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October 14, 2002

No Vacancy

The Park is a caesura in the city; a pause for breath. A two and a half by one half mile gap, where the grid of Manhattan is not filled in; an aperture in the density of urban intensity.
But it is not a vacant lot.
There are vacant lots in the city, and, scale aside, the effect of a gap in the rectilinear mass is similar. Such lots may represent both decay and potential; the razing of the past and the promise of the future. In the meantime, they are dormant, but only in human terms. The emptiness of the Park has been aestheticised, sculpted and subsequently filled with specimens conventionally considered beautiful. Any untended expanse will also fill up, but if we do not love its contents we will continue to consider it essentially empty. The mean grasses and the plants we deign as weeds do not appeal, nor do they offer much resistance to our plans. Regardless, they appear wherever our attention wavers, or our purposes are stymied for a time. Then green things will grow, and animals appear, for Life occupies any place it can.

There is opportunity in vacancy.
Thinking about Columbus Day, I realize that the Europeans treated America as a vacant lot. It was an opportunity, to be cleared and built upon; its plants and animals and even people were merely squatters who should scatter at our coming, or be plowed under. The price of such wantonness is to be alienated from the very Land that sustains us, and therefore to suffer a great nostalgia for what we have lost. I learn this lesson each October as the Wildflower Meadow goes to seed.

The Meadow is a small but significant patch of the Park in which the effect of a vacant lot has been intentionally created, in the interest of encouraging wildlife. A transitional habitat, overgrown and unruly amid the careful landscaping of a lost Victorian America.
Artfully we have planted what once the wind could sew.
But even if we cannot fully recapture our vanished wildness, we may mark in the idea of the Meadow the turning back point of Columbus’ voyage; Santa Maria coming about among the Asters and the Sparrows in a sea of dying grass.

A walk through a vacant lot remains a voyage of discovery.
In truth, the Meadow is as dense as the City, thick with Primrose and Pokeweed, Grape and Pea, Milkweed and Goldenrods and Daises of many kinds. Somewhere in between these I’ve managed to spy, a couple of times, the Yellow-breasted Chat. It’s considered a good bird, for although it’s the largest of our Warblers it’s notoriously secretive, and none too common, either. Seeing one might be the highlight of an intensive day of birding in the Park, so imagine my surprise when one popped up a few feet in front of me, not in the hyper-real habitat of the Meadow, but in a vacant lot in Queens, across the street from the diner where I was having breakfast. The Chat, migrating on a rainy night, needed a place to land and refuel, and that little spot of green was good enough.
There is opportunity in vacancy.

I must confess to my own nostalgic fondness for vacant lots. Indeed, it comes to me that my relationship with Central Park is much the same as I had one childhood Summer when I daily walked the two long blocks to a vacant lot at the end of our street, where I spent hours hunting for butterflies and spiders. That was thirty seven years ago, and I soon moved on, to superheros, to baseball, and then to adolescence, but among all the passing passions of youth I still recall it as one of my favorite Summers. I no longer imprison spiders in jars, or stick pins through butterflies, being (perhaps) a little wiser than a child, but I still find the living things in the corners of our World just as compelling as ever.
I see no vacancy in the empty places.

Vacancy or Plenitude.
It may be a matter of interpretation.
For the Chat, it’s the difference between life and death, but the bird’s interpretation reverses ours. Chats have seen their world diminish. Caught in the vacancy of the City, they must look for those few green gaps that allow at least the possibility of their continued existence. The rest is all necropolis.

For us, everything pivots upon the realization that every vacant lot could be a meadow, and a meadow is something to treasure, to plant if necessary, but not to build over. When we have learned to plant as much as we destroy, and sometimes to merely leave well enough alone, then we will have sent Columbus sailing Home, with a flight of Chats trailing off his windward bow.

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