Lambert Castle, originally called Belle Vista, is located within the Garret Mountain Reservation in Paterson, Passaic County, New Jersey. The building was built in 1892 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 3, 1976 for its significance in art, architecture, and industry.
History
Lambert Castle was built in 1892 as the home of Catholina Lambert, the owner of a prominent silk mill in the City of Paterson. Constructed in the Medieval Revival architectural style, Mr. Lambert's dream was to build a home reminiscent of the castles in Great Britain that he remembered from his boyhood years. President William McKinley and Vice President Garret Hobart visited the castle in 1898. In June 1910, filmmaker D. W. Griffith shot The Call To Arms on the grounds. The film was released in July 1910. The cast included Mary Pickford (in her only male role) and Henry B. Walthall. Film Preservation Society, Inc. is currently restoring the film as part of The Biograph Project.
After Lambert's death in 1923, his family sold the building to the City of Paterson, which in turn sold it to Passaic County a few years later. Passaic County used the building for administrative offices, and in 1936, provided one room to the fledgling Passaic County Historical Society to serve as its historical museum. As time went by the museum grew, room by room, until the entire first floor became the historical museum.
In the late 1990s, the Castle underwent a multimillion-dollar restoration and all four floors of the building were developed into a museum and library.
Construction
Construction began on the castle in 1891. The castle was built on the side of the First Watchung Mountain out of sandstone and granite. The sandstone was quarried from the surrounding hills. The initial construction cost was estimated at a half a million dollars. In 1896, an art gallery was added to the castle and a 70-foot observation tower was constructed on the crest of the cliff.
The gallery wing fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1936. The observation tower was open to the public until the late 1960s when it was closed due to disrepair.
In 2014 the Garret Rock Observation tower renovations were completed and the observation tower was reopened to the public. Admission to the tower is free with panoramic views available from the top.

Lambert Castle

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Kip's Castle, is a 10-acre (40,000 m2) estate (8 acres in Verona, 2 acres (8,100 m2) in Montclair) on the ridge of First Mountain, on the border of Montclair and Verona townships. It contains a 9,000-square-foot (840 m2) mansion that replicates a medieval Norman castle, and a 6,000-square-foot (560 m2) two-story carriage house.
Originally built as a private residence, current plans for the estate include housing offices for various administrative functions for Essex County. However, the Castle's true purpose is to evolve into the County's premiere cultural resource center, supporting and promoting arts and culture throughout our region. Meeting space will be available for conservancies, community groups, and non-profit organizations. A calendar of ongoing educational programming will be developed, and museum space will be created to showcase the history of the Essex County Park System.
A twelve-member Advisory Board has been formed to provide recommendations about not only how to maintain and restore the estate, but also to develop ideas as to how this property can grow into a cultural asset for the community.
History
Kip's Castle, originally known as "Kypsburg," was constructed over a three-year period in the early 1900s by Frederic Ellsworth Kip and his wife, Charlotte Bishop Williams Kip. Frederic was a wealthy textile inventor and industrialist who also published several books related to United States tariff laws.
Charlotte is credited for the design of the "Kypsburg" building and grounds, cultivating an octagonal rose garden in the southwest corner of the property. After Charlotte's passing in 1926, the estate was sold and went through several owners, including Indian guru Osho in the 1980s, serving as a monastery.
The building and grounds fell into a state of dilapidation until the law firm of Schwartz, Tobia & Stanziale purchased the property in 1985. Up until 2005 a considerable amount of work was done to restore the Castle to its original grandeur. In the early 2000s, The lawfirm wanted to develop townhouses on the property, however, found itself in various legal complications and lawsuits with Verona, and in 2006, the property was placed on the market. As a result of grants from the NJ Green Acres Program and the Essex County Recreation and Open Space Trust Fund, the County of Essex purchased Kip's Castle in March 2007. The property is now part of the historic Essex County Park System.
Offices for the County Division of Cultural and Historic Affairs, the Essex County Recreation and Open Space Committee and Essex County Park Foundation will be located in the castle, which is also a meeting site for the twelve-member Kip's Castle Park Advisory Board appointed by the County Executive to provide guidance about the maintenance, restoration, activities, and growth of the facility as another asset for the Essex community. According to the county brochure, over time, Kip's Castle Park will become the County's premiere cultural resource center, supporting and promoting arts and culture throughout the region. Meeting space will be available for community groups, and non-profit organizations. A calendar of ongoing educational programming will be developed, and museum space will be created to showcase the history of the Essex County Park System.

