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July 21, 2003
Happy Birthday
Today is Central Park’s one hundred and fiftieth birthday.That’s how they’re putting it, anyway, the Conservancy and the Parks Department. If they’re looking for an excuse for a celebration, I can’t blame them. These are not the best of times in New York. A gritty adrenaline animated the immediate post-9/11 environment, but that’s dissipated, like a fading drug rush. There was the horror of death, and the marvel of survival; well-deserved sympathy was matched by self-congratulations, and amid it all we were reminded that there would be hard days ahead, but that we, being New Yorkers, were up to it...
Those days are here now, here and all over the country, as the nation faces enormous expenses for war and security, even while the general economy struggles and public services are curtailed. Trying to repair our own particular damage has made it that much harder in New York. Yes, we will be up to it, not because we are special, but because we have the spirit and resiliency native to human beings. Certainly there’s nothing special about being unemployed these days; the numbers keep growing, “recovery” notwithstanding. Now I know what it is to be a number, and on the negative side of the ledger.
So the city is in a ragged state; tax revenues are down, and money for parks is not a top priority while schools and firehouses go wanting. All of which makes this the perfect time for a Central Park party, and a little coincidental fund-raising. I don’t want to be so cynical as to suggest that money and publicity are the motivating factors here; it’s genuinely appropriate to focus attention and appreciation on the Park. Treating it as an entity, with a birthday, is, however, rather problematic. For one thing, birth implies a reciprocal death, and is properly attributed to living things. The Park contains life of many kinds, but is itself a cultural artifact, and has already “outlived” generations of its patrons, with no end in sight. Perhaps the devastation of 9/11 reminds us that even seemingly immutable monuments may “die,” but we are not much in the habit of contemplating the ultimate disappearance of our self-created environment. We know that we will die, but surely our world will go on.., even if the countless lost landscapes that ripple through the last few billion years tell us otherwise.
It’s an anniversary we celebrate then, rather than a birth, but even the date’s debatable. The Park has not yet really existed for a hundred and fifty years, but it was imagined even further back, at least since the 1840s. The date chosen for the current observation, July 21st, 1853, was when the state senate empowered the city to purchase the land that would become Central Park. Of course, the same legislative session also approved the acquisition of another, competing, site: Jones Wood on the East River, and it wasn’t until the beginning of the next year that the courts settled the issue in favor of the central location. After much haggling, landowners were compensated, while those who merely lived in the location were evicted. Surveying and clearing began in the Summer of 1856, with heavier work commencing in 1857. Still, it wasn’t until the Fall of that year that the design competition was held, with the commission awarded to Olmstead and Vaux’s “Greensward Plan” in April of 1858. This is really the beginning of the Park as we know it, though it took years to actually complete the work, and since it was opened bit by bit there is no one final date to mark. The Park was first used by the public in December of 1858, when ice-skaters took to the barely completed Lake. The Ramble was opened the next June, with drives in the southern end following, but many of my favorite haunts in the north end were not even on the map until the parcel from 106th to 110th Streets was added in 1863.
So there are plenty of dates to chose from, but leave it to bureaucrats to honor bureaucracy. The real point seems to be to have a celebration now, rather than five years hence, so 1853 it is. In keeping with the imprecision, this has been an on-going affair, with events scattered throughout the year. Even the “big day” was displaced from July 21st to the 19th, so that it could be held on a weekend.
I was in the Park that day, last Saturday, and it was as beautiful a Summer day as can be conceived of. A cold front passed in the night, draining the humidity and leaving a bright blue day, hot enough to honor the season, but not so hot as to be overtaxing for the stroller. Volunteers distributed flyers with a lengthy list of functions, occurring throughout the Park over the course of the day. The funny thing is, I managed to miss every one of them. Which just goes to show how truly amazing the Park is; how it serves the broadest public need in the course of catering to the all the idiosyncrasies within that public. That’s what I call resolving the dialectic of individual and society. Or if not resolving, at least escaping such conundrums. For over a hundred and fifty years, escape, most specifically from the city, has been the very premise of the Park.
I managed to escape the crowds. I’m admittedly alienated, but I am honestly happy for the enjoyment people take in the Park. I just want to take mine in a more contemplative fashion than some folks. And that’s generally no problem. Even on this “biggest event day in the history of the Park,” I was able to wander over the Great Hill before the Revolutionary War Encampment was in place. I saw the bike race and the run/walk going by on the Drive, but they didn’t distract me from viewing baby birds, fed by their parents throughout the North Woods. I was aware of the World Archery Championships proceeding on the far side of the North Meadow, but I was finding butterflies in the plantings on the knoll at the northeast corner, and couldn’t be bothered.
These plantings are indicative of the way the Park works for me. Referred to as “Butterfly Gardens,” they’re just a few square yards, protected by flimsy wire fencing and planted with flowers, especially Buddleia, commonly known as “butterfly bush.” Somehow they survive on that little slope, just above the ballfields. There’s a lot of traffic there, dogs; mountain bikes; violent exercise rituals, you name it, but the flowers persist. And they do draw butterflies, as if from nowhere.
It’s not really from nowhere that they come, but from outside the usual boundaries of consciousness. The butterflies were there all along, but I couldn’t see them, not until now, when Swallowtails and Tortoiseshells, Azures and Anglewings are concentrated in these tiny plots, almost ignored within the labyrinthine landscape of the Park. Meanwhile, everything goes on all around me, but I turn away from the rest of it, and train my glass upon a Question Mark...
I can, at leisure, turn back, as well. The Park has that much latitude. Enough for me to grant as much to its administrants, to whom I must admit some debt. If their celebration falls squarely between the fatuous and the cynical, perhaps that’s where the garden of human sincerity truly blooms. Therefore, they may have their party, with my blessing. As long as I can have mine, with butterflies.