Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York

As Homo sapiens we leave our mark on the places we design, remodel, destroy, and restore. Some places, which are broadly cherished, slide into oblivion through the indifference that turns the meaning place into the use space as a receptacle where “Anything goes” is more than a Cole Porter song title. Can such places be revived? Such was true in the case of Central Park. To learn how this came to pass take a walk with me and the writer Eugene Kinkead, author of Central Park: The Birth, Decline, and Renewal of a National Treasure.

“Let’s get our secrets out in the open,” has a familiar ring. If this rule is made relevant with regard to the wildlife in Central Park, we must follow in the footsteps of some of the former and present-day regular human habitués among whom some are authors who have been intellectually and emotionally, as well as visually, engaged in making daily contact with the Park’s often-elusive permanent and migratory wildlife. My deeply rewarding friendship with a Central Park “regular” named Lambert Pohner, a knowledgeable amateur naturalist and passionate Central Park devotee, is evident in this entry’s transcribed selections from the four hard-bound account books in which a total of 804 pages with 34 lines to a page bearing my handwriting in the weekly entries I made between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 1991. In this post, meet Lambert and experience my love of the Park being nourished by lessons in the nature of Nature combined with its nurture and respect for Olmsted and Vaux’s picturesquely naturalistic design.