Kip's Castle

Iviswold, also known as "The Castle", is a house originally constructed in 1869 located in what is now Rutherford, in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. It was placed on the List of Registered Historic Places in New Jersey on November 4, 2004. The house is part of the Rutherford campus of Felician College and underwent a renovation that was completed in 2013.
History
The home was built in 1869 by Floyd W. Tomkins who called it "Hill House". It was purchased in 1887 by David Brinkerhoff Ivison who greatly expanded it and gave the home the name "Iviswold". The expansion was designed by the architect William Henry Miller. Ivison died in 1903 and Iviswold was sold and resold multiple times. During this period the building was used by the Rutherford Union Club. In 1930 the building was owned by the Rutherford National Bank, then headed by Fairleigh S. Dickinson. In 1942 Fairleigh Dickinson University was created and held the first classes within Iviswold. As the university grew it built multiple college buildings around Iviswold, but by the late 1980s the college was outgrowing their Rutherford campus, which was closed in 1994 and sold along with Iviswold to Felician University in 1997. Felician University spent several years restoring the building to its original condition. The New Jersey Historic Trust contributed $1,550,000 to the restoration project.
Construction
The original home was a two-story stone house with a mansard roof. The 1887 remodeling of the house was inspired by the Château de Chaumont in Loir-et-Cher, France. The remodeling turned the building into a three-story turreted mansion with 25 rooms, including balconies, a music room and a porte-cochère. Local brownstone was used in the construction of the exterior walls. In the 1930s, an indoor pool was installed with a water tower built into the structure to supply it. In the 1970s, when Fairleigh Dickinson was using the building for classroom space, the college covered up much of the original interior with drop ceilings and partition walls.

Iviswold Castle

The Legacy Castle is dedicated to providing a story book setting for our brides to create the wedding of their dreams. From the moment your limousine enters our gated property you become royalty. As your driver winds up the drive way to the front door where white gloved doormen open the wrought iron embellished doors to your castle, you are greeted by your personal attendant in the grand entrance with winding stair cases, exquisite chandeliers, marble floors and lavish decorations, all leading to an elegant ballroom and your private bridal party quarters.  Every detail at The Legacy Castle is designed to leave you and your guests with a cherished memory that will last a lifetime.
The Legacy Castle is a truly unique, unparalleled romantic setting to celebrate momentous occasions. The castle exudes an aura of classic elegance and the grandeur of a royal palace, reminiscent of mansions built during the gilded age of the late 19th century.
Originally purchased in 1998, this project has been in process for quite some time. Envisioned by entrepreneur Mounir Badaan, this has been a family venture. With over 30 years of experience in real estate, Mounir Badaan has successfully developed land in the surrounding towns, and made a name for himself in the tri-state area. Ready to hand over the reigns to his children this will be Mounir Badaan’s last project, as it has been so aptly named.
https://thelegacycastle.com/

