Journal

A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part Seven

There is no public recognition so rewarding to its recipient as that which delves dispassionately into her life as a torchbearer for a vision that steadily materializes into a self-perpetuating reality. It is time therefore for me to re-acquaint my readers with Eugene Kinkead, the quintessential New Yorker magazine journalist and author of A Concrete Look at Nature: Central Park (and other) Glimpses (Quadrangle, 1974) by introducing into this journal entry another literary outcome of his great passion: Central Park, 1858–1995: The Birth, Decline, and Renewal of a National Treasure (Norton, 1990). Here is Kinkead’s voice in the introduction, saying:

When my serious interest in Central Park first began, I often had to trek over mud-covered paths, past graffiti-marred, vandalized structures, beside unpruned trees and patches of bare ground. Melancholy are those memories. Now, however, a brighter day has come, Central Park is undergoing a protracted period of renewal. The cost in dollars will be scores of millions. But when it is finished, Central Park will be as close to the inspired dreams of its planners and the desires of its present users as modern conditions allow.

In writing about the Park’s birth, decline, and present rehabilitation, I have received much useful assistance, which came equally from the Parks Department and the Central Park Conservancy. The staffs of both have been consistently cooperative. But I must single out especially Parks Commissioner Henry Stern and the Conservancy’s Central Park Administrator Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. Of their personnel, I have leaned most heavily upon Gary Zarr, the Parks Department’s press officer, and Sara Cedar Miller, the Conservancy’s photographer.

However, I must not forget the two heads of the Conservancy itself, William S. Beinecke, the first chairman, and James. H. Evans, his successor. Both have been as approachable as any author could ask.

Indeed, one of the most heartening features of Central Park today is the existence of the Conservancy, a relatively new development. A group of public-spirited citizens form its board and committees. They are not only raising millions of dollars annually – from individuals, corporations, and foundations – but are promising to continue this aid to the restoration of the Park into the indefinite future. Such munificent help virtually assures that the Park will not revert to its once-sorry condition. Furthermore, each year the Conservancy is persuading thousands of the Park’s public users to contribute by becoming members of the Conservancy.

And this is of supreme importance. If Central Park is to be – and to remain – the place we all want it to be, its users, and particularly the committed, must sustain and protect it.

Kinkead implicitly maintains that as sentient creatures homo sapiens are attuned to seasonality and that the Park serves the function of a psychological barometer as well as an official meteorological one, which has been the case from its inception up to the present day. The echo of Olmsted’s metaphor “Rus in Urbe” is heard in Kinkead’s voice, which is also that of a romanticist as he points out that to New Yorkers Central Park is:

A wondrous slice of nature smuggled into the city by sleight of hand. In the verdant world of the growing season, the Park becomes a shimmering green jewel in the forehead of Manhattan. With the burst of vegetation in the spring, the resurrection of the whole vegetable race occurs almost miraculously amid the surrounding lifeless brick and stone. Fresh new leaves and small half-hidden flowers grace the trees’ branches. The disparate crowns are ragged, rounded, comical, or vast clouds of green. Birds in nuptial plumage rest and sing among them. Insects buzz there, seeking the tiny sylvan blossoms, Here and there, high up the trunks, in cavities nature naturally makes, young squirrels a month or two old peer inquisitively from their aeries. On the ground, the water bodies form inlays of cerulean-bright lapis lazuli amid a matrix of enameled green. Many of the mild, clear nights find treetops silver under moon births over the eastern skyline. Day by day, inexorably, the green umbrella steadily thickens, auguring those deep shades that in the weary heats of July and August will cool the visitor and refresh the air.

In the months of bleak, cold weather, with snow on the ground and the skaters, the rocks, vast presences, half-hidden during the growing season, now come into their annual prominence amid the leafless trees or show through crannies between the evergreens, enormous personalities lying there, quiescent, bulky, and overpowering, under the breath of the wintry winds whose perfume is raw ice. Now sweeps into the Park one of the happiest of its throngs, the children with their sleds, like so many brightly colored snowbirds, laughing as they coast the knolls. 

