Posted on 08/28/2004 3:37:52 PM PDT by NYC GOP Chick
S Central Park a serene "church" for reflective New Yorkers or a bustling "town square" for the masses? Is it a bucolic "oasis" for Wordsworthian rumination or a sterile "grass museum" serving first and foremost to enhance the view from the high windows of the finest buildings of Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, where some of the park's wealthier benefactors happen to live?
In the fierce debate of the past weeks and months over whether more than 200,000 anti-Republican protesters should be allowed to congregate en masse on the park's Great Lawn, the poetic language used to describe the park suggested, though never quite stated, an underlying rift. Left unsaid was that the dispute over the proper use of the park has overtones of class conflict — whether the 843 acres of greenswards and woods now reflects too much of the uptown character of the elites who pay for it. Last week, courts denied permission for two large rallies on the lawn. Critics find the restored park exquisitely manicured, yes, but also bourgeois, stiflingly rule-bound and more than a little repressed.
"It's a people park; it's not a mayor's park or a park for the Central Park Conservancy," said Bill Perkins, a city councilman from Harlem who fondly recalls the "be ins" and "happenings" on the Great Lawn in the 1960's. "We're on a slippery slope when we start saying that the rights of grass trump the rights of the people to protest."
Mr. Perkins, who has run several New York City Marathons, added: "I love the park; it's a great park. Its greatness is most revealed when I see people in it — a lot of people. When the marathon ends, thousands of people are there greeting us, trampling on the grass. We feel invigorated. What else is it for? The park is not a park for park's sake, like art for art's sake."
By contrast, for Richard Gilder, a stockbroker who has been one of the great benefactors of the conservancy, the nonprofit group that has done so much to restore the park, it is a people's park. It's just that for him, the "people" in question are the ones trying to quietly enjoy a newspaper on a park bench on a Sunday morning. "We just have to fight so hard to keep it pristine," Mr. Gilder said wearily.
Conflicting visions of how the park should be used, and who it should benefit, are age-old, seesawing over time, said Roy Rosenzweig, an author of "The Park and the People: A History of Central Park."
"In the last 20 years, the ordered, manicured vision has become more dominant," he said. "Regulation has been central to that. In a way, it's fabulously successful. The conservancy has done a great job, and the park looks tremendous. But personally, I'm more of a populist and a believer it's a space for the people. For me, I'd be happy to accept a less good-looking park to allow for more public gatherings, more active use, more recreation."
It may be hard for new visitors to comprehend how badly the park had deteriorated a generation ago. As recently as the early 1980's, Belvedere Castle was a boarded-up ruin. Graffiti covered 65,000 square feet, and weeds grew three feet tall, "even on roofs of buildings, where weeds don't grow," said Sara Cedar Miller, the official park historian. Founded in 1980, the Central Park Conservancy has raised and spent $300 million and at this point supplies about 80 percent of the park's $20 million annual operating budget. The city employees 30 full-time employees overseeing Central Park. The conservancy employs 270.
Ms. Cedar Miller disputes the perception that the swells have gained undue influence over the park's personality. Of the conservancy's benefactors, she said, a "solid body" of them are those who give $35 to $1,000. "Even kids with lemonade stands raise pennies and give us the pennies," she said. "It's a misconception that it's only rich people."
Still, the perception lingers. Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for United for Peace and Justice, one of the organizations denied a permit to assemble on the Great Lawn, insisted, "Central Park is not just a beautiful greensward, it's also the town common."
"The Great Lawn we considered a perfectly reasonable request," he added. "It turns out it's a trophy." The group's march, planned for today, officially ends at Union Square.
Fred Kent, the president of Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit organization based in Greenwich Village, fears a growing influence of transplanted affluent suburbanites over park priorities.
During the 90's, he said, the successful cleanup of New York City as a whole under the Giuliani administration helped lure a "migration" into the city of people who instinctively "feel secure in gated communities." He worries that it is their park now, at least spiritually. It's leading to a "cultural clash," Mr. Kent argued. "You have philosophies of `neat, clean but don't touch' clashing with chaos and diversity and experience."
