn’t mean that everyone was happy about it. Then, as now, New Yorkers envisioned the future of their city in multiple, sometimes conflicting, ways. Colonial officials, elites, and church leaders worried that the surplus of “disorderly” taverns (i.e. unregulated, unlicensed, and/or lower-class drinking spaces) might disrupt their efforts at realizing a “civil society” in the New World, and accordingly took to their newspapers to argue that “The Suppression of these Houses, which subsist only by furnishing the Means of Drunkenness and Debauchery to Servants and mean disorderly People, would be highly agreeable to the Inhabitants in general.”[13] This 1773 New-York Journal quote is startlingly similar to an August 2018 New York Times article which showed that the number of alcohol-serving bars, clubs, and restaurants in New York City is growing at a breakneck pace (the city now supports over 12,000 beer, wine, and liquor licenses). Many aren’t happy about this. As the Times article explained, “A resident of Inwood testified to trash-strewn streets and violence in her corner of Manhattan, while…a man from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, complained that his community was ‘overrun’…[by] the rising number of bars in New York City.” The article continued to note, “critics say that a flood of drinking spots can turn neighborhoods into unruly entertainment zones…and make streets less safe.”[14]
Eighteenth-century city planners, business owners, and land purchasers also expended considerable effort in managing the growth of their city. Unsurprisingly, urban and industrial expansion often led to the demise of green spaces in New York City. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Ranelagh gardens were demolished to make way for commercial building sites, while all traces of Vauxhall were buried under the Cupola Iron Furnace. The horrors of the American Revolution didn’t help New York City’s pleasure gardens and orchards, either![15]
Green steadily made way to gray, and New York City’s urban planners and residents are still struggling to inject their city with green at the same time that commercial, industrial, and residential development multiplies by the day, especially in lower-income areas. As of 2019, New York City contained only 146 square feet of green space for each of its residents, placing it last among the fifteen most populous cities in America.[16] Hoping to battle this shocking trend, singer/actor Bette Midler founded the “New York Restoration Project (NYRP)” in 1995 with the goal of “fortifying the City’s aging infrastructure and creating a healthier environment for those who live in the most densely populated and least green neighborhoods.” With the assertion that “nature is a fundamental right of every New Yorker,” the NYRP has brought green to New York City everywhere from schools to housing projects to highways.[17]
In many ways, the Tavern on the Green is an homage to those long-gone eighteenth-century hybrid green/urban entertainment venues like Fraunces’ Vauxhall, Prince’s “Garden and Tea House,” or Brandon’s Corlear’s Hook Tavern. The Tavern is at once distinctly urban, providing food, beverages, and entertainment. Yet, it also offers patrons an escape from the city (even if, as historian Colin Fisher recently noted, “Central Park is not nearly as natural as it may appear”).[18] Unfortunately, the Tavern on the Green now stands alone in New York City, for unlike in the eighteenth century, fewer business owners and urban planners understand sociable businesses and green spaces as mutual, interdependent entities. But there is hope. Beer gardens and open concept restaurants are multiplying throughout the city as owners decide to inject once-gray buildings and courtyards with flashes of green. In 2009, New York City officials approved the High Line “living system” and park on Manhattan’s West Side, and “urban backyards” have become a necessity for many apartment buyers.[19] Our eighteenth-century predecessors got a lot wrong, but in the case of an urban-green balance in New York City, I think we can all agree that they were on to something right. Hopefully, the Tavern on the Green will soon be one among many such spaces in modern New York City.
Vaughn Scribner is an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Arkansas. His new book, Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and the Negotiation of Early American Civil Society, analyzes early Americans’ mercurial attempts at realizing a “civil society” through the lens of the urban tavern.
[1] For more on Central Park’s careful planning, see Colin Fisher, “Nature in the City: Urban Environmental History and Central Park,” OAH Magazine of History 25:4 (Oct. 2011): 27-31.
[2] “History and Renovation,” Tavern on the Green, accessed February 20, 2020, https://www.tavernonthegreen.com/history/. It should be noted that the Tavern on the Green closed its doors as a restaurant between 2009 and 2014. From 2010 until 2012, the building was used as a public visitors’ center and gift shop. After extensive renovations, the Tavern on the Green re-opened as a restaurant in April 2014.
[3] For more on “hybrid spaces,” see Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” in Douglas Cazaux Sackman, ed., A Companion to American Environmental History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2010), 188; Paul Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” The Journal of American History 100 (June, 2013): 96.
[4] Vaughn Scribner, “Cultivating ‘Cities in the Wilderness’: New York City’s Commercial Pleasure Gardens and the British American Pursuit of Rural Urbanism,” Urban History 45:2 (May 2018): 284.
[5] Vaughn Scribner, “‘The happy effects of these waters’: Colonial American Mineral Spas and the British Civilizing Mission.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14:3 (Summer 2016): 409-449.
[6] Scribner, “Cultivating Cities in the Wilderness,” 275-305.
[7] Ira D. Gruber, John Peebles’ American War: The Diary of a Scottish Grenadier, 1776-1782 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books for the Army Records Society, 1998), 402.
[8] Vaughn Scribner, Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 14; Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 64.
[9] William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of New-York: First Discovery to the Year 1732 (London: Thomas Wilcox, 1757), 211; Alexander Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 89.
[10] Thomas M. Garrett, “A History of Pleasure Gardens in New York City, 1700-1865,” (PhD diss., New York University, 1978), 68-70.
[11] Scribner, “Cultivating Cities in the Wilderness,” 295.
[12] Garrett, “Pleasure Gardens of New York City,” 92-3, 99-100, 103. New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury, April 27, 1772.
[13] Carp, Rebels Rising, 68, see also 69-75.
[14] Colin Moynihan, “Think There Are Too Many Bars in Your Neighborhood? You’re Not Alone,” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/nyregion/liquor-licenses-bars-nyc.html
[15] Garrett, “Pleasure Gardens,” 119, 91.
[16] “Urban Footprint: The Allocation of Space in U.S. Cities,” Geotab, https://www.geotab.com/urban-footprint/, accessed February 17, 2020.
[17] “About Us,” New York Restoration Project, https://www.nyrp.org/about, accessed February 16, 2020.
[18] Fisher, “Nature in the City,” 27.
[19] Emma Orlow, “The 25 Best Beer Gardens and Beer Halls in NYC,” Timeout New York, https://www.timeout.com/newyork/bars/best-beer-gardens-and-beer-halls-in-new-york-city, accessed February 18, 2020; Emily Nonko, “Green Acres: The Elusive, Shape-Shifting Urban Backyard,” Observer, May 17, 2016, https://observer.com/2016/05/green-acres-the-elusive-shape-shifting-urban-backyard/