"Central Park Music" (New York: H. B. Dodworth, 1863), Music Division.
John Sullivan Dwight records in Dwight's Journal (see note14) that in 1862 band concerts in Central Park were paid for to increase fare income by transporting out-of-town concertgoers. This lithograph shows the south end of the park in an opulent and festive series of vignettes that transports us back to a time before skyscrapers--but belies the fact that the very opulence portrayed was a product of Northern industrial expansion encouraged by a nation dedicated to the pursuit of a tragic civil war. The participants in the idyllic scenes portrayed here were unaware that the new principles of the war from which many were probably the immediate economic beneficiaries would have included the fair-and-square obliteration of their park, their homes, and themselves if the technological and logistical means had been available.