Page 6 - Scavenger Hunt 11172022

5 I WAS ONCE A LARGE FIELD .... I STILL AM. ALTHOUGH MY NAME HAS CHANGED MANY TIMES THROUGHOUT HISTORY I WILL ALWAYS BE KNOWN AS THE LAND THAT BROUGHT VICTORY.
ANSWER: Bryant Park
LOCATION: between 40th and 42nd Streets in Midtown Manhattan.
FUN FACT: In 1884, Reservoir Square was renamed Bryant Park. it was named by William Cullen Bryant.
In 1884, Reservoir Square was renamed Bryant Park, to honor recently deceased Romantic poet, longtime editor of the New York Evening Post, and civic reformer, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). After the Crystal Palace burned down in 1858, the park became a public square, and was the site of deadly race riots during the Civil War. In the 1880s, the city honored longtime New York Evening Post editor and staunch abolitionist William Cullen Bryant by renaming the park.
MORE OF THE HISTORY OF BRYANT PARK:
The area to the west of the reservoir was initially known as Reservoir Square, and was utilized as the site of the “Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations” from 1853-1854. Considered by many to be the first World’s Fair on American soil, the exhibition was heavily influenced by the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (aka, the Crystal Palace Exhibition) in London’s Hyde Park. The showpiece was NYC’s own Crystal Palace (an almost exact replica of its English counterpart) that housed four thousand exhibitors and displayed industrial wares, consumer goods, and artwork. Alongside the Crystal Palace was NYC’s then-tallest structure, the 315-foot-tall Latting Observatory.
Unfortunately, the exhibition was a financial bust and closed in late 1854. The Crystal Palace itself burned to the ground in 1858, inadvertently making space for Reservoir Square to serve as an encampment for Union troops during the Civil War. Shortly after the war, in 1870, Reservoir Square was finally converted into a park, aptly named Reservoir Park.