Central Park Love Song: Wandering Beneath the Heaventrees

By Stephen Wolf

Central Park Love Song is both an intimate portrait and meticulous research of America’s first great public park and the most visited site in New York City. Beginning with the narrator and his dog wandering the battered but still beautiful park in the late 1970s, readers learn why the park is so large on an island so small, why it

• Language: English
• Publisher: Griffith Moon Publishing
• Release date: Jul 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780999845271

Book preview

CENTRAL PARK

LOVE SONG

Wandering Beneath the Heaventrees

PRAISE FOR

CENTRAL PARK LOVE SONG

[Stephen Wolf’s] Central Park Love Song: Wandering Beneath the Heaventrees is an eloquent, evocative ode that encompasses New York history, past and contemporary protagonists, geography and botany so gracefully that reading his book is like, well, a walk in the park….The author’s storytelling is charming, his factoids are fascinating: a combined guidebook and autobiography that’s the next best thing to being there.

SAM ROBERTS, The New York Times

Adopted New Yorkers—those who have with romantic intention come to live for good in the metropolis of their dreams—sometimes feel compelled to express with words their profound love for what E. B. White called this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death. In Central Park Love Song, Stephen Wolf, editor of I Speak of the City: Poems of New York, is as rhapsodic as White in prose where nostalgia and knowledge are skillfully combined. This book about an enduring enchantment with place will resonate with all who find in the city’s green heart a special world of their own.

ELIZABETH BARLOW ROGERS, author/editor of The Central Park Book, author of The Green Metropolis, first president of the Central Park Conservancy, 1980-1996

Stephen Wolf loves the city & its green sanctuary as Frank O’Hara did its streets, cafes & museums, as Nelson Algren sung about Chicago’s Janus-head & gritty heart, as James Joyce celebrated the lives of work-a-day Dubliners. Central Park Love Song is a hand-guided tour of the world’s most famous & beautiful park from the purview of a master story teller & street smart historian. Everywhere you look there is wonder & beauty & the everyday real people who populate the place. Along the way, wandering beneath the heaventrees, you will most certainly fall in love.

KEVIN COVAL, author of A People’s History of Chicago, This is Modern Art, editor of The Breakbeat Poets

Stephen Wolf's Central Park Love Song is an intimate historical and personal portrait of perhaps the world's most beloved urban park and the city surrounding it. It is a meticulously researched and beautifully written homage to Olmsted and Vaux's man-made paradise. Here you will meet the people who inhabit the park, and learn the stories behind the statues, fountains, bridges, ponds, meadows and landscapes that have existed from Civil War times to the present day. There is much more to NYC's Central Park than meets the eye and this wonderful book reveals it all!

DAVID SMITH, New York Public Library's Librarian to the Stars

Copyright © 2018 Stephen Wolf

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be duplicated or transmitted in any form without prior written consent from the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews. Displaying such material without prior permission is a violation of international copyright laws.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2018

Cover Image New York City Skyline with Central Park watercolor and pencil on paper, 19.75 x 26.12 in.

by American Artist Fairfield Porter 1907–1975

© Courtesy Estate of Fairfield Porter

Photos by author: 14, 30, 34, 50, 67, 144-145, 170, 210, 231

Book Design: Marvin Lloyd Larson

ISBN: 978-0-9993153-6-1

ISBN: 978-0-9998452-7-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934802

Published by Griffith Moon

Santa Monica, California

www.GriffithMoon.com

CENTRAL PARK LOVE SONG

Wandering Beneath the Heaventrees

STEPHEN WOLF

CONTENTS

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One: Passage Through the Wall

Chapter Two: A Walk in the Park

To Make an Eden: Retreating glaciers as high as the Empire...

Chapter Three: Garden of Sacred Gatherings

Chapter Four: City at the Edge of the Trees

To Make an Eden continued: New York is "more scantily...

Chapter Five: The Wild Garden

Part Two

Chapter Six: Garden of Champagne and Despair

Chapter Seven: Kindred Spirits

To Make an Eden continued: Designing the city’s new park...

Chapter Eight: Garden of Earthly Delights

Chapter Nine: If Not in the Park

To Make an Eden continued: Before the sublime imaginings by...

Chapter Ten: Garden of Darkness and Light

Chapter Eleven: Garden of Grandeur

To Make an Eden continued: At 4:30 on the morning of April...

Chapter Twelve: Blessings From Above

Part Three

Chapter Thirteen: Seeing the Park with New Eyes

Chapter Fourteen: Garden of Song and Saffron

To Make an Eden continued: The physical labor of creating...

Chapter Fifteen: The Magic of Osseo’s Log

Chapter Sixteen: Garden of Remembrance

To Make an Eden continued: When the city bought the land...