Even Jon Stewart mocked the city's apparently fussy obsession with lawn care on "The Daily Show" last Wednesday. "If next week comes and the worst problem we have is divots, I'll be pleased and amazed," he deadpanned.
But while critics like Mr. Kent seem to envision Central Park as the apotheosis of city life — a circuslike forum where the huddled masses can gather to reaffirm their oneness — the park's leadership tends to favor the original view of its designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, as the "antithesis" to the teeming city itself.
"Keep off the grass" signs were a defining feature in the park for decades after it opened in 1858. Visitors weren't even allowed to walk on most lawns until well into the mid-20th century, said Adrian Benepe, the city's parks commissioner, who has been busy fending off charges of political favoritism and myopic tidiness in recent weeks. Even in the Robert Moses era, "sparrow cops" would blow whistles at anyone who wandered off the prescribed routes.
"People talk about the `tradition' of mass protests in Central Park, but if you look at the long-term history of the park, those were sort of an aberration," Mr. Benepe said. "It started with the be-ins of the late 60's, which were intended to effectively bring people back in to a park that was run down, scary and abandoned." Thomas Hoving, the parks commissioner at the time, encouraged mass gatherings "to create a critical mass of people to drive out the muggers," Mr. Benepe said.
"If you ever go back and look at the movie `Hair,' which was shot in Sheep Meadow before it was restored, you can see clouds of dust," recalled Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founder of the conservancy, who led it until 1995. This past week, Ms. Rogers was serving on a grand jury downtown where she passed by sign-toting protesters chanting "Whose park? Our park!" near the steps of the State Supreme Court. She said she was tempted to explain to them that "their" Great Lawn would be be no one's Great Lawn for several months if 250,000 people were allowed to trample on it. "The landscape has rights, too," she insisted.
I see no reason for dems to trample the crap out of the green. Let them march in the street and dodge Jamacian cabbies who never touch their brakes.
What a stupid socialist simp! Yes, it's for the people -- the people who live in NYC and pay taxes in NYC! It's not for a bunch of smelly, doped-up out-of-towners to come in and destroy with their stupid riots!
These turds have no rights to be making demands on us and our wallets!
Are you staying in the City for the Convention or seeking shelter in a saner location?
These days, it's more like Muslim drivers.
What these people don't get (or refuse to get) is that when events (such as the marathon mentioned) take place at the park, the events pick up the tab for clean-up and damage to the lawn. No way the anarchists would do that. It'd be up to the taxpayers. THAT is the real point.
I'm a volunteer at one of the "priority" hotels.
Of course, I'm going out of my way to avoid these miserable miscreants.
I haven't visited the Holy City of New York since '94. They were Haitians and Jamaicans back then. No brakes, but free with the hand gestures.
It's the Muslim cab drivers who seethe and mumble that worry me.
Please give us an insight ala Vanities to any observations of note while you are volunteering, please! :-)
We had them in SF some many years ago. I know you do, but warn newbies to town to stay away from the jitneys.
Haven't the left been telling us for years that the environment is more important than human beings?
sure, but first I'm trying to figure out WTF this sign (the one on the white paper) is all about?!
"We're on a slippery slope
Hmmm, someone must have just watered the grass.
when we start saying that the rights of grass trump the rights of the people to protest."
Did anyone remember to submit an Environmental Impact Statement to the EPA to check that out?
The landscape has rights, too," she insisted.
Right on!!! lady.
Ohhh the irony of it all ROTFLM( | )O!!!
That does indeed merit a WTF? Maybe they forget that they aren't allowed to unionize?
That's an enigma, GOP Chick. I think we need a decorder ring to crack that one.
Considering the park is looking the best its EVER looked, I think the Conservancy/Parks Dept should be commended and keep doing what they haave been doing. Limiting restricting damagin usage and allowing for grass down time as required.
Or some major drugs!
That on goes right past me too. Poor Starbuck's workers. Maybe the realize a career in lattes just doesn't have the glamour of years past?
Cape Cod is protected as part of the National Seashore. Development is regulated, but the feet of humans and the rise in sea level due to global warming are still causing destruction on the beaches of the Cape. .... It takes as few as twenty human footsteps to destroy the beach grass Amophila breviligulata
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