Tavern On the Green
Victorian sheepfold-turned-restaurant famed for theatrical excess and crystal chandeliers.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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