Central Park is well-named.
The rectangular recreation ground not only sits in the middle of Manhattan but also occupies a central place in New York history, the American imagination and even the conception of what a self-respecting city should provide for its citizens.
Central Park, which celebrates its 150th birthday this year, has been the setting for millions of romances, more than 170 movies and several horrific crimes. It has prospered and suffered with the city it serves. And it has been a barometer for large city parks across America. As Central Park goes, so go parks in Buffalo, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco and elsewhere.
“I think it would be impossible not to be aware of what’s going on in Central Park almost on a day-to-day basis,” said Robert Megquier, the director of planning and development for the Chicago Park District.
The verdant Sheep Meadow, the dense thickets of the Ramble, the fairy-tale Belvedere Castle, and the stately, elm-lined Mall are the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had never worked together until they entered an 1858 competition to design a new city park.
The drawings for their winning “Greensward Plan” will go on display this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a spring and summer series of events commemorating the 1853 state legislation that created the 843-acre park.
In addition to the exhibit, celebrations include an international urban parks conference in June, an all-day birthday party in July featuring an outdoor concert by singer Andrea Bocelli, and a five-day film festival in September.
The anniversary observance is a tribute to one of the most fabled urban oases in the world, where 25 million people come annually to visit the park’s zoo, ride the carousel, see a William Shakespeare play, or simply take a break from the city’s feverish pace.
“I think [the park] helps New York maintain its civility and sanity,” said Regina Peruggi, president of the Central Park Conservancy, the non-profit group founded in 1980 that rescued the park during the city’s fiscal crisis and is now responsible for its maintenance.
New Yorkers started lobbying for a “central park” in the 1840s as the city solidified its place at the forefront of American commerce. Some thought a large park would put New York on a par with European cities, where former royal preserves had been opened to the public. Others believed a park would provide workers respite and fresh air in an otherwise crowded, filthy city.
That quintessentially New York blend of social striving and social engineering led to the legislation that created the first publicly financed park in America.
`Optimistic vision’
“It represents a remarkably optimistic vision of American democracy being able to provide for people’s pleasure and health,” said Elizabeth Blackmar, a Columbia University historian and co-author of a history of the park.
The park site used to be an unappealing mix of dismal swamps and craggy outcroppings far from the southern tip of Manhattan, where most New Yorkers lived.
To shape the terrain into the seemingly natural landscape Olmsted and Vaux envisioned, some 20,000 workers, including Irish laborers and German gardeners, planted more than 500,000 trees, shrubs and vines and blasted away rock so four transverse roads could be sunk out of sight. Central Park construction crews used more gunpowder than the Union and Confederate armies at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Olmsted envisioned Central Park, with its mix of open meadows for picnicking and formal walkways for promenading, as a democratic rendezvous.
“Right from the start, Olmsted was very clear on the park being for ordinary people,” said University of Pennsylvania professor Witold Rybczynski, an Olmsted biographer. “The park was something that was a civilizing force.”
Olmsted’s vision quickly caught on across the country. Realizing the value of having large green spaces for residents–or wanting to stake their claim to importance by emulating New York–other cities started building versions of Central Park.
“He laid down the principles that were copied all around the country,” said Galen Cranz, an architecture professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “He invented a form to create a psychological balance between the frontier that we had conquered and the city grids that he thought were too structured.”
In 1869, the Illinois legislature chartered the three Chicago park systems that later merged into the Chicago Park District. In demand across the country, Olmsted designed Washington and Jackson parks on Chicago’s South Side.
But his influence on younger landscape architects and planners was scarcely less important than his direct role in laying out those parks.
“People like [Daniel] Burnham, that younger generation, were influenced by the size of Central Park to think at a very big scale,” Rybczynski said.
Burnham, to whom the quote “Make no little plans” is attributed, was the author of the 1909 Chicago plan that envisioned a continuous lakefront park, much of which was built.
Over the decades, Central Park’s roads were altered to accommodate automobiles, playgrounds were added, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art was built in the park on Fifth Avenue.
Neglect the biggest peril
The biggest threat to the park was neglect, especially when New York’s free-spending ways led to the 1970s fiscal crisis. To stave off bankruptcy, the city slashed maintenance costs and laid off park workers.
By the late 1970s, a burned-out boathouse at the northern end of the park and graffiti at the stately Bethesda Fountain at the southern end “were just heartbreaking images of the city’s fiscal crisis,” Blackmar of Columbia said.
“The park can only be as healthy as the city,” she said.
Central Park became not only unsightly but unsafe, a place of frequent muggings and more-violent assaults.
The depth to which the park had sunk was epitomized by the 1989 savage beating and rape of a young jogger, allegedly by a gang of marauding youths.
Last year, their convictions were vacated when a convicted serial murderer confessed to the crime. And, after 14 years of anonymity, the victim, Trisha Meili, published an account in March of her ordeal and near-miraculous recovery.
Central Park’s recovery has been no less remarkable. Since the 1980 founding of the Central Park Conservancy, the non-profit group has raised $300 million to restore the park’s ragged landscape and deteriorated structures.
How it works
Under an agreement with the city, the conservancy now provides 85 percent of the park’s $20 million annual operating budget and takes care of all basic upkeep.
And the park has become one of the safest police precincts in the city.
“The nicer the park looks, the more people come to the park and the safer it becomes,” Peruggi said.
Like Olmsted’s design for the park, the conservancy has become a much-copied model as a way to shift the cost of parks and other non-emergency city services to private groups.
That has not happened in Chicago, where the parks are run not by city government but by the Park District, a separate agency with its own taxing authority.
“The great value of taxing authority is that you don’t compete in hard times with other things that are perceived as more important,” said the district’s Megquier.
The decline and recovery of Central Park were important lessons for other big-city park agencies in the need to keep up with maintenance, he said.
But cities have not given up building new parks. Although expansive tracts of green space are harder to come by, cities such as Chicago, Denver and Pittsburgh are creating new parkland on reclaimed riverfronts.
“I think we need parks more than ever because cities have gotten bigger,” said Berkeley’s Cranz. “How do we make density palatable? I think it’s by making cities incredibly beautiful.”
