Ballplayers House on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
Ballplayers House is a building in
The Ballplayers House is decorated with an encaustic tile
File:BOYS PLAY HOUSE.jpg, Boys Play House, built in 1868 and demolished in 1969.
File:1868 Vaux ^ Olmstead Map of Central Park, New York City - Geographicus - CentralPark-CentralPark-1869 (Showing Playground).jpg, 1868 Map of Central Park, showing the Boys Play House just south (left) of "Road No. 1"
File:BOYS PLAY HOUSE 1868.jpg, Ball Field and Boys Play House, 1869
File:1870 Stereoscope Ballplayers House.jpg, An 1870 Stereoscope view of the Boys Playground with architect Calvert Vaux's Boys Play House in the distance.
File:Ballplayers House 1871.jpg, A sketch of the Boys Playground in 1871
File:BOYS PLAY HOUSE CENTRAL PARK.jpg, A View of the Boys Play House
Ballplayers House is a building in Central Park
Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West Side, Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the List of New York City parks, fifth-largest park in the city, covering . It is the most visited urban par ...
in Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
, New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, designed by the architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis. Completed in 1990, it replaced an older building, architect Calvert Vaux
Calvert Vaux (; December 20, 1824 – November 19, 1895) was an English-American architect and landscape designer, best known as the co-designer, along with his protégé and junior partner Frederick Law Olmsted, of what would become New York Ci ...
's Boys Play House of 1868, which stood on the northern edge of the Heckscher Ballfields until it was demolished in 1969. Vaux's building was a long clubhouse and dispensary for bats and balls, whereas Buttrick White & Burtis' building is a food concession half the size of the original.
Design
The Ballplayers House recalls Vaux's design, albeit much altered in form and detail. In contrast to the brick and bluestone facade of Vaux's building, with its pointed arches and polychromevoussoir
A voussoir () is a wedge-shaped element, typically a stone, which is used in building an arch or vault.
Although each unit in an arch or vault is a voussoir, two units are of distinct functional importance: the keystone and the springer. The ...
s, the facade of Ballplayers House is composed with graphic stripes of highly contrasting brick. In lieu of Vaux's bracketed eaves, pointed pinnacles and chamfered chimney, the new building boasts a simple roofline, topped with a sleek, factory-made metal cresting.
The Ballplayers House is decorated with an encaustic tile frieze
In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...
with a simple flower motif symbolizing a ball-field, and a zig-zag pattern symbolizing a bouncing ball, designed by William W. Braham and fabricated by Brenda Bertin. In 2007, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers (born 1936) is an environmentalist, landscape preservationist, author of numerous books and essays, and a former park administrator. Her most notable achievement was her role in the revitalization of New York City’s Cen ...
, head of the Central Park Conservancy
The Central Park Conservancy is a private, nonprofit park conservancy that manages Central Park under a contract with the City of New York and NYC Parks. The conservancy employs most maintenance and operations staff in the park. It effectively ...
when the Ballplayers House was built, described its design as "a contemporary interpretation of Vaux's style."Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, "Robert Moses and the Transformation of Central Park." ''Site/Lines, A Journal of Place'' (Fall 2007), Volume III, No. 1.
Historic gallery
References
{{Coord, 40, 46, 13.08, N, 73, 58, 33.3, W, display=title Central Park Buildings and structures in Manhattan Postmodern architecture in New York City New Classical architecture