October 24th, 2024
A Beginner’s Education in the History and Landscape Design of Central Park: Part Two
After rereading Henry Hope Reed’s 1967 Central Park: A History and Guide, which provided the subject of my most recent journal entry, I experienced the impetus to write a series of subsequent “book reviews” as exegeses of similarly well-written and instructive pre-third-millennium books in which neophyte New Yorkers and tourists alike can experience Central Park more thoroughly as a great work of landscape art that boasts, in addition to its naturalistic landscape architecture, the assets of a natural history curriculum (think geology, ornithology, biology, and botany in particular). The dust is now off the bottom shelf where my collection of books relating to the park are chronologically organized according to their publication dates, and in this journal posting I am calling the reader’s attention to another pre-third-millennium-CE book about Central Park since it was from knowledge that I gained from these that I was able to anchor the management and restoration plan that launched the first fifteen years of the park’s rebuilding following the founding of the Central Park Conservancy.
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Please meet M. M. Graff, author of Tree Trails in Central Park, published by the Greensward Foundation in 1970. Although the best and most comprehensive book on the subject is the handsomely illustrated and historically informative Central Park: Trees and Landscapes: A Guide to New York City’s Masterpiece by Edward Sibley Barnard and Neil Calvanese, published in 2016 by Columbia University Press, Graff’s Tree Trails, written in the voice of a personal guide that implies a participatory stance on the part of a reader who is obeying the imperatives of a curator of a major exhibition in a fine arts museum, is still an excellent text for the initiate in the hypothetical classroom that is Central Park.
This “old friend” in my collection of favorite-still-on-the shelf books about Central Park, is another link to my earliest Central Park education days when I found myself ill-equipped to recognize the various species of trees by name and had no knowledge of their growth cycles and arboricultural maintenance requirements. Like Henry Hope Reed and Sofia Duckworths’ history cum tourist guidebook, Graff’s Tree Trails in Central Park remains as useful a self-education tool as when I first bought it in the early days of my ongoing love affair with Central Park.
As an aside, I will mention here that Graff’s publisher, the former Greensward Foundation, was a not-for-profit organization devoted almost entirely to an historic restoration ethos that demanded fidelity to the Olmsted and Vaux Greensward plan for Central Park as well as to that of their subsequent design for Prospect Park. Headed by lawyer and civic activist Robert Makla, the Greensward Foundation was a civic home base for Graff, whose volunteer curatorship of Central Park’s 18,000 trees made her my adopted professor of arboriculture, the teacher whose book helped me overcome my inability to identify trees by name both within and beyond the confines of Central Park.
Find a copy if you can of this excellent tree-identification primer, which, in addition to enhancing the pleasure of your walks Central Park will hone your ability to call out the names of trees on a world-wide basis with the same pleasure that you have when you catch sight of an apparent stranger on the street who, by chance, is a friend whose name you find yourself able to recollect.
Graff’s pedagogy goes beyond mere tree and shrub identification. Her prefatory advice in Tree Trails in Central Park sets the tone:
Trees in Central Park are like notes in music. If you study them only as individuals, you may miss the deeper harmony, the underlying plan and purpose of the landscape design the park’s history is inseparable from the present but you needn’t stand in the park shifting from one foot to the other while you read about it. Especially on the longer tours [in this book], it is advisable to get the background material in mind before you start out. You can then move fairly quickly from tree to tree without losing a sense of continuity.
To facilitate her readers’ ability to follow in her footsteps alongside the trees she describes, Graff provides an easy way to define location when she writes, “As a preliminary aid to navigation, you should know that the first two numbers on a lamp post indicate the nearest cross street: “9723 is in line with 97th Street. If the next post you come to is #9614, you will know that you are heading south.”
Another Graff tip for the amateur tree-identifier reads, “A hand lens – 8X or stronger – is indispensable if you want to identify trees with certainty. Without one, you will miss conclusive and often beautiful details: the gradation of color on the bud scales of a red oak, the cockscomb glands on a nannyberry, the minute stubble on an English elm leaf, or the gold-powdered buds of a bitter-nut hickory.”
Graff would be the first to recommend a virtual botanical walk in Central Park through the leaves of the book Trees and Shrubs of Central Park by Louis Harman Peet (Manhattan Press, 1903). I cherish my copy for the scenic descriptions that focus upon the park’s overall purpose as a landscape for pedestrians. Instead of Graff’s highly instructive pedagogical approach, Peet’s writing is more aesthetically focused on the scenic effect of the Central Park plants he identifies, which for the modern reader provides a time-warp experience that opens to the reader’s virtual eye the park’s mature landscape as it existed at the turn of the twentieth century.