The Legacy Castle

The Cloisters, also known as the Met Cloisters, is a museum in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York City, specializing in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard in France before 1913, and moved to New York. Barnard's collection was bought for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer.
The museum's building was designed by the architect Charles Collens, on a site on a steep hill, with upper and lower levels. It contains medieval gardens and a series of chapels and themed galleries, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish and Gothic rooms. The design, layout, and ambiance of the building is intended to evoke a sense of medieval European monastic life. It holds about 5,000 works of art and architecture, all European and mostly dating from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods, mainly during the 12th through 15th centuries. The varied objects include stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, of which the best known include the c. 1422 Early Netherlandish Mérode Altarpiece and the c. 1495–1505 Flemish Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries.
Rockefeller purchased the museum site in Washington Heights in 1930, and donated it and the Bayard collection to the Metropolitan in 1931. Upon its opening on May 10, 1938, the Cloisters was described as a collection "shown informally in a picturesque setting, which stimulates imagination and creates a receptive mood for enjoyment".
History
Formation
The basis for the museum's architectural structure came from the collection of George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor and collector who almost single-handedly established a medieval art museum near his home in the Fort Washington section of Upper Manhattan. Although he was a successful sculptor who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, his income was not enough to support his family. Barnard was a risk taker and led most of his life on the edge of poverty. He moved to Paris in 1883 where he studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He lived in the village of Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, between 1905 and 1913, and began to deal in 13th- and 14th-century European objects to supplement his earnings. In the process he built a large personal collection of what he described as "antiques", at first by buying and selling stand-alone objects with French dealers, then by the acquisition of in situ architectural artifacts from local farmers.
George Barnard and Clare Sheridan at his cloister in New York City, 1921
Barnard was primarily interested in the abbeys and churches founded by monastic orders from the 12th century. Following centuries of pillage and destruction during wars and revolutions, stones from many of these buildings were reused by local populations. A pioneer in seeing the value in such artifacts, Barnard often met with hostility to his effort from local and governmental groups. Yet he was an astute negotiator who had the advantage of a professional sculptor's eye for superior stone carving, and by 1907 he had built a high-quality collection at relatively low cost. Reputedly he paid $25,000 for the Trie buildings, $25,000 for the Bonnefort and $100,000 for the Cuxa cloisters. His success led him to adopt a somewhat romantic view of himself. He recalled bicycling across the French countryside and unearthing fallen and long-forgotten Gothic masterworks along the way. He claimed to have found the tomb effigy of Jean d'Alluye face down, in use as a bridge over a small stream. By 1914 he had gathered enough artifacts to open a gallery in Manhattan.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1920
Barnard often neglected his personal finances, and was so disorganized that he often misplaced the origin or provenance of his purchases. He sold his collection to John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1925 during one of his recurring monetary crises. The two had been introduced by the architect William W. Bosworth. Purchased for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the acquisition included structures that would become the foundation and core of the museum. Rockefeller and Barnard were polar opposites in both temperament and outlook and did not get along; Rockefeller was reserved, Barnard exuberant. The English painter and art critic Roger Fry was then the Metropolitan's chief European acquisition agent and acted as an intermediary. Rockefeller eventually acquired Barnard's collection for around $700,000, retaining Barnard as an advisor.