This activity is only one of many that the Park affords its users. Others are the picnic spreads in the summer on the Great Lawn before the evening performances of grand opera, or the Shakespearean productions in the Delacorte Theater. And the jollity that surrounds such ethnic celebrations as Puerto Rican Day that are held here. Then there are individual freelance doings such as sketching, rowing, and biking. The Park in all likelihood offers more activities for visitors than any park in the world.

Kinkead’s four chapters falling under the rubric “The Gold and Silver Ages” (1857–1911) covering the Park’s history from inception in 1857 through the various stages of its design and building up unto 1989 when the book went to press, are a “must” for the reader who wishes to know the personalities and talents of the key figures who presided over the Park’s design and creation.

Here is a history with a manifest hero – Frederick Law Olmsted – and a related set of actors with the skills to turn his vision into reality. Olmsted, who had, out of financial necessity, accepted the position of superintendent of the clearing operations of the surveyed and mapped land that had been set aside for a park in the heart of New York City had an intimate knowledge of its existing topography, vegetation, soil composition, and rainwater drainage patterns. Enter Calvert Vaux, “a doll-like man four feet eight inches in height, a British-born-and-trained architect” who was “despite his diminutive stature, a forceful and novel character and although difficult to classify, essentially an original artist, conscientious, and independent to a fault, yet any obstinacy was not the result of vanity but a belief in the correctness of his view.” Vaux realized Olmsted’s circumstantial aptitude to be his partner in the design competition when he recruited him to be his partner in conceiving the plan they named Greensward, the 33rd and last entry to be put before the Central Park board of commissioners in 1857.

Thinking back on my own after-work hours as head of the newly formed Central Park Task Conservancy walking home from my office in the Arsenal, gathering ideas and making mental notes for the Park’s prospective restoration projects and future management, I realize that I was experiencing a sense of reverent discipleship with Olmsted, who could be imagined according to Kinkead as “looking at the outcrops, hillocks . . . and flats and then fitting them into the vistas he trusted were to be.”

As things rightly turned out, the Conservancy’s restoration projects have consistently honored the spirit of Olmsted and Vaux’s naturalistically designed park while also restoring the later additions of active recreation facilities such as playgrounds, baseball fields, and basketball courts as integral parts of the Park’s larger landscape. Kinkead makes an important point of Olmsted’s six-month trip in 1850 to Europe and Great Britain whose “gentle scenery bewitched him” and further notes that “bonding with our cousins overseas could well account for some of the nomenclature of Central Park – arrant Briticisms such as Dalehead, Dene, Gill, Hernshead, Loch, Willowdell, terminology that seems also to have met with Vaux’s approval.”

The semantic derivation of the word “recreation” are important to Kinkead, who, as reader of Olmsted’s mind, maintains:

For him, it was re-creating the body and mind through juxtaposition with, and tranquil observation of nature, the placing of persons in a setting of trees, water, rocks, and herbage, wherein rest and relaxation, emanating from the world spirit, would come easily. To further this, Olmsted set out in the Park a variety of flora – trees, shrubs, and plants – green, leafy cushions on which the weary refugee could, metaphorically speaking, rest his head. The chief responsibility for these verdant palliatives rested with Anton Ignaz Pilat, Olmsted’s skilled head gardener.

Pilat, well trained in his homeland, had been, before coming to this country, a gardener to Prince von Metternich, the European statesman and aristocrat. As chief landscape architect, Pilat had charge, under Olmsted’s direction, of planning the Park’s groves, shrubs, herbs, and gardens. In these chores, however, both he and Olmsted were guided by a powerful but absent confederate, a deceased English parson, born a century before Olmsted, by name the Reverend William Gilpin, perhaps the world’s greatest proponent of trees. His two-volume work, Forest Scenery, had come into Olmsted’s hands as a child at the Hartford Public Library. Its ideas strongly influenced Olmsted then and throughout his life. 

