A Forum for Diary Entries, Essays, Observations, Poetry, News, and Reviews
March 10th, 2025
How does a fledgling not-for-profit civic organization assume responsibility for the permanent horticultural care of a 830-acre public park in which lawns and meadows need regular mowing and periodic re-sodding; shrub beds call for regular weeding, composting, and replanting; and trees demand to be pruned and inspected for insect-borne diseases? Geri Weinstein, The Central Park Conservancy’s first head of horticulture, hired and oversaw the work of other employees in these areas of sound landscape maintenance. Her story in her own voice is that of a savior. READ MORE >
February 28th, 2025
Back in the 1980s when the recently incorporated not-for-profit Central Park Conservancy was building a substantial donor base and was able to offer field-operations jobs, ancillary staff duties, and contracts for special projects, the manual and intellectual skills, aesthetic sensibilities, and visions for the Park’s betterment as a naturalistic landscape offering opportunities for both active and passive recreation were evident in the work performed by some of its highly gifted employees. One of the primary saviors of Central Park in this era of its 167-year history was David Robinson, whose expertise as a self-taught woodworking artist brought about the rebuilding of the rustic structures that originally graced the Park, thereby providing a legacy for today’s rustic structures restoration crew. READ MORE >
January 25th, 2025
As Homo sapiens we leave our mark on the places we design, remodel, destroy, and restore. Some places, which are broadly cherished, slide into oblivion through the indifference that turns the meaning place into the use space as a receptacle where “Anything goes” is more than a Cole Porter song title. Can such places be revived? Such was true in the case of Central Park. To learn how this came to pass take a walk with me and the writer Eugene Kinkead, author of Central Park: The Birth, Decline, and Renewal of a National Treasure. READ MORE >
January 11th, 2025
“Let’s get our secrets out in the open,” has a familiar ring. If this rule is made relevant with regard to the wildlife in Central Park, we must follow in the footsteps of some of the former and present-day regular human habitués among whom some are authors who have been intellectually and emotionally, as well as visually, engaged in making daily contact with the Park’s often-elusive permanent and migratory wildlife. My deeply rewarding friendship with a Central Park “regular” named Lambert Pohner, a knowledgeable amateur naturalist and passionate Central Park devotee, is evident in this entry’s transcribed selections from the four hard-bound account books in which a total of 804 pages with 34 lines to a page bearing my handwriting in the weekly entries I made between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 1991. In this post, meet Lambert and experience my love of the Park being nourished by lessons in the nature of Nature combined with its nurture and respect for Olmsted and Vaux’s picturesquely naturalistic design. READ MORE >
December 21st, 2024
“What's in a name?” queries Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet.” Note this one: The 840 acres assigned to Central Park was due to the fact of its location within the surrounds of the middle reservoir of the Croton Aqueduct’s chain of receiving and distributing water basins (during its existence between 1842 and 1955) is the result of the mid-nineteenth-century advocacy by citizen proponents for the creation of a recreational open space to be achieved by the exemption from private ownership of platted lots between Fifth and Eighth Avenues from 59th Street to 106th Street, an area heretofore within the confines of New York City’s official grid plan for laying out intersecting thoroughfares of streets and avenues. The Central Park, published in 1926 by as a civic group named The Central Park Association, whose mission was almost identical to that of the Central Park Conservancy more than half a century later, provides an excellent history of the advocacy, design, and building of the park. Of special interest, the second half contains complete descriptions of the honorifically bestowed names of each of the park’s eighteen entrance gates as a means of burnishing the image of New York City as a great metropolis filled with population of diligent citizens of various trades and occupations. In this post, follow in the footsteps of the committees that chose the names of the entrances to Central Park. READ MORE >
December 5th, 2024
“Rus in Urbe” (countryside within the city)? People’s Park? Lovers’ Retreat? Birdwatchers Paradise? Central Park wears all of these labels. Its building and rebuilding as a scenic recreational amenity par excellence is an ongoing story that does not grow old since its administration under the aegis of the public-private partnership of the New York City Department of Parks and the Central Park Conservancy, moves in an ongoing line of success stories. For Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence, the Central Park Mall is what its designers intended: a promenade for an engaged upper-class couple’s Sunday afternoon walk. For Henry James, the quintessential literary expatriate, it is an eye-opener on the success of New York City as an example of American democracy seen in its best light. READ MORE >
Share