In 1927 Rockefeller hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of one of the designers of Central Park, and the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a park in the Fort Washington area. In February 1930 Rockefeller offered to build the Cloisters for the Metropolitan. Under consultation with Bosworth, he decided to build the museum at a 66.5-acre (26.9 ha) site at Fort Tryon Park, which they chose for its elevation, views, and accessible but isolated location. The land and existing buildings were purchased that year from the C. K. G. Billings estate and other holdings in the Fort Washington area. The Cloisters building and adjacent 4-acre (1.6 ha) gardens were designed by Charles Collens. They incorporate elements from abbeys in Catalonia and France. Parts from Sant Miquel de Cuixà, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-sur-Baïse and Froville were disassembled stone-by-stone and shipped to New York City, where they were reconstructed and integrated into a cohesive whole. Construction took place over a five-year period from 1934. Rockefeller bought several hundred acres of the New Jersey Palisades, which he donated to the State in an effort to preserve the view from the museum. The Cloisters' new building and gardens were officially opened on May 10, 1938, though the public was not allowed to visit until four days later.
Collection
The museum's collection of artworks consists of approximately five thousand individual pieces. They are displayed across a series of rooms and spaces, mostly separate from those dedicated to the installed architectural artifacts. The Cloisters has never focused on building a collection of masterpieces, rather the objects are chosen thematically yet arranged simply to enhance the atmosphere created by the architectural elements in the particular setting or room in which they are placed. To create the atmosphere of a functioning series of cloisters, many of the individual works, including capitals, doorways, stained glass, and windows are placed within the architectural elements themselves.
Exterior
The building is set into a steep hill, and thus the rooms and halls are divided between an upper entrance and a ground-floor level. The enclosing exterior building is mostly modern, and is influenced by and contains elements from the 13th-century church at Saint-Geraud at Monsempron, France, from which the northeast end of the building borrows especially. It was mostly designed by the architect Charles Collens, who took influence from works in Barnard's collection. Rockefeller closely managed both the building's design and construction, which sometimes frustrated the architects and builders.
The building contains architecture elements and settings taken mostly from four French abbeys, which between 1934 and 1939 were transported, reconstructed, and integrated with new buildings in a project overseen by Collins. He told Rockefeller that the new building "should present a well-studied outline done in the very simplest form of stonework growing naturally out of the rocky hill-top. After looking through the books in the Boston Athenaeum ... we found a building at Monsempron in Southern France of a type which would lend itself in a very satisfactory manner to such a treatment."
The architects sought to both memorialize the north hill's role in the American Revolution and to provide a sweeping view over the Hudson River. Construction of the exterior began in 1935. The stonework, primarily of limestone and granite from several European sources, includes four Gothic windows from the refectory at Sens and nine arcades. The dome of the Fuentidueña Chapel was especially difficult to fit into the planned area. The east elevation, mostly of limestone, contains nine arcades from the Benedictine priory at Froville and four flamboyant French Gothic windows from the Dominican monastery at Sens.
Governance
The Cloisters is governed by the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan's collections are owned by a private corporation of about 950 fellows and benefactors. The board of trustees comprise 41 elected members, several officials of the City of New York, and persons honored as trustees by the museum. The current chairman of the board is the businessman and art collector Daniel Brodsky, who was elected in 2011,[156] having previously served on its Real Estate Council in 1984 as a trustee of the museum and Vice Chairman of the Buildings Committee.
Exhibitions and programs
The museum's architectural settings, atmosphere, and acoustics have made it a regular setting both for musical recitals and as a stage for medieval theater. Notable stagings include The Miracle of Theophilus in 1942, and John Gassner's adaption of The Second Shepherds' Play in 1954. Recent significant exhibitions include "Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures" which ran in the summer of 2017 in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Ontario and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
In popular culture
Since it opened in 1938, The Cloisters has been featured and referenced in many works of popular culture. One of the more prominent uses of the Cloisters as a setting took place in 1948, when director Maya Deren used its ramparts as a backdrop for her experimental film Meditation on Violence. That year, German director William Dieterle used the Cloisters as the location for a convent school in his film Portrait of Jennie. The 1968 film Coogan's Bluff used the site's pathways and lanes for a scenic motorcycle chase.

