A Forum for Diary Entries, Essays, Observations, Poetry, News, and Reviews
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 >
September 6th, 2024
Used as a noun, the word “place” carries certain diverse meanings, some of which have emotional significance for the speaker (or author) and listener (or reader), depending on the context, circumstances, and a mutually accepted concept of the intrinsic definition of the word. To describe this observation more fully, I am sharing here the text of a speech titled “Reflections on the Meaning of Place,” which I gave in Chicago twenty-two years ago. READ MORE >
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 >
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