By a stroke of good fortune, I am the proud possessor of a copy of this rare out-of-print book, which has led me to an understanding of the meaning of the term Picturesque as a category of landscape design. Here is what I wrote on this subject in my magnum opus Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (Harry N. Abrams, 2001):

William Gilpin (1724–1804) who was brought up in the north of England beside the Scottish border, was an early admirer of wilder and more rugged landscapes than those of southern England. Tutored by his father in painting and sketching, he instinctively viewed landscape as artistic subject matter wherein craggy topography and a certain roughness of objects provided greater variety and visual interest than smooth and flowing perfection. His discriminating eye led him to an appreciation of the different varieties of natural scenery as a traveler moved from one piece of countryside to another. As developed by Gilpin, the term Picturesque did not apply to gardens, which “want the bold roughness of nature,” and were therefore uninteresting subjects for painters. For him, Picturesque meant scenery that because of its boldly projecting outcrops of rock, contrasts of dark and light, compositional grouping of trees and other such attributes was either naturally suitable for picture making or, with some compositional correction to foreground, middle ground, or background, could be made so. His appreciation of scenery was as a two-dimensional scene, and his visual satisfaction depended on a correspondence between the works of nature and the animated “roughness” of elements and the atmospheric light and shade that give pleasure in a painting. Gilpin’s imagination, therefore, was not excited by wild nature as such, but rather by nature as seen through the filter of art. His own talent as a sketchbook artist admirably served his purpose as a travel writer and illustrator of a new and popular way of looking at landscape. 

Gilpin’s writings, which were translated into French and German, became revered texts both for scenic tourists and landscape designers. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), the future co-designer of Central Park, remembered that the extended carriage tours he took through the Connecticut countryside with his father and stepmother as a boy were “really tours in search of the picturesque.” He had read Remarks on Forest Scenery in the Hartford Public Library, and it later served him as a professional tool. He routinely put the book in the hands of his students, along with Sir Uvedale Price’s On the Picturesque, with the instruction “to read these seriously, as a student of law would read Blackstone.” 

According to Gilpin, nature was an admirable colorist but deficient in terms of Picturesque composition, and the landscape designer’s art therefore, like the painter’s, was to take little liberties, particularly with regard to the foreground, adding here and there a few trees and in other ways giving an air of wildness to the place. “Turn the lawn into a piece of broken ground: plant rugged oaks instead of flowering shrubs: break the edges of the walk: give it the rudeness of a road: mark it with wheel tracks, and scatter around a few stones, and brush-wood; and in a word, instead of making the whole smooth, make it rough; and you make it picturesque.” 

Similarly, according to Olmsted. “grazing sheep with their rough woolly coats of “just that dingy hue, which contrasts with the verdure of the ground: were highly desirable in a park. 

Thus was Central Park’s Sheep Meadow born in Olmsted’s imagination along with the sheepfold designed by Vaux’s architectural collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould, which was repurposed by Robert Moses in the 1930s as the restaurant Tavern on the Green).

In addition to the Park’s opportunities for the bucolic peace that was concomitant with the Picturesque style of landscape design was its capacity for spectacle. According to Kinkead:

An early spectator sport that Olmsted approved of was the Park’s daily carriage parade. Many came to the Park everyday just to see it. A favorite spot was on the side of the carriage road by the Concert Ground at the head of the Mall or on the Terrace side just across from it. The procession started around four in the afternoon. The vehicles – barouches, broughams, carriages, landaus, phaetons, and victorias, meaningful nomenclature to every informed adult in those days of the long ago – arrived at the Park through the traditionally important entry at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. They proceeded north up to the East Drive for nearly a mile to the stretch that ran by the top of the Mall and exited at 72nd Street and Central Park West. The wealthy, the aristocratic, and the notorious were represented, all splendidly, or less splendidly, awheel. The socially assured – the Jays, Livingstons, Van Rensselaers, Stuyvesants, and such – affected the stodgy brougham, pulled by fat old horses under the reins of elderly coachmen. Glass paneling concealed those within. Carriages were most common. Those wealthy, such as that of Jim Fisk, the financier, were resplendent and gleaming. So were the those in the barouches and victorias. Young things, the Beautiful People of that time, dashed along in phaetons, light rigs with a groom perched pm back.

