A Forum for Diary Entries, Essays, Observations, Poetry, News, and Reviews
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 history 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 >
November 19th, 2024
Wayfinding can become a pleasant recreational activity, if one is confident of being in a safe environment in which legible signage, familiar landmarks, or simply an innate sense of orientation make movement throughout a landscape with a logically designed infrastructure of interwoven vehicular, equestrian, and pedestrian modes of mobility, as is the case in Central Park. To experience in words and illustrations the close-up views afforded the visitor in 1869 when Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s 1858 Greensward Plan was continuing to unfold as the great green heart of New York City join me in perusing an unknown author’s book titled A Description of the New York Central Park, which I picked off of my bookshelf earlier today, together with Bridges of Central Park, an elegantly illustrated work of architectural history by Henry Hope Reed et al, published by the Greensward Foundation in 1990. To understand Central Park's circulation infrastructure of interwoven modes of mobility as the essential purveyor of the artistry embedded in its offering up of sequential series of views to visitors throughout the length and breadth of its 830 acres. READ MORE >
November 2nd, 2024
How, if possible, do we establish proactive protocols for control of the effects of climate change by the custodians and community supporters of green landscapes in the public domain? Here I have felt it necessary to air my thoughts on the subject in a journal entry that holds up to the eyes of the civic and citizen stewards of other protected green public places the example of the Central Park Conservancy in practicing and promoting the kind of management and education protocols associated with fulfillment of the ideal of climate-change remediation. READ MORE >
October 24th, 2024
When we speak of the meaning of place in human life, how do we describe what we might call “placeness?” Through our five senses we experience the salient characteristics of landscapes; by on-site signage and personal investigation we determine the uses of certain places, and through books we learn how to classify the agents of the sensory experiences of up-close vision, smell, hearing, and touch as well as the historic facts, natural endowments, and design intentions that account for individual place identities. Join me in again approaching Central Park through recently rediscovered books that I have taken off the shelf in my library dedicated to this purpose. READ MORE >
October 18th, 2024
Book reviews ordinarily focus upon recent publications. Looking a my bookshelf of works about Central Park, which date from my early days as an avidly adopted New Yorker, I see a rich trove of information and insight in books that were published more than half a century ago, beginning with Central Park: A History and A Guide by Henry Hope Reed and Sophia Duckworth, whose observations and information about the park remain as valid today as they were upon publication in 1967. Future journal entries will constitute reviews of other books that, together with this one, collectively constitute a beginner’s education in the history, natural history, and landscape design of Central Park. READ MORE >
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