Saving Central Park: A History and A Memoir

“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.

“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 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.