Chapter Seventeen: A Special Luncheon

Epilogue

Prologue

One night soon after the ball dropped in rowdy Times Square for 1977, we began our journeys to Central Park. Bo sniffed only a few cold yards ahead keeping close on the unfamiliar blocks of Bleecker Street. It was well named, Bleecker, though surrounding streets were as badly wounded. Much of the city lay in shambles then, aluminum gates ripped from empty storefronts, dark brick walkups crumbling, trash on sidewalks and in stairwells and gutters, graffiti’s mad, white lines over everywhere: in the distance far downtown, the slender shafts of the World Trade Center glittering between the gaps of the potholed cross-streets.

Just before descending the stairs to the Broadway/Lafayette subway station, I fixed Bo on a short leash. From my coat pocket I removed a thin, white, fold-up cane with a bungee cord running through it that snapped open long and straight, put on a pair of Roy Orbison-style sunglasses, then tapped my way downstairs; this late at night fewer people would see us if anything about my plan went awry. The white cane’s red tip touched just to the left and crossed over to the right, always low to the ground to detect a rise or drop. Everything was so dark in these glasses.

We passed the drowsy attendant in the booth as I tugged Bo slightly toward the turnstile and, in character, fumbled a little with the token while seeking the slot: fifty cents a ride back then. Once through, we moved to the uptown tracks, descended the stairs with steady taps, and waited on the empty platform, Bo patient and curious though never having seen anything remotely like a New York City subway platform. Someone hunched in a pillar’s shadow along the downtown side, never looking at us.

Bo was a border collie the color of graham crackers, with a muscular white chest, lively brown eyes, and a floppy ear torn in a fight he picked with Cerberus. He ran free on a college quadrangle fastened to Illinois soy bean fields when he adopted me a decade ago. He’s run free ever since until a few nights earlier when I romantically landed us on a battered street of New York’s Lower East Side with no other plan than the next few beats of my restless heart. Though past his prime Bo still needed more than a walk around the block twice a day, so we headed to Central Park. When I felt the cold air pushed through the tunnel by the incoming train I rubbed Bo’s flank, his fur soft as talcum: It’s okay, I said just when the leash grew taut as Bo pulled forward, prepared to protect me from any challenge. I had worried he might be skittish as a rapid subway rushed toward us, but when the D train burst from the dark tunnel, then slowed with a screech, stopped, and the doors gaped opened, Bo confidently guided me inside.

Only a few people were in the car though I couldn’t really look around since I was blind. As the subway clattered and clanked, shimmied and sparked, I saw myself in the reflection of the subway door’s window: wavy brown hair needs trimming, worn black coat, could be taller, and looking unconvincingly blind despite the dark glasses, white cane, and handsome dog.

Soon the train came to a gradual, jerking stop at Columbus Circle, the southwest corner of Central Park. The doors opened and a bundled man grudgingly made way as I tapped by. Along the platform were other travelers of the night, in couples or alone, and once off the train I vigorously rubbed Bo along his strong neck.

"Good doggy!" and he leaned his weight into me.

I tapped along a trash-strewn, foul-smelling corridor, then down another, wadded, wet newspapers along the rank gutters. Ugly lines, mad and thick, covered cracked, tiled walls, every poster for six-packs and cigarettes, every subway map made useless, and each ethnic group biting into Levy’s rye bread.

I was heading for any exit when suddenly Bo hesitated, narrowed his eyes and sniffed the air, then pulled me in a different direction. Down another dreary, piss-reeking corridor, a lone traveler never glancing at us as Bo kept pulling toward a darkened corner of the station where from a stone staircase cold, fresh air descended. He was heading for Central Park. All exits at Columbus Circle Station lead to the streets above but only one directly to the edge of the park, and that was the one Bo found; he could smell it. We walked up the steps into the cold night, the city bright and churning but a vast plain of darkness to our left which we entered at the first opening in a low stone wall. I broke down the cane and slipped it into my pocket, removed the sun glasses to see better that New York night, then freed Bo an instant before he scampered for a thin grove of trees and I lost him in the dark.

Together we made dozens of visits to Central Park: without him, I another five thousand. This book is what I found in those wanderings.

Part One

To an ecologist, New York is most interesting as an ecotone, a place where natural worlds collide.

Anne Mathews,

Wild Nights:

Nature Returns to the City

CHAPTER ONE

Passage Through the Wall

The greatest urban park in the United States and a model for many parks to follow was designed by a young man from Connecticut who had never designed anything before, a landscape architect lured from London by a doomed horticulturist living sixty miles up the Hudson River, and an Austrian who had once tended the gardens of a king. A moody ornamentalist from Chislehurst, England, sculpted the park’s most enchanting artifacts, a woodworker from Hungary created in his Brooklyn shop the park’s rustic, rugged shelters, and thousands of Irish laborers who hauled a million wheelbarrows of earth, drained the swamps, and dug tremendous pits miraculously transformed into ponds and lakes demanded that no African-Americans work those acres and got what they demanded.

