![]() THE bill that authorized the construction of the park followed three years of cantankerous public debate. A walk in Central Park always makes me feel that I'm playing hooky. There is always that delicious and slightly unsettling sense of dislocation, of being in the city - and not. That's why so many memorable movie scenes have been filmed in the park: romantic carriage rides, park-bench conversations, harrowing chases, echoing steps in a shadowy underpass. Paradoxically, this heightens the experience of retreat and lends a particular zest to everyday, ordinary occurrences. The experience of any urban park is always the experience of temporary escape, but in Central Park the distant view of tall buildings is a constant reminder of the city. The contrast is underlined by the looming cliff of skyscrapers that encloses the park like an architectural frame. Even though I know that the park is as much an artifact as the surrounding city, like any work of art, it's what it makes you feel that's important.Ībove all, Central Park is horizontal, in the most vertical city in the world. The abruptness of the change - from man-made to natural, from natural to man-made - is so absolute, it almost takes my breath away. On one side of the wall, a sidewalk, women in frocks, traffic, and the bustle of the city on the other, a dark, silent primeval forest. Central Park is a swath of Adirondack landscape - woodland, rocky outcroppings, lakes and all.Ĭity and park meet at a simple, rugged stone wall. Generally, urban parks are conceived as large public gardens with gravel paths, flower beds and manicured lawns. It's easy to forget what a distinctly odd world it is. ![]() Maybe it's all those shady trees, or the glimpse of sparkling water, or the sinuously curved path that disappears behind a clump of bushes. Whenever I walk down Fifth Avenue next to the park, and I am not in a hurry, I get drawn in. The park is part of New York's better nature. Without Central Park, New York would risk becoming as callow and mercenary as many of its critics maintain it is. It was Edmund Burke who first coined the famous description of parks as ''the lungs of the city,'' but Central Park is also New York's heart. Despite its matter-of-fact name, Central Park is romantic, nonstandardized, uncommercial, artful - and full of trees. They made the park all loopy curves even the streets crossing the park lose their straightness. The creators of Central Park turned their backs on this mercantile diagram. Pragmatic, standardized, commercial, artless - and largely treeless - the grid represents an urbanism that only a surveyor could love. The uniform Manhattan grid was laid out for the convenience of real-estate subdivision and traffic flow, just building lots and streets. ![]() Central Park, which officially got its start 150 years ago yesterday, when the proposal to create the park went to the New York State Senate, is different. Parisian parks and gardens exhibit a Gallic sense of good order and neat urbanity London parks are casual and elegant, like London buildings and streets. Most urban parks reflect the style of their cities. Central Park is the city's outdoor rumpus room. ![]() On any given day, you can see dog walkers and bird watchers, bicyclists and joggers, horseback riders and folk dancers, soccer and baseball teams, and yes, pétanque players. Central Park is like neither it's too informal to be a drawing room, and too sweaty and boisterous to be a living room. A decorous Parisian park could be described as a sort of salon, with nothing more strenuous going on than a game of pétanque a London park is more like a comfortable living room, with people dozing in scattered deck chairs. I've always liked Napoleon's description of the Piazza San Marco in Venice as ''the finest drawing room in Europe,'' a somewhat ingratiating remark since he had just conquered the city. New York City without Central Park would be like Chicago without the lake, San Francisco without hills or Los Angeles without sunshine. Without its enchanted setting, Tavern on the Green would be just another tourist eatery, and the site of the Bethesda Fountain would be simply an ordinary street corner. Without the intervening park, the Upper East Side would blend into the Upper West Side - unthinkable. I would never see the top of the Dakota sticking up out of the trees like a spooky Transylvanian castle. Columbus Circle would be simply a circle, like Piccadilly Circus, instead of an arc opening onto a generous green wood. Without the park, taxis couldn't take those east-west shortcuts that are like sudden short drives into the country. Without the park, meadows and lakes would be miles away, instead of just behind the Metropolitan Museum. I CAN'T imagine Manhattan without Central Park.
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