Tavern On the Green

This guide to Tavern on the Green in Central Park traces the 1956 standoff when a group of mothers camped out with strollers and dogs to save a wooded lot next door from becoming a parking lot, facing off against Robert Moses, the city's most powerful builder. It reaches back to the building's start as a sheepfold, where forty-nine sheep grazed until Moses evicted them in 1934 to open the restaurant. Decades later restaurateur Warner LeRoy poured a fortune into crystal chandeliers and a glass-enclosed garden room, calling a restaurant a kind of living theater.