From a wealthy family on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a young woman would sculpt the model of her lover into an angel, the park’s iconic image. Though it was the only statue intended for the park, gradually there would be many more, most of them incidental, some terrible, the payment for one assisted by a benefit performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: included in the cast, a man who would murder our greatest president. And there was the capable ax man from Savannah, Georgia, a Union artillery captain during the Civil War who failed as a farmer on the rich, black earth of Illinois but heard of work for able-bodied men clearing land for a vast public park in New York City. One day at the job site he watched transfixed as a co-worker molded the head of a wolf in wax, and this began a journey that led him to become, self-taught, the nation’s most celebrated sculptor of animals.

Where any other great metropolis displays in the center of town its most arrogant buildings or lofty monuments, New York planted trees, for Central Park’s enlightened designers were inspired by their era, one that found the Creator’s spirit not amid the rigors and right angles of the artificial city but in Nature’s simple splendor. Central Park was a blessing to New York before the skyscraper and subway, before millions lugged their dreams through Ellis Island or a single steel cable looped from one epic tower of the Brooklyn Bridge to the other. When wealthy New Yorkers displayed themselves in fine carriages along the park’s undulant roadways, Times Square was a remote, scarcely populated stretch of cobblestone streets known as Longacre Square where those carriages were made. And just as with the towers and streets that now surround it, Central Park’s forests and rolling meadows, its ponds and streams were never here; it’s all been created with the same care and effort as the Sistine Chapel ceiling or Wagner’s Ring or the odyssey of one man’s day and night in Dublin. Yet to this day most visitors still believe as did Horace Greeley when seeing the park after its official opening in 1873. Utterly charmed by the illusion, the renowned editor of the old New York Tribune said of the park with satisfaction, Well they have let it alone better than I thought they would.

On that late night early in January I knew none of this. Never had I heard of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Andrew Jackson Downing, Jacob Wrey Mould, or Elizabeth Barlow, but the instant Bo and I first entered Central Park the city had quickly fallen away, parallel streets and perpendicular avenues left at the tree-line. The landscape dipped to a dark, gentle valley or rose to a ridge, and even the constant hum of traffic and blasts from car horns, all but a distant siren somewhere in the vast city beyond the trees faded as I followed Bo deeper into the park. Often I lost sight of him since the globes of nearly all the lampposts had been shattered, but after a whispered call he returned, only to wander off again as I followed him up black, ridged rock face where I could see the park rolling and barren and dark.

Now, everyone knew the park’s reputation; Last night it was so quiet in Central Park, Johnny Carson once quipped at the time of my first wanderings, you could hear a knife drop. But I was fit and Bo a fierce protector, and muggers tend to avoid targets with big dogs. Besides, I felt lucky. No one should come to New York to live, wrote E.B. White in Here Is New York, unless he is willing to be lucky.

So this book is also about the city that needed and created Central Park, a city with the chutzpah to place a park so big in the center of an island this small. And on that first night in the park the city pressed all along its edges, light from surrounding buildings dangling like jewels through the bare trees. But Manhattan’s midnight shrouded us with invisibility as if I wore the magic tarnhelm, prowling unseen the valleys and rocky ridges; even Bo’s white chest dimmed to a soft-furred grey. It was a thrilling night.

East First Street in the Lower East Side resembled the street where Dylan and Suze Rotolo are cuddling on the cover of Freewheelin’, and here in a five-floor walk-up I rented two rooms on the second floor. Laid out long and narrow, it was known as a railroad apartment, half the width and the entire length of the old, cranberry-colored brick building with a black, zig-zag of a fire escape bolted to its exterior. In the front room, two dirty windows faced a tattered street, lively each day but Sunday and loud on Saturday nights when the Puerto Rican social club in the storefront blasted salsa that set the wood floors trembling to the beat. Another, more narrow room led to the kitchen in the rear, and in the walls of this narrow room, ingeniously, windows for light and air.

The kitchen stove resembled the grill of a ‘55 Buick Roadmaster, and since the pale yellow Frigidaire had no handle I had to pry it open with my hands. Cracked, yellow linoleum on the kitchen floor and two windows looking down upon a small, bare backyard enclosed by a chain-link fence. A large, leafless tree grew in a corner, and behind the fence, wide East Houston Street, traffic moving crosstown from river to river.

There was a bathtub along the kitchen wall with a little sink at one end of it. Above the sink, a bathroom cabinet. Beside the sink, a narrow closet with a toilet inside with the chain thing and wooden box like the one where Michael found the gun Clemenza had taped behind it. East First Street, a fitting place to begin life in New York, so I signed a year’s lease for $150 a month. The apartment needed a good cleaning and places in the walls patched, all four windows were grimy inside and especially out and I also must open a bank account, hook the phone and power in my name, find a good veterinarian close by, God forbid, and soon a job. But here in this city of promise and possibility there must be at least one copy editor or proof-reading position, and I would find it.