Among the most notorious regularly in the cavalcade was the impressively beautiful Josie Woods, her ebony tresses bordering a finely chiseled face. She was mistress of the town’s most exclusive bordello on Clinton Place. She rode richly attired in silks and expensive jewelry, her equipage a dignified black. Black, too, was the carriage of Madame Restell, the English-born woman who was the city’s leading abortionist, full of money and scandalous secrets. Her dress was always expensively demure but her horses spirited. The common folk gawked. And returned next day.

The parade had an effect on the local economy. Carriage makers throve. Before the Park, there had been almost no pleasure driving here, Olmsted said. But within twelve years after its inception, at least ten thousand horses were being kept for that purpose. And, of course, vehicles had to be made for them to pull. 

The Park created another rise in industry, also connected with horse flesh. This was the business of saddlers. When the Park began, Olmsted noted again, there were not half a dozen New Yorkers who kept horses for riding. Nor among all the many suggestions made in advance for Park features was there one for space to be devoted to horseback riding. However, with the six miles of bridle paths that were turned out under the Greensward plan, hundreds of equestrians soon were trotting them daily. Olmsted was proud of this. He wrote that the space “given to bridle roads was larger than that of all the bridle roads in all of the parks of London, and in three years after the plan had been settled upon more riding had been done at the Central Park for the encouragement of pleasure riding than had been done in ten times as many years in all the other cities of the world.” Despite this leap in early activity atop a horse, the most colorful and flamboyant part of this Park pastime was still half a century off. 

Just north of the Ball Ground was a large flat area. On the Greensward plan, this was the Parade Ground that had been mandated by terms of the competition for the design of the Park. Olmsted had no real desire to see a military use of the Park. His reaction is shown in his testy note of 1864: “Two regiments of the National Guard paraded illegally in the Park.” And again in his attitude toward the military display that accompanied the 1877 visit of President Rutherford B. Hayes to the Park for a statue unveiling. Firing off a letter to the head of the Parks Department, Olmsted said that with its whoopla and ability to attract hordes of spectators, the visit by the military had created chaos and much damage: “the crowd was essentially a mob, lawless and uncontrollable.” (Italics Olmsted’s). He was happy, then, when the Parade Ground became the Sheep Meadow. With some satisfaction, he realized that soldierly drills would never turn the turf there into a dust bowl.

_

The section in Kinkead’s book titled “Our Prime Recreation Ground Restored” has for me a satisfying “story-of-my-life” ring to it, which must also be true in the case with Gordon Davis, the Parks commissioner who was responsible for funneling my passion for the Central Park as a picturesquely naturalistic designed landscape into the diligence of a full -time job. This is how Kinkead sets the stage:

Today the Park is not as its creators left it. . . . Its large-scale design remains as it was – supple, beautiful, and largely indestructible by man. But only a few years back this was not true of much of the rest of the Park. . . . The recovery period of the era when Robert Moses was Parks commissioner did not last forever. Man’s ineptitude thereafter was displayed in lack of general maintenance, which rendered the whole infrastructure of pipes and drains largely inoperative. Partly as a result of this and partly due to other forms of neglect, water bodies, roads, and paths were badly silted, comfort stations were closed, lawns were often incipient dustbowls, the drinking and ornamental fountains went dry, and many Park structures were heavily vandalized and graffiti-marred. The disheartening situation was similar to that which had confronted the designers a century before. Now, it was manmade disfigurement in place of the nineteenth-century squatters shacks, pig pens, and swamps that had once dotted the place.