I particularly like the first walk the reader takes with Peet. Logically, its itinerary begins in the vicinity of the Pond at the park’s southeast corner adjacent to the park’s main entrance at 59th Street opposite Grand Army Plaza.
As you enter the Park . . . if you love color and the flash of crystal light over glossy leaves, you will stop and look at the lusty bushes of Californian privet on your left. Their rich life-full deep green foliage flings off the light in white fire at every touch of the breeze, and, if you watch them sway, you will see the deep sea-green undersides of their leaves or perchance your eye will catch that ice-like glint of white sunlight just as they turn.
You cannot speak highly enough of the Californian privet. You know that it is the Californian privet and not the common privet by its leaves, which are larger and oval, while the leaves of the common privet (Ligustrum vulgare) are elliptic-lanceolate. Besides, the Californian’s color is richer, glossier and more of a deep sea-green shade, while the common privet’s leaf has more of a bottle-green color.
If you happen upon these bushes in early summer (June), you will see their bloom-panicles of white flowers (mostly the ends of branches). The flowers are four petaled and their corollas are funnel shaped. They are to me, at least, very unpleasant in their odor – a sickish smell, which I get away from as soon as I come near it These flowers change into small black berries.
This beautiful species of privet, though known generally as Californian privet, really comes from China and Japan. It is a profuse bloomer and in its season is covered with its white flower clusters. In the autumn its leaves turn a beautiful gold bronze and their glossy, satin-like finish makes their effects truly exquisite.
Not very far along a little by-path slips away at your left down an easy run of stone steps toward the Pond. The Californian privet makes a bower of it, shooting out lances of straight branches like masses of soldiery at charge bayonets.
Because of the one-hundred-and twenty years that have elapsed since Peet wrote this descriptive paean to the Californian privet shrubs in Central Park, today’s visitor cannot expect to find the same plants still adorning the park’s southeasterly entrance and must therefore turn her or his attention to the park entrance itself and the book that identifies it by name, as is the case with the rest of the park’ twenty-three entrance points, all of which are known as “gates.”
Actually these are simply openings in the perimeter wall and therefore make the park more effortlessly accessible and inviting to visitors than ones with iron palings would have been, spanning the Upper West Side along Central Park West between 63rd and 110th Streets, the four entrances cut within the wall at the north end of the park along 110th Street, and the other three entrances from 59th Street, which appear at Central Park West the southwest corner of the Park and at the entrances at the Sixth and Seventh Avenue entrances to the park’s interior East and West Drives has been designated a name by the members of one of the individual committees assembled by a committee of the Central Park Commissioners in 1862. Here we are still standing at the southeastern corner of the park adjacent to the entrance at 59th Street, which is nothing more than an opening in the park’s circumferential wall where the name “Scholars’ Gate.” has been etched its stone coping.
Fortunately, resting on my Central Park bookshelf there is The Central Park. (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1926), which was published by a citizens’ organization known as the Central Park Association. Its purpose in doing so was to give the rationales for the names that had been conferred individually on content which chronicles the logic on which each gate was named, gives the following rationale for the naming of Scholar’s Gate:
There seems to be yet one other class of laborers who cannot be correctly distinguished either by the term ‘Artizan,’ ‘Artist,’ or ‘Merchant,’ and this is the class that includes the Poet, the Statesman, the Lawyer, the Author, the Editor, the Teacher, the Physician, the man of Science, and all in fact, whose contributions to the welfare of the community are of a specially intellectual character.”
Simply say the words “Central Park Gates” today, and for many people who walked beneath a series of 7,503 saffron banners floating from paired stanchions lining 23 miles of the park’s pathways from February 12th through the 28th 2005, the amazing and long-awaited exhibition of Christo and Jeanne Claude’s exhibition, the full story of which I recounted in my journal posting of September 29, 2023.
In closing this entry, which is primarily devoted to walking amid the trees and shrubs that constitute the essential green body of Central Park, I am happy to say that, because of the close relationship that was forged between Vince Davenport, longtime project engineer for Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Douglas Blonsky, the Central Park Conservancy’s head of design and construction at the time, no “Gates” were erected where a tree’s branches were overarching a portion of a pathway, and three woodlands – the 38-acre Ramble between 73rd and 78th streets, the 40-acre North Woods forest, and the four-acre Hallet Sanctuary just northwest of the Pond at 5th Avenue and Central Park South – were exempted from “The Gates” installation in their entirety.
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