The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  5:40 a.m. To enter the park at this hour is to be wary of disturbing things. Daylight has not yet woken the homeless. Inside the entrance at 96th Street and Central Park West, a man wearing a baseball cap is curled in a fetal position on the grass beneath a rocky crag. Squirrels leap over him.

  6:15 a.m On East Drive, just north of the 79th Street Transverse, bicycle racers are queueing up to register for the weekly competitive sprint, sponsored by the Century Racing Club, around the park’s 6.2-mile inner circumference. “It’s a good road course, a clear road most of the time,” says Jim Boyd, the club’s president. “And it’s not the roller rink it can become.”

  9 a.m. The Rubies, one of four all-girl teams in the Catholic Youth Organization’s Manhattan Youth Baseball League, arrive in the park’s North Meadow for their game against the Diamonds. The players, ages 8 to 10, gather around their coach, Tom Hock, who reminds them to drink plenty of liquids because it’s such a hot day.

  Then, with cries of “Remember, we’re the Rubies!” they take the field, hoping to improve on their 4-2-2 record. “We’ll never lose again!” declares Danielle Bolling, 9, the team’s best hitter. Alas, she is wrong. The Diamonds prevail, 10-0.

  10 a.m. The first model yacht race of the day gets under way on the Conservatory Water, better known as the boat pond, on the east side of the park at 74th Street. Eleven men, members of the 75-year-old Central Park Model Yacht Club, stand on the edge, holding transmitters that control their boats, which are painted a variety of exquisite colors and range in value from $200 to $3,500.

  “I can tell you that compared to a real boat, it’s much easier to throw this one in the water,” says Michael Gianturco, whose 17-year-old son, Alexander, is racing “Viper.”

  NOON There’s a waiting line at Claremont Stables on West 89th Street, where it costs $33 an hour to rent a horse for a clip-clop along the park’s 4.5 miles of bridle paths. “I stopped therapy so I could go riding in the park,” says Cecelia Marcus, a lawyer in full riding regalia.

  12:30 p.m. George C. Wolfe, producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, takes the stage at the Delacorte Theater to begin rehearsal of the Festival’s first summer production, “The Tempest,” which he is directing. Today is the first time the actors are in costume, on a near 90-degree afternoon.

  5:15 p.m. On a ramp leading down to the Wollman Skating Rink, Yolanda Cortez, just back from an extended stay in Italy, is walking with several relatives when she is run over by an in-line skater; her ankle is broken. As the Emergency Medical Service ambulance arrives, Ms. Cortez smiles at the man who hit her, Damon Johnson, a 28-year-old stockbroker who lives in Brooklyn. She flashes him a peace sign.

  8:45 p.m. In a hansom cab on the east side of the park, Jason Oshins, a 30-year-old lawyer, gets down on one knee and proposes to Alice Hurwit, a 28-year-old television producer.

  “Will you do me the honor of being my wife?” he says.

  She sobs and kisses him.

  MIDNIGHT The park is empty enough that individual sounds are carried clearly on the cool night wind. “The Tempest” is still in rehearsals at the Delacorte, dramatic bellows issuing out over the Great Lawn. In the guardhouse on the south end of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, the security guard is passing time watching television.

  What will he do for the rest of the night? Not much, he says, though he looks forward to dawn. “I watch the sun come up,” he says. “Now that’s peaceful.”

  Coyote Leads a Crowd On a Central Park Marathon

  By JAMES BARRON | March 23, 2006

  A COYOTE’S OVERNIGHT ROMP IN CENTRAL Park ended with a tranquilizer dart and a nap, but only after a messy breakfast (hold the feathers), a dip in a chilly pond and a sprint past a skating rink-turned-movie set.

  There was also a final chase that had all the elements of a Road Runner cartoon, with the added spectacle of television news helicopters hovering overhead, trailing the coyote and the out-of-breath posse of police officers, park officials and reporters trailing it.

  The coyote’s pursuers joked that it even tried to turn itself in. It was hunting for a place to sleep it off after being hit by a single tranquilizer dart, and that place was a Fire Department dispatching station next to the Central Park station house overlooking the 79th Street transverse.

  The coyote—named Hal by his captors, who said he was about a year old—woke up in a cage on the bed of a pickup truck carrying him out of the park. This was a couple of hours after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had delivered some one-liners at Hal’s expense. “Are New Yorkers in danger?” the mayor asked at a breakfast at the New York Public Library. “This is New York, and I would suggest that the coyote may have more problems than the rest of us.”