Today, the bleak scene for Central Park is changing. The long-term outlook is, in fact, rosy. This began in 1978, when the city’s lengthy fiscal crisis ended and funds became available for the Park’s rescue. The person then overseeing all the city parks was the newly appointed commissioner Gordon Davis, a black graduate of Harvard Law School, the son of a Chicago clergyman. Edward L. Koch, mayor at the time, called him “one of my stars.” Koch plucked Davis from the City Planning commission, a seven-member body concerned with planning and zoning and public improvements in all aspects of the city’s development, including parks. 

From such a background Davis came to his post with pronounced ideas as to what should be done. Most of his ideas were logical; all were firm. One of the best was his support for the idea of an administrator of Central Park, someone whose immediate obligation would be to oversee the Park’s programs and betterment. In 1979 Davis persuaded the mayor to approve such an appointment. The person he named was Elizabeth Barlow, a transplanted Texas who likes to be called Betsy. For the first time since the city’s dismissal of Olmsted in 1878, a single individual had the primary responsibility for the Park’s maintenance and day-to-day operation. 

Then forty-three, Betsy Barlow, a Wellesley graduate with a Yale master’s degree in city planning, had strong feelings about preserving and bettering the environment. She had written three books, one about Jamaica Bay and Pelham Bay Parks, The Forests and Wetlands of New York City; another on Frederick Law Olmsted, Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York; and a third, The Central Park Book, a product of Barlow, as author and editor, and three collaborative specialists in the fields of art, geology, and nature. 

In the half dozen years before her appointment, Barlow had been prominent in the private (and quite determined) movement to save Central Park during the fiscal crisis. While the movement was small, it included influential individuals and several influential organizations, among them the Central Park Community Fund, the Central Park Task Force, the Friends of Central Park, and the Parks Council. Through their combined efforts, more than one improvement or reconstruction was accomplished with the aid of federal and private money. An example of the latter was the 1972 restoration of Bow Bridge, spanning a narrow section of the Lake, the most beautiful and elaborate of the Park’s original six cast-iron bridges, of which five remain. All were designed differently, as was virtually every one of the arches, benches, boat landings, bridges, fountains, shelters, and spans installed in the Park. The $200,000 cost of putting Bow Bridge back in shape was borne by Lucy Moses, the widow of a New York lawyer, and Lila Acheson Wallace, cofounder of Reader’s Digest, highly philanthropic women. 

Before Betsy Barlow’s appointment as administrator, she was active on the scene, as executive director of the Central Park Task Force, perhaps the busiest of the organizations in the Park rescue effort. 

In 1980 Commissioner Davis dusted off another useful notion, namely to solicit help from the private sector. Barlow was in enthusiastic accord, and Davis, his arguments at the ready, went to see the mayor once again. Success followed. In December 1980, the mayor announced the formation of the Central Park Conservancy to raise funds from corporations, foundations, and private individuals. A thirty-four-member board of trustees was appointed, largely composed of public-spirited citizens, and William Beinecke, a recently retired business executive, was named chairman. Since then the Conservancy has handsomely performed its task of fundraising and undertaking various jobs connected with the Park’s renewal. These have included project design, repair, maintenance chores, and visitor services. 

Before long, the truth became apparent: a patchwork approach to the rehabilitation of the Park was worthless. A different treatment would have to be found, with an effective maintenance schedule. But before such a gigantic scenario could be fashioned, it was necessary to know what the current Park had, and lacked, in physical plant, current maintenance, and user needs.

Ten surveys were commissioned in 1981, to be undertaken by various specialists, with the Conservancy footing the bill. With one exception, the surveys, were completed at various times through 1984. They dealt with the Park’s archives, circulation, hydrology, management, use, security, soil, structural inventory, trees and vegetation, and wildlife. 

For over two years the staffs of the Conservancy and the administrator studied the surveys, including the by- then complete management survey. They realized that a plan that would deal effectively with the operation of the Park would also have to seem reasonable – or as reasonable as possible – to the Park’s diverse set or users, some notably opinionated. 

