Calvert Vaux

Calvert Vaux was a London trained architect who came to America in 1850, and it was his idea to enter the Central Park competition with Frederick Law Olmsted. Vaux designed the park's bridges, arches and buildings so that each one sits into the landscape rather than on top of it, and the two men went on to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

His buildings hide in plain sight on our New York walks. The Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village, all towers and patterned brick, was built as a courthouse by Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers. The Metropolitan Museum swallowed his original 1880 building as it grew; you can still see its brick west front indoors, in the Robert Lehman Wing. And Columbus Park in Chinatown, built where the Mulberry Bend slum was torn down, was planned by him and opened in 1897, two years after he drowned in Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn.