William Glackens: Park at Gracie Square

Katherine Bogden 


When I first moved to New York in 2006 I lived in Yorkville, just a few blocks from Gracie Mansion. I frequently walked in the park there, which runs along the East River from 79th to 87th Streets. In fact, when I left the neighborhood, it was that park, called Carl Schurz Park, that I missed the most. 

And so last year, during an exhibition at the gallery, I was pleased to assist the head of our research department, Lisa N. Peters, with research on William Glackens’s, Park at Gracie Square (Carl Schurz Park, New York). At first, we couldn’t understand the picture’s title. Could the park have once been called Gracie Square? Many phone calls and newspaper articles later, we found out the following information:

• The park was established in 1887 as East End Park. 

• It was renamed in 1910 after Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who moved to New York in 1881 and became an important member of the New York community (he served as Secretary of the Interior under Rutherford B. Hayes). 

• Gracie Square, though not actually part of the park, is the name given to the street that runs along the southern end of the park. This picture shows a view of the park from Gracie Square. 

• The bridge, seen from afar in the drawing, spans the East River, near its junction with the Harlem River. This intersection was referred to as Hell Gate because of the dangerous currents created by the confluence. In 1917 the Hell Gate Bridge (formally the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge) was completed and is visible here.

While conducting our research, we also became aware of various other paintings Glackens rendered of the park, including one other after the name change, which is presently in the White House Collection (for more see Peters’s entry in the Works on Paper exhibition catalogue).

Although the gallery’s photographer, who still lives in the area, kindly offered to search for the exact scene Glackens shows us here, she turned up empty-handed. It seems reasonable to me to assume the swings and benches were lost in one of the park’s transformations since the 1920s.

However, Glackens’s chalk and charcoal rendering certainly captures something more than just the physical elements of the park, for despite whatever conversions have occurred, the picture is immediately recognizable to me—I feel once again like a resident of Yorkville, out for an afternoon stroll.