With this in mind, those responsible came up with a six-point program: to resurrect the functional and structural integrity of the original Park design when necessary; to protect and preserve these features in the future; to give special attention to historical aspects of the Park, the prototype for so many others; to provide for public safety and enjoyment within the wide spectrum of user activity; to maintain a clean and structural beauty. . . .

The structural inventory, similarly, is typical of the depth of the surveys. It enumerated every manmade object known to have stood on the surface of the Park, now or in the past those vanished and those still present. Its twelve categories consist of arbors, bridges, (and arches), buildings, fountains, plazas, shelters, and water bodies. It records four hundred seventy-two items, of which three hundred seventy-six survive and ninety-six do not. The longest section is that for buildings. Of its total of one hundred eleven, seventy-two can still be found, thirty-nine cannot. The largest intact subdivision therein is that for maintenance buildings, all of the sixteen erected still being in place, as is the case with the reservoir buildings. Almost in that situation is the segment on concession structures, whose total of eighteen has lost only one to time or circumstance. However, nineteen of the thirty comfort stations have disappeared.

Monuments are the second largest grouping. Of its one hundred and two total, only three have gone, all animal or allegorical representations. The other classes of monuments, in some cases admittedly arbitrary, are busts, commemorative portrait statues, benches, gates, plaques (with twenty-one the most numerous entry), mixed forms of art, and other, less easily classified works. 

Of the remaining ten headings whose composition so far has not been broken down, the total units under these amount to thirty-one, comprising two hundred sixty-three objects, existing and vanished. To detail them would overburden the point that the surveys were comprehensive. But comprehensive they certainly were, as those for park use and structural inventory clearly show. For over two years the staffs of the Conservancy and the administrator studies the surveys, including the by then complete management survey. They realized that a plan that would deal effectively with the operation of the Park would also have to seem reasonable – or as reasonable as possible – to the Park’s set of diverse users, some of whom were notably opinionated. 

With this in mind, those responsible came up with a six-point program: to resurrect the functional and structural integrity of the original Park design when necessary; to protect and preserve these features in the future; to give special attention to the historical aspects of the Park, the prototype for so many others; to provide public safety and enjoyment within a wide spectrum of user activity; to maintain a clean and structurally sound Park, attainments that notably decrease crime and enhance visitor gratification; and, last, to encourage the Park’s horticultural beauty. 

Following the study, a document that embodied these requirements, which was funded through a grant that I had secured from the National Park Service, U. S. Department of the Interior, under the provisions of the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Act of 1978 (Title X, Public Law 95–625), was published in May of 1986. The ninety-six-page, heavily illustrated treatise with the measurements of a tabloid newspaper was entitled Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan. Here I must say that, although I conceived of the creation of the Park’s 1986 Management and Restoration Plan, secured its funding, and oversaw a great deal of its step-by-step realization, it is the professionals whom I hired both as consultants and members of what is the still-extant Central Park Conservancy’s in-house landscape-design “firm” who deserve credit for the Park’s ongoing scenic and recreational improvements and the maintenance protocols supporting them.

A roll call of the original group of employees forming this department of the Conservancy’s staff includes landscape architects Mariane CramerJudith HeintzBruce Kelly, and Phillip Winslow, all four of whom were collaboratively instrumental in strategizing the Central Park Conservancy’s series of restoration projects and foreseeing the system of daily maintenance whereby the Park landscape offers a unified appearance within the framework of interlocking individual parts. Mapped as zones, each is assigned an individual groundskeeper, or zone gardener, as this specific Conservancy staff member is called. Often assisted by members of the Conservancy’s cadre of volunteers, zone gardeners oversee morning trash cleanup and supervise annual bulb plantings while also supplying routine horticultural maintenance of the trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, groundcovers, and wildflowers in their designated areas of the Park.