  Where Hal came from remained a mystery. The parks commissioner Adrian Benepe said that he had probably been driven out of Westchester County and meandered down the West Side to 72nd Street, where Riverside Park ends. And then, Mr. Benepe said, he turned left.

  That was news in the neighborhood. “I see a lot of things pass this way,” said Ralph Mascolo, a doorman on West 72nd Street near Central Park West, “but never a coyote.”

  Squares, Beatniks, Children, Dogs Et al. Coexist From 2 to 6 P.M.

  By GAY TALESE | April 9, 1962

  YESTERDAY MARKED THE BEGINNING OF A long season of Sunday afternoon song around the circular, gray pool in Washington Square Park, and it was a scene of peaceful coexistence between the hipsters and squares. Nobody brought bongos—which are outlawed in the park—but people softly sang sad ballads together, or listened to the competitive strumming of guitars, or made casual conversation, or just wandered through the crowds.

  A quintet sang “Down By the River Side,” and 20 yards away a crowd watched a lasso being twirled by a Manhattan cowboy who calls himself Texas Weinstein. Behind him, a slinky girl sat reading Proust, her expression hidden behind sunglasses; next to her was a monkey on a chain who seemed interested in the poetry that William Brown, the Brooklyn bard, was delivering to his followers on the other side of the pool.

  “… he was choked-up tight … in his white-on-white,” said the poet, “and he wore a cocabrown … that was down a candy-striped tie … and he looked real fly … and he had on a gold-dust crown … and it was the 15th frame of a nine-ball game, and as Bud stood watching the play, with a casual shrug, he looked up and dug … a strange cat coming his way … .”

  The young people at his knees seemed visibly moved by the lines and, when the bard had finished, some put money into his hand. “Splendid,” said the poet. “My money has turned green … on the New York scene.”

  With the temperature in the middle 60’s, they sang on and on, undisturbed by the children on tricycles scooting under their guitars, or the teenagers who hurled pink high-bouncers past them, or the dogs that were giving their all to “fetch” for their masters.

  This mellow afternoon in Greenwich Village went on from 2 to 6 p.m., at which time the police declared the self-expression hours at an end. And so everybody took their guitars and songs, their poetry and perambulators, their high-bouncers and dogs, and went peacefully home.

  The Battle Over Washington Square

  By GRAHAM BOWLEY | November 23, 2008

  CATHRYN SWAN TOOK OUT A TAPE MEASURE and leaned into the bushes to indicate the height—four feet—of an imaginary iron perimeter fence, one proposed by the city’s parks department as part of its $16-million-plus redesign of Washington Square Park.

  Marching off past chess players, guitar strummers, baby strollers, magazine readers and people watchers—the usual Greenwich Village crowd—she headed to a spot where benches and trees would soon vanish. She posted a flier. “Stop Mayor Bloomberg from destroying Washington Square Park,” it read. “Who is behind the destruction of our magical park?”

  We all want to write our desires on New York. But in a metropolis of eight million overlapping voices, that is rarely possible. Public spaces like parks are a particular battleground, equally prized as green oases
and places for personal expression.

  And other than Central Park, perhaps none are more valued than the 181-year-old Washington Square Park, a seemingly round-the-clock distillation of the frenetic spirit of New York.

  In 2004, responding to what it said were numerous calls for repairs and improvements, the parks department announced a plan to renovate the space, a proposal quickly met with bitter opposition from residents who complained that their park was being violated. In 2007, after candlelight vigils, demonstrations and rancorous fights at community board meetings and in the courts, the city won and workers moved in.

  Many people who use the square have since accepted the changes as improvements. But a core group remains unconvinced and bitterly angry. For them, the battle for Washington Square is not over. Their frustration speaks to the question of who controls the public spaces that many city residents treat as personal fiefs.

  The parks department saw an opportunity to replace the swaths of asphalt and clunky seating and lighting dating to 1970 and transform it.

  “From the beginning,” said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, “the idea was to try to restore some of its historical character and to try to make it a greener park.”

  But Ms. Swan hopes that she may yet persuade parks department officials to save some of the trees or the alcove seating that she says was such a facilitator of conversation.

