Bethesda Terrace: The Only Minton Tile Ceiling in the World

Bethesda Terrace sits at the geographic and architectural heart of Central Park. The grand staircase descends from the Mall on the south to the plaza beside the Lake on the north. The Angel of the Waters fountain stands in the centre of the lower plaza. Most visitors descend the staircase, cross the plaza, photograph the fountain, and walk on toward Bow Bridge. They do not look up.

The ceiling they walked under, on the way down, is the only known suspended Minton encaustic tile ceiling in the world. There is no second example anywhere. Fifteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-six hand-fired English tiles, arranged in forty-nine panels of three hundred and twenty-four tiles each, hang above the lower arcade in a single coherent decorative scheme. The reason it is the only one is that nobody has ever again attempted to suspend Minton encaustic tilework as a ceiling at this scale. The material was designed for floors. It is heavy. It is brittle. It is durable underfoot for centuries but it is structurally hostile to overhead installation. Bethesda did it once, in 1869, and the world has not done it again.

This is the architectural climax of the original Greensward Plan. To understand why, you have to know what the original plan was for, who designed Bethesda, and what the Minton ceiling was meant to do that the rest of the park could not.

The Greensward Plan, the Terrace, and the architects

In April 1858, the Central Park Commission awarded the $2,000 first prize in the United States' first landscape design competition to plan number 33. The plan had been submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted, the park's superintendent, and Calvert Vaux, an English-born architect Olmsted had partnered with. The submission was called the Greensward Plan. The Commission had asked for separation of pedestrian, equestrian, and vehicular traffic; for a formal "promenade" and an "open air hall of reception" at the centre of the park; for sunken transverse roads to carry crosstown traffic across the park without breaking the pastoral illusion above. The Greensward Plan delivered all of it.

Bethesda Terrace was the open-air hall of reception. The Promenade, today called the Mall, was the formal axial allée of American elms that led to it. The Terrace itself was the architectural anchor that made the rest of the park's deliberate informality legible by contrast. The original plan called for a grand horizontal masonry composition descending into the Lake plaza, with a fountain at its centre and a covered arcade running underneath it. Vaux was the lead architect. The bulk of the design work, especially the decorative programme, was carried out by Jacob Wrey Mould, an Anglo-American architect of extraordinary virtuosity who had trained in London on the South Kensington Museum project and brought that decorative literacy with him to New York.

Mould is responsible for the figurative carvings on the staircase balustrades that read as a year-cycle: birds, fruits, harvest scenes for the four seasons, witches and bats for Halloween, owls for night. Each panel is a separate composition. None of them repeats exactly. They were carved on site between 1859 and 1864 by stonecutters working from Mould's drawings.

Mould is also responsible for the Minton ceiling.

The Minton ceiling

The English firm Minton Hollins and Company, based in Stoke-on-Trent in the English Midlands, was the largest producer of encaustic floor tiles in the world by the 1860s. Encaustic tiles are made by pressing two or more colours of clay into a mould, then firing them so the colours fuse permanently and a pattern is created that runs the full thickness of the tile. The technique is medieval; Minton revived it in the 1830s for floor installations in churches, public buildings, and country houses across the British Empire. By 1865, Minton tiles were on the floors of the Palace of Westminster, the Smithsonian Institution Building, and dozens of cathedrals.

Mould specified Minton tiles for the ceiling of the Bethesda lower arcade. The order was placed in 1865. The tiles were fired in Stoke-on-Trent, shipped to New York, and installed in 1869.

The decorative scheme is a single coherent composition. Forty-nine panels, each containing three hundred and twenty-four individual tiles, are arranged in a ten-by-five grid above the arcade. The total tile count is 15,876. The colour palette is restrained: terracotta reds, deep blues, ochres, creams. The pattern is geometric and floral, with formal motifs in each panel and decorative bands running between panels. The total ceiling area is approximately seven hundred and eighty square metres.

The structural challenge was significant. Floor tiles are designed to be installed on a continuous, well-supported substrate. A ceiling is the opposite condition. The Bethesda installation suspended the tiles from a structural framework of cast iron beams and brick vaulting, set in mortar from below. Each tile carries its own weight plus the weight of the bonding mortar plus the live loads on the surface above (the upper Terrace, which carries pedestrian traffic). The installation required a hybrid construction method that has not, by any documented record, been attempted again for an exterior overhead encaustic tile composition at this scale.

The ceiling closed to the public around 1987 because falling fragments had begun to constitute a safety hazard. A complete restoration, undertaken by the Central Park Conservancy, ran from 2003 to 2007 and removed every tile, conserved the framework underneath, replaced cracked tiles with newly-made Minton tiles produced by the original firm from the original moulds, and rehung the ceiling. The arcade reopened in 2007 for the first time in twenty years.

The Angel of the Waters

The fountain in the centre of the lower plaza is a separate piece of art on its own. The Angel of the Waters was sculpted by Emma Stebbins, an American sculptor working in Rome, and dedicated in 1873. The fountain commemorates the 1842 Croton Aqueduct, which brought the city its first reliable supply of clean fresh water and ended the cholera epidemics that had killed thousands of New Yorkers in the 1830s and 1840s. The angel stands on a base of four cherubs representing health, purity, temperance, and peace.

Stebbins received the commission directly from the Park Commission. It was the first major public art commission given to a woman in New York City history, and one of the first in the United States. The sculpture was modelled in Rome between 1864 and 1872, cast in bronze in Munich, and installed in 1873. The pose of the angel, with one foot lifted, makes literal reference to the Pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John, where an angel troubled the water and the first sick person to step in was healed. The fountain's name and the terrace's name come from the biblical scene.

Stebbins's brother, Henry Stebbins, was president of the Central Park Commission during the commission and installation. Emma Stebbins had also been the partner of the actress Charlotte Cushman for more than a decade by the time the fountain was commissioned. The biographical context is now relatively well-documented and is part of the standard interpretive material at the site.

What to look for

Stand at the top of the staircase, on the upper Terrace, facing north toward the Lake. The carved balustrades on either side of you are Mould's year-cycle composition. Walk down slowly and read them as you descend. Birds in spring on the south side, summer fruits, autumn harvest, winter witches; the cycle reverses on the opposite balustrade. Each panel is a separate carved composition.

Stop at the bottom of the staircase, under the arcade, before stepping out into the lower plaza. This is the moment most visitors miss. Look up.

The ceiling above you is the Minton tilework. Stand still and let your eye track across one panel, then the next. The colour palette reads cooler than you expect, terracottas mostly, with deep blue accents. The geometry is precise. The pattern repeats panel to panel with small variations. The light coming through the arcade openings on either side shifts the colours throughout the day. The best light is mid-morning, when the sun comes in from the south through the arches and lights the ceiling from below.

Then step out into the lower plaza and walk to the Angel. The fountain is on, in season, from April through October. The pose of the angel, the four cherubs at the base, the references to the Croton Aqueduct are all visible at close range.

Look back south toward the staircase from the fountain. The architectural composition is complete from this angle. Upper Terrace, balustrades with Mould's carvings, the staircase, the arcade with the Minton ceiling above it, the Angel of the Waters in the foreground, the Lake behind you. This is the open-air hall of reception the 1858 plan called for. It is the one part of the original Greensward Plan that has survived, in working form, with its original decorative programme intact, for one hundred and fifty-three years.

The rest of Central Park is engineered landscape. Bethesda is engineered architecture. The two together are the laboratory at its full original ambition.

The Minton ceiling is what proves it. Most people never see it. You can.