Part Four of Kinkead’s Central Park, is titled “The Future in Sight (1990–1995).” Reading it again now is for me a reminder of my friendship with this excellent chronicler of the life of a manmade miracle created amid the glacially scoured outcrops of an eroded ancient mountain range. Furthermore, this chapter is in a sense a chronicle of the life of the Conservancy during the last five years of my job as the Parks Department’s Central Park administrator cum founding president of the Conservancy. The chapters in this section therefore recount the dreams set in motion by proposals for rebuilding Central Park through capital projects and management policies outlined in the Management and Restoration Plan, which, with successful fundraising in the future and ongoing nourishment of the 150 million endowment I had been instrumental in achieving, would crystalize in the ongoing life of the Park as an urban institution with a stable ecology, meticulous management system, and the continuation of its physical, social, educational, and psychological benefits for people of all ages, races, and genders.

It is heartening to me today to be able to track important achievements that were still in a project-proposal stage when Kinkead wrote in pragmatic terms of what would be necessary to achieve the Conservancy’s goals, here is how he put things in his book’s last chapter:

Returning to what in the way of renewal still faces the administrator, the Parks Department, and the Conservancy, the answer is: heavy sledding. Scores of projects large and small lie ahead over the years. But in the light of accomplishments since 1978, the task is not undoable. 

To pick at random for the immediate future, there is the sector around the Harlem Meer, the eleven-acre lagoon in the Park’s northeast corner. Its boathouse, close to the water, stood just inside the Park’s terminal wall along 110th Street – or Central Park North as the name is. The structure was a vandalized burnt-out wreck when the original Park rehabilitation started. Erected in 1966, it once offered food and rental rowboats to residents of nearby Harlem and Spanish Harlem. Now it has been razed. Replacing it will be a concessionaire-run restaurant providing three meals daily at moderate prices, cafeteria or tablecloth style, as well as a catering service. 

Eventually the Conservancy, aided by grants totaling more than $2 million from the Cissy Patterson Trust, the Dana Foundation, and the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, will furnish the area with facilities for rowboat hire, a Ranger station, a visitor center with rooms for meeting and classes and space for exhibits, as well as a plaza beside the Meer. 

As for the Meer itself, it was drained. Dredging will be done. Like all Park water bodies, the Meer had accumulated sediment over the years, estimated at two and a half feet, or around forty thousand cubic yards. After removal, part of it will form an island of about an eighth of an acre some seven feet above the water level, replacing one destroyed some years ago by the Lasker Rink. Trees and shrubs will grow on it, and boaters will be prevented from landing by an underwater fence. When refilled, theMeer’s depth in places will exceed eight feet. The level will be controlled by new valves and the circulation improved. This will benefit the new population of fish, comprising the same species present before. Earlier these were netted and transferred to other Park havens – largemouth bass, bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish, carp, and banded killifish. The bass in particular had been special targets of Meer anglers in the past. Presumably they will be again when a fish-stocking program is reinstituted. 

To leap to the present, for me the most heart-lifting thing to happen in the Park these days is the birth of the multi-purpose Harlem Meer Center, which was designed to replace the now-demolished Lasker Rink. Also on Kinkead’s bucket list of projects to be accomplished, which have now been successfully completed are “the enlargement of the Great Lawn and repositioning of the east and west walkways to be placed in better positions to handle the pedestrian traffic,” and the combined fountain restoration and re-gilding of the bronze equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman at Grand Army Plaza just outside the southeast corner of the Park, together with the restoration of this prominent public space’s northern half in front of the Plaza Hotel with the Pulitzer Fountain as a center piece crowned by Pomona, Roman goddess of fruit and gardens. I remember overseeing the Conservancy-commissioned architect and the outside contractor for this project with the assistance of my appointed Conservancy construction manager Tim Marshall, and today I am sorry that Kinkead, who died in 1992, never saw this prominent outlier of Central Park in its current neoclassical urban-landscape glory.