The Met Cloisters

The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain over 34 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than 2 million square feet (190,000 m2). AMNH has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about five million visits annually.
The mission statement of the American Museum of Natural History is: "To discover, interpret, and disseminate—through scientific research and education—knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe."
Founding
The American Museum of Natural History was housed in the Arsenal from 1869 until 1877.
Before the construction of the present complex, the museum was housed in the Arsenal building in Central Park. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. president, was one of the founders along with John David Wolfe, William T. Blodgett, Robert L. Stuart, Andrew H. Green, Robert Colgate, Morris K. Jesup, Benjamin H. Field, D. Jackson Steward, Richard M. Blatchford, J. P. Morgan, Adrian Iselin, Moses H. Grinnell, Benjamin B. Sherman, A. G. Phelps Dodge, William A. Haines, Charles A. Dana, Joseph H. Choate, Henry G. Stebbins, Henry Parish, and Howard Potter. The founding of the museum realized the dream of naturalist Dr. Albert S. Bickmore. Bickmore, a one-time student of zoologist Louis Agassiz, lobbied tirelessly for years for the establishment of a natural history museum in New York. His proposal, backed by his powerful sponsors, won the support of the Governor of New York, John Thompson Hoffman, who signed a bill officially creating the American Museum of Natural History on April 6, 1869.
Construction
In 1874, the cornerstone was laid for the museum's first building, which is now hidden from view by the many buildings in the complex that today occupy most of Manhattan Square. The original Victorian Gothic building, which was opened in 1877, was designed by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould, both already closely identified with the architecture of Central Park.
Expansion
The original building was soon eclipsed by the south range of the museum, designed by J. Cleaveland Cady, an exercise in rusticated brownstone neo-Romanesque, influenced by H. H. Richardson. It extends 700 feet (210 m) along West 77th Street, with corner towers 150 feet (46 m) tall. Its pink brownstone and granite, similar to that found at Grindstone Island in the St. Lawrence River, came from quarries at Picton Island, New York.
The entrance on Central Park West, the New York State Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt, completed by John Russell Pope in 1936, is an overscaled Beaux-Arts monument. It leads to a vast Roman basilica, where visitors are greeted with a cast of a skeleton of a rearing Barosaurus defending her young from an Allosaurus. The museum is also accessible through its 77th Street foyer, renamed the "Grand Gallery" and featuring a fully suspended Haida canoe. The hall leads into the oldest extant exhibit in the museum, the hall of Northwest Coast Indians.
Later additions, restorations, and renovations
Since 1930, little has been added to the exterior of the original building. The architect Kevin Roche and his firm Roche-Dinkeloo have been responsible for the master planning of the museum since the 1990s. Various renovations to both the interior and exterior have been carried out. Renovations to the Dinosaur Hall were undertaken beginning in 1991, and the museum also restored the mural in Roosevelt Memorial Hall in 2010. In 1992 the Roche-Dinkeloo firm designed the eight-story AMNH Library. However, the entirety of the master plan was ultimately not fully realized, and by 2015, the museum consisted of 25 separate buildings that were poorly connected.
The museum's south façade, spanning 77th Street from Central Park West to Columbus Avenue was cleaned, repaired, and re-emerged in 2009. Steven Reichl, a spokesman for the museum, said that work would include restoring 650 black-cherry window frames and stone repairs. The museum's consultant on the latest renovation is Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., an architectural and engineering firm with headquarters in Northbrook, Illinois.
In 2014, the museum published plans for a $325 million, 195,000-square-foot (18,100 m2) annex, the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, on the Columbus Avenue side.Designed by Studio Gang, Higgins Quasebarth & Partners and landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand, the new building's pink Milford granite facade will have a textural, curvilinear design inspired by natural topographical elements showcased in the museum, including "geological strata, glacier-gouged caves, curving canyons, and blocks of glacial ice," as a striking contrast to the museum's predominance of High Victorian Gothic, Richardson Romanesque and Beaux Arts architectural styles. The interior itself would contain a new entrance from Columbus Avenue north of 79th Street; a multiple-story storage structure containing specimens and objects; rooms to display these objects; an insect hall; an "interpretive" "wayfinding wall", and a theater. This expansion was originally supposed to be south of the existing museum, occupying parts of Theodore Roosevelt Park. The expansion was relocated to the west side of the existing museum, and its footprint was reduced in size, due to opposition to construction in the park. The annex would instead replace three existing buildings along Columbus Avenue's east side, with more than 30 connections to the existing museum, and it would be six stories high, the same height as the existing buildings. The plans for the expansion were scrutinized by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. On October 11, 2016, the Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously approved the expansion. Construction of the Gilder Center, which was expected to break ground the next year following design development and Environmental Impact Statement stages, would entail demolition of three museum buildings built between 1874 and 1935. The museum formally filed plans to construct the expansion in August 2017, but due to community opposition, construction did not start until June 2019. The project is expected to be complete by 2022.
Presidents
The museum's first two presidents were John David Wolfe (1870–1872) and Robert L. Stuart (1872–1881), both among the museum's founders. The museum was not put on a sound footing until the appointment of the third president, Morris K. Jesup (also one of the original founders), in 1881. Jesup was president for over 25 years, overseeing its expansion and much of its golden age of exploration and collection. The fourth president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was appointed in 1906 on the death of Jesup. Osborn consolidated the museum's expansion, developing it into one of the world's foremost natural history museums. F. Trubee Davison was president from 1933 to 1951, with A. Perry Osborn as Acting President from 1941 to 1946. Alexander M. White was president from 1951 to 1968. Gardner D. Stout was president from 1968 to 1975. Robert Guestier Goelet from 1975 to 1988. George D. Langdon, Jr. from 1988 to 1993. Ellen V. Futter has been president of the museum since 1993.
Associated names
Famous names associated with the museum include the paleontologist and geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn; the dinosaur-hunter of the Gobi Desert, Roy Chapman Andrews (one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones); photographer Yvette Borup Andrews; George Gaylord Simpson; biologist Ernst Mayr; pioneer cultural anthropologists Franz Boas and Margaret Mead; explorer and geographer Alexander H. Rice, Jr.; and ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy. J. P. Morgan was also among the famous benefactors of the museum.
The museum is at 79th Street and Central Park West, accessible via the B and ​C trains of the New York City Subway. There is a low-level floor direct access into the museum via the 81st Street–Museum of Natural History subway station on the IND Eighth Avenue Line at the south end of the upper platform (where uptown trains arrive).
On a pedestal outside the museum's Columbus Avenue entrance is a stainless steel time capsule, which was created after a design competition that was won by Santiago Calatrava. The capsule was sealed at the beginning of 2000, to mark the beginning of the 3rd millennium. It takes the form of a folded saddle-shaped volume, symmetrical on multiple axes, that explores formal properties of folded spherical frames. Calatrava described it as "a flower". The plan is that the capsule will be opened in the year 3000.
The museum is in a 17-acre (69,000 m2) city park known as Theodore Roosevelt.