  “The biggest question people ask is, ‘Why?’” Ms. Swan said. “Why are they doing this?”

  Ah, the Heat, the Crowd, Bryant Park and the Booze

  By CARA BUCKLEY | July 16, 2008

  WITH BARS ON EVERY CORNER, AND—THANKS to buses, subways or cabs—no need to drive after the drinking is done, New York City can be like a giant—and boozy—college campus. This is never more true than in the summer.

  Even going to the movies involves drinking. Michael Treanor and Brianna Jacobson, both 23, were sitting with their friend Christopher Jarrod Thomas, also 23, in the middle of Bryant Park. It was a recent Monday evening, and a free film, “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” was about to be shown. They were polishing off two bottles of Yellow Tail shiraz, without cups. And, to their surprise, no one was stopping them.

  “I’m a little shocked,” said Mr. Treanor between swigs, his eyes widening. “In California, this is way not allowed.”

  New York City is somewhat of a drinker’s paradise year round, but a certain extra layer of permissiveness seems to infuse the city in the summertime, along with a wellspring of opportunities to get sloshed, slightly or mightily.

  The Bryant Park scene is replicated to an extent around the sweating city, be it at the Great Lawn in Central Park, Cunningham Park in Queens, or Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Whenever there are free events, the throngs follow, alcohol stealthily—or not so stealthily—in tow.

  The official line from the city’s parks department is that alcohol cannot be brought into city parks, though in the summer of 2003, Mayor Bloomberg suggested that drinking wine at concerts in Central Park was O.K. At Bryant Park on July 7, a security guard said he turned a blind eye to booze on movie nights, “so long as it is covered, like in a bag.”

  It’s enough to make Elizabeth Brady—“Boozeabeth” to her friends—shrug.

  “I think it’s normal for people our age, out of college, to learn how to function with a hangover,” Ms. Brady, 24, said at a “Williamsburg block party” at McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn. “It’s like when people have a baby, and they say they haven’t slept in weeks. C’est la vie.”

  The Renewal of Union Square Park

  By DEIRDRE CARMODY | August 3, 1986

  THE FLOWERS ARE BLOOMING IN UNION Square Park.

  Only a few years ago, no grass could be found there. Lights were ripped out, benches were broken and the area had been so taken over by drug dealers that passers-by walked through at their peril.

  Now, there are deep-pink roses and a profusion of snapdragons around the statue of George Washington. Dozens of orange flowers surround the base of the flagpole, brilliant against the lush green of the well-tended lawns.

  This now-cheerful park just north of 14th Street between Broadway and Park Avenue South marks one of the city’s real success stories, according to virtually everyone who knows anything about it, from neighborhood regulars to former critics to city officials.

  “It can only be termed a great triumph,” said Joseph Rose, chairman of Community Board 5, which just a few years back was one of the most outspoken critics of the park and the city’s neglect of it.

  Walking through the 153-year-old, 3.6-acre park last week, one could see people lying on the grass looking up at the sky, while mothers took care of toddlers in the new play area and office workers drank coffee at little white tables under blue-and-white umbrellas. Two park attendants were picking up litter. Several members of the City Volunteers Corps were sweeping the sidewalk near the entrances. Even the drinking fountains worked.

  Keeping a promise by city officials to keep the drug dealers away, two police officers are stationed inside the park and others flank the park on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue South. Community leaders like to tell the story of the surprise visit paid to the park by Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward shortly after it reopened in May 1985 following the first phase of its $3.6 million renovation. There were still a few shadowy figures lurking around. The Commissioner noted with a smile that he knew them all but could not acknowledge it publicly. They were all undercover police officers.

  A Date With Serenity At the Cloisters

  By ANDREW L. YARROW | June 13, 1986

  PERCHED HIGH ABOVE THE HUDSON IN THE forested hillsides of craggy upper Manhattan, the tower of what appears to be a medieval monastery etches its brown granite profile against the sky. This imposing building is the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is like an intricate puzzle whose pieces form a tableau of medieval culture. Tapestries such as the renowned “Hunt of the Unicorn” and “Nine Heroes” series, Gothic stained glass, frescoes, sculptures, enamels, illuminated manuscripts, bejeweled reliquaries and panel paintings such as the Merode Altarpiece are among its treasures.

  The Cloisters and its collections have their origins in the remarkable obsession of George Grey Barnard, sculptor and medