A Forum for Diary Entries, Essays, Observations, Poetry, News, and Reviews
June 29th, 2024
In addition to being a recreational resource for people, Central Park’s landscape harbors niches that serve as welcoming sites for the habitation and procreation of certain species of wildlife, including the turtle known as a red-eared slider. Its propagation process is a rarely observed and fascinating spectacle to behold. READ MORE >
May 9th, 2024
You don’t have to live in a grand English mansion on a huge country estate to name the place according to its antiquity, design distinction, prestige of its proprietors, and pleasure for visitors who appreciated the fusion of nature and art as a pinnacle of cultural tourism exemplifying the Romantic movement’s influence on landscape design. In opposition to this aristocratic attitude is the ideal of a democratic landscape such as the one you find in the heart of New York City’s borough of Manhattan. To advocate an infusion of non-urban rurality as a counterbalance to the bustling city surrounding the park Frederick Law Olmsted appropriated the epithet “rus in urbe, to denote the countryside within the city. Although no Latin linguist, I was sufficiently in accord with the characterization of the park as place where countryside fused with the city to create a landscape in which farm fields and forested lands could be incorporated into a metropolitan setting that I decided to honor Olmsted’s observation in the following sonnets. READ MORE >
April 12th, 2024
Central Park is a great work of land art in its own right, which during the course of time has become a showcase for memorial statues honoring literary, cultural, and political figures famous in the public eye and other sculptures including ones of animals inspired by the park as a setting for display or famous in the popular imagination as characters in children’s stories. READ MORE >
March 12th, 2024
Consider Central Park to be something more than New York City’s prime recreational open space but also, as is the case in this website’s current series of postings, a showplace containing works of art that have been assimilated into a landscape that is a work of art in and of itself. When we think of the various parts of the park that have acquired sculptures and other forms of focused display as well as historic preservation and restoration projects that preserve their original appearances, we inevitably turn to the heart of an American masterpiece in its own right and find the Bethesda Terrace, Arcade, and Fountain over which an Angel with outspread wings presides as a symbol of both the healing of sickness, injury, and infirmity following divine intervention and the blessing sent via the Croton Aqueduct since its opening in 1842 upon all residents and visitors to New York City who drink pure water from a supply system emanating in upstate New York. READ MORE >
February 23rd, 2024
Public space is often considered as a desirable receptacle for memorial monuments and artistic sculptures created for outdoor display. While being a work of art in its own right, Central Park can also be considered as an outdoor museum with four additional wings – Frederick Douglas Circle at 110th Street and Central Park West; Duke Ellington Circle at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue; The Maine Monument plaza at Columbus Circle; and Grand Army plaza at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. READ MORE >
February 3rd, 2024
Historical reverence begets memorials of persons of patriotic and moral leadership, political righteousness, valor in military battle, and figures of religious influence and scientific genius. Before and after the Civil War drastically altered the social, economic, and cultural conditions of the nation, American artists, many of whom were trained in Italy, adopted individual styles in which naturalism played a role not only in sculptural portraiture but also with regard to animals, creating an entire genre of beguiling beasts in bronze. READ MORE >
Share