American Museum of Natural History

Belvedere Castle is a folly in Central Park in Manhattan, New York City. It contains exhibit rooms and an observation deck, and since 1919, has also housed the official Central Park weather station.
Belvedere Castle was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1867–1869. An architectural hybrid of Gothic and Romanesque styles, Vaux's design called for a Manhattan schist and granite structure with a corner tower with conical cap, with the existing lookout over parapet walls between them. Its name comes from belvedere, which means "beautiful view" in Italian.
Design
Belvedere Castle was originally built as a shell with open doorway and window openings. The main tower was given a more medieval design, with a weather antenna on top, but during the castle's 1983 renovation, the tower was restored to a German style with a flag, a weather vane, and an anemometer on top. The two fanciful half-timbered wooden pavilions deteriorated without painting and upkeep and were removed before 1900.
Starting in 1919, Belvedere Castle housed the New York Meteorological Observatory, which had been taken over by the United States Weather Bureau. The current weather station in Central Park, an Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS), is located immediately south of the castle, though wind equipment is still located on the main tower.
The castle caps Vista Rock, a 130-foot-tall (40 m) outcropping of schist and the park's second-highest natural elevation. (Summit Rock, at 83rd Street overlooking Central Park West, is higher at 137.5 feet (41.9 m).) Constructed of Manhattan schist quarried in the park and dressed with gray granite, it tops the natural-looking woodlands of The Ramble, as seen from the formal Bethesda Terrace. The natural rock was tunneled through for the innovative sunken transverse roadway that still carries commercial and other traffic unobtrusively through the park.
The castle serves now as a visitor center and gift shop. Free family and community programs hosted at Belvedere Castle include birding and other Central Park Conservancy discovery programs for families as well as a variety of history and natural history programs led by NYC Urban Park Rangers, including stargazing/astronomy and wildlife-education events.
The eastern elevation formerly faced a rectangular receiving reservoir that was part of the Croton Aqueduct system. The reservoir was filled in with city building rubble, beginning with spoil from construction of the New York City Subway's IND Eighth Avenue Line (now carrying the A, ​B, ​C, and ​D trains) in the 1930s. Today, the eastern elevation overlooks the Great Lawn and Turtle Pond, which occupies the former site of the receiving reservoir.
History
The castle was designed by the architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould as an additional feature of the Greensward Plan, created by Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted and Vaux were re-hired to their positions in mid-1865 after quitting abruptly several years before. In 1867, Vaux decided to develop this area by building Belvedere Castle on the top of the rock, overlooking the Croton Reservoir. The site already held a fire tower under the control of the Croton Aqueduct board, and so the fire tower was demolished.
The original plans for Belvedere Castle called for two turreted stone towers: a larger structure on the eastern elevation and a smaller structure on the west side. Under Tammany Hall's leadership, it was revised in November 1870 to reduce costs and was completed as an open painted-wood pavilion. The eastern structure was completed by 1871, while the western structure was never built. As the plantings matured, the castle has been obscured from its original intended viewpoint. Its turret is the highest point in the park.
After the New York Meteorological Observatory automated its equipment and moved its offices to Rockefeller Center in the 1960s, Belvedere Castle was closed to the public and became an object of much vandalism, neglect and deterioration. The Central Park Conservancy launched a restoration effort and reopened the structure on May 1, 1983. The original turret was replaced, the pavilions were rebuilt, and the castle was converted into a visitor center. In 1995, the Conservancy's Historic Preservation Crew replaced the painted wooden loggia of the castle, working from Vaux's designs, on the granite piers and walls that had survived. The same year, a $340,000 grant was distributed toward restoring the castle as the Henry Luce Nature Center. That restoration was completed in 1996.
In 2018, the Central Park Conservancy conducted a second renovation of Belvedere Castle. Plans included replacing existing doors and windows with double paned glass. In addition the Conservancy proposed to construct a new access path to ADA standards from the East Drive. The access path − actually an elevated ramp with parapets − has been criticized as creating an unnecessary barrier in the otherwise naturalistic park. Following the $12 million renovation, the castle reopened on June 28, 2019.