First I must make some semblance of a home in these ragged rooms where for weeks I’d wake for a confused moment in the night before realizing where I was, Bo snoring on his rug beside the bed. And after the old apartment was swept and mopped, sponged and plunged, scraped and swept and mopped again, before some patching work and sanding and long before enough off-white paint covered the bumpy walls, we headed back to Central Park. I had kept thinking about our visit there a few nights before, how I felt both thrilled and calm at once, so I put on my heavy black coat as Bo’s head rises, ear perked, and as I reached for the white cane he raced for the door.

Before fleeing the Midwest I had mulled over ways to get my old dog to Central Park, nearly four miles from the apartment I had rented. A taxi might not even pick up a big dog, especially after wading in water or strolling through mud as Bo liked doing. Besides, taxi were expensive and I had low funds and no prospects. With confidence in the one bold option, I headed to the medical supply store off campus for a guide-dog harness.

A dog must be fitted for one, the pharmacist told me. He was elderly, thin, serious, and I knew Bo would never fool him enough to pass the audition.

May I see that? I asked, pointing between the bedpan and catheter at a white cane with a red plastic tip in the display case.

I was confident after our late-night ride to take the subway during the day when many more people did the same; I felt their eyes on me far longer than they would if I could see, which, of course, I could. I kept my gaze fixed ahead of me, even tilting my head back slightly like Stevie Wonder, and we were left to ourselves. At Columbus Circle Station the way parted for us again, and again I tapped for the dark stone staircase where we entered the park at the first opening in the low stone wall.

Only then did I see how the park was as badly battered as the city. Once off the leash Bo again headed for the valley to our left, dry and dusty, the exposed tree roots resembling thin hands, skeletal and desperate. Most benches lining the walkways had splintered rails, as were the planks of a gentle bridge above a bridle path, its cast iron lace rusting. Like the city, graffiti was everywhere: on lampposts, benches, across the great shelves of black rock. It was like Mississippi kudzu; if I stayed still long enough someone would graffiti me. And none was exciting graffiti sprayed with skill on a crumbling wall or the exterior of subway cars winding like colorful dragons through dark tunnels. Graffiti scarring the park was the kind inside the subway, initials and bizarre signs making you edgy, like constantly being yelled at.

Off the walkway I followed Bo, his keen snout skimming the soft rise and fall of the hard, cold land. I called him back when he headed up an embankment towards a roadway where cars sped through the park. We entered a tunnel under the road, a crescent entry to a rank, sour passageway, a bundled figure huddled along a crumbling wall; at the other opening, rolling, barren landscape, curving walkways, and so few people despite the mild winter afternoon.

When we visit Central Park today the groves are green, benches mended, graffiti blasted clean, walkways lit and flower-lined. There are bike tours and walking tours and tours of famous movie scenes (no tours for fiction or poetry) that occurred in Central Park. There are long lines at bathrooms and cafes, for row boats and drinking fountains, walkways often as visitor-thick as Times Square. The restoration from those dusty meadows to today’s luscious lawns took decades, as the abuse and neglect had taken, and to know Central Park is to experience those changes, its seasons and migrations, the animals struggling to survive within and to share the park with people who love it for reasons as varied as themselves. And so, as in our memory and dreams, the past and present often entwine in this story, merging at times into something both remembered and imagined. What I thought would give Bo a place to wander besides the streets of the Lower East Side soon cast a spell over me; I imagined the park while away from it, like a good book on a nightstand, beckoning despite the tattered pages.

My old dog was always eager for a walk, but after only two visits to Central Park he spun in a circle like a puppy when I reached for the collapsible cane; if I tarried, he scratched at the front door. Again we rode the D train to Columbus Circle, Bo in the lead and I with a cane and sunglasses, and we did this several more times before I noticed chiseled on the park’s wall the words MERCHANTS’ GATE.

More than fifty entrances are cut into the park’s stone perimeter though only twenty were intended, and each has a name carved into the wall; there is a gate for artists, artisans, children, farmers, inventors, saints, strangers, warriors, women, woodsmen, and more. They serve as both portal from the turbulent city into the quiet park and greetings to each group, with a thematic statue nearby. Today only two remain: Samuel Morse at INVENTORS' GATE (Fifth Avenue/72nd Street) and a bust of Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt at NATURALISTS’ GATE (aka EXPLORERS’ GATE at Central Park West/77th Street). Why it took so long before I noticed the friendly greeting and acknowledgment is that here at Columbus Circle the city boldly declares its pomposity.

In 1892 a seventy-foot tall pillar rose in the center of the ‘circle’ for horse-drawn busses to turn around before heading back downtown where Broadway, West