The Angel of the Waters: Why Bethesda Fountain Celebrates a Pipe

Central Park is the beating heart of New York City, and the beating heart of Central Park is Bethesda Terrace. Of the two, the terrace has the calmer resting pulse.

Originally called the Water Terrace, it is the one place in Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s 1858 plan where the designers called for a sculpture. They imagined an idyllic gathering place where nineteenth-century New Yorkers could escape the grime of the city and take in the view across the Lake to the Ramble, the rugged network of outcrops and wooded paths to the north that Vaux described, approvingly, as an “irregular, disconnected, featureless conglomeration of ground.”

The star of the terrace is the Angel of the Waters, the statue at the center of the fountain. It was created by Emma Stebbins, the first woman to receive a public art commission in New York City, and it has been pouring water over four cherubs — health, purity, temperance and peace — since the taps were turned on in 1873.

What it commemorates is a pipe. The Croton Aqueduct, completed in 1842, carried clean drinking water forty-one miles into a city whose population and industrial waste were both booming, ending in a massive stone reservoir right here in Central Park that looked, in our tour guide’s words, like a supermax prison for the potable blessing of life. The aqueduct and reservoir are long gone, but the theme of water lives on at the terrace — and in 1947 the Navy re-dedicated it as the Navy Terrace in honor of the servicemen and women of the two world wars. Look for the dedication plaque set into the ground on the side of the fountain farthest from the Lake.

On the Central Park Space-Time Adventure Tour, Bethesda Fountain is where your Walkie-Talkie Time Machine first makes contact with a parallel timeline. Scan the fountain and see for yourself. There are two steps between the plaque and the fountain; the narration lets you know.