Antique & Vintage Postcards

A rustic log-sided greenhouse nestles among formal flower beds alive with red and gold blooms in this richly hand-tinted early-twentieth-century view of Central Park's now-vanished nursery garden — a scene so pastoral it is hard to believe the brick apartment blocks of the Upper West Side loom just beyond the tree line. Central Park's greenhouse and propagation nursery, located near 104th Street, supplied the park's legendary plantings for decades before being demolished in the early twentieth century, making photographic and postcard records of it genuinely scarce historical documents. The warm peachy-rose sunset sky behind the urban skyline gives the card a dreamlike quality characteristic of the German-printed "divided back" era, when chromolithographic skill was at its height and a penny postcard could feel like a small painting. Published by the Century Post Card & Novelty Co. of New York, this undivided-back transitional card would have been a souvenir prized by any visitor to the park around the time of the great Olmsted and Vaux centennial.