For those of my readers of this review of Kinkead’s historic narrative of Central Park’s reclamation as spearheaded by the Conservancy who may be interested in the origins and condition of the Egyptian obelisk that occupies a knoll between the backside of the Metropolitan Museum and the Great Lawn, there is a fascinating account of how the coveted monument that was given in 1879 to New York City by Ismail, the Khedive of Egypt, was shipped to the Hudson River dock at 6th Street and from there rolled along the 86th Street transverse road for a period of nineteen days on a bed of cannon balls before being lifted and carried to the site it occupies today.

Looking forward, Kinkead writes:

In the future planned for 1993, is the decision about the role of the present reservoir in the Park. It is by far the Park’s largest feature, and its future status is probably the renewal’s largest decision. The Reservoir is one hundred and six acres, about one-eighth of the Park’s surface. By the early 1990s, when it is estimated that the Third Water Tunnel (channeling water from the Croton Aqueduct) will be finished, the Reservoir’s function as a water-holding body will be over, and the Bureau of Water Supply in the city’s Department of Environmental Protection will give it to the Parks Department.

Then what?

It’s a big question.

Thirty years ago Moses said he’d like to turn the Reservoir into a gigantic swimming pool. Since then, at least two other ideas have been considered. The first is simply to fill in the Reservoir for additional parkland. The second, far from simple, would have part filled in and part left wet. On the disparate sections there could be ballfields, a concert lawn, a jogging course, an arboretum, and, on the watery part, a marina and a swimming beach. At the moment, the Parks people lean, sort of, in Moses’s direction. This is what the Master Plan says on that score: Although the old Reservoir was filled in to form the Great Lawn, the present plan envisions keeping the Reservoir as a body of water and redesigning it as an attractive, natural-looking lake. The shoreline would be made more irregular and soft-edged than it is now and parts of the artificial berm that rims it at present could be lowered to create a more naturalistic littoral. 

The 106 acres of water opened up to public use will offer an abundance of recreational opportunities. There could be swimming from a beach or pier, sailing or windsurfing. When the end of renewal does come, whenever that may be, a number of pending policy matters will have been decided by Park officials and interested others. This is standard democratic procedure. And it is called for because some of the decisions will be vital to what the Park offers. 

From my vantage point today more than three decades after Kinkead wrote these words, I rejoice in that I have lived to see the Central Park Conservancy institutionalized as a prominent not-for-profit corporation ranking among New York City’s major institutions in terms of financial support and volunteer-services participation. Thus will the deep-seated abiding love that regular park-goers and in-depth observers such as Eugene Kinkead have for this municipal wonder be passed on to the next generation.


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JOURNAL ARCHIVE

DIARY

Venice Revisited

Wainscott: Cherishing Memories of my Former Home in a Non-Hampton Hamlet in the Hamptons

Hill Country Journal

Budding Poets in the Park

Central Park Conservancy 40th Anniversary

Nine-Eleven Remembered

ESSAY

A Speech on the Subject to Combatting Climate Change through the Preservation Green Historic Places.

An Analysis of the Sonnet as a Form of Poetic Expression

OBSERVATIONS

Reflections on the Meaning of Place

Central Park as Turtle Nursery

Part Five: Central Park as An Outdoor Museum

Part Four: Bethesda Terrace, Arcade, and Fountain

Part Three: Central Park as An Outdoor Museum

Part Two: Central Park as An Outdoor Museum

Part One: Central Park as An Outdoor Museum

Designing the Central Park Luminaire: Nature as Ornament

“The Gates” by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005

Jacob Wrey Mould: Central Park’s Third Designer

America’s Greatest Example of Land Art

Summit Rock, the Tallest Point in Central Park as a Palimpsest of Multi-generational History

Discovering Central Park’s Above-ground Bedrock Foundations

POETRY

The Naming of the Park

The Life and Times of Garth Fergusson, Poet

NEWS

Writing the City

REVIEWS

A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part Seven

A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part Six

A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part Five

A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part Four

A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History and Landscape Design of Central Park: Part Three

A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part Two

A Beginner’s Education in the History, Natural History, and Landscape Design History of Central Park: Part One

Lee County: The Setting of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Land of my Pioneer Ancestors

The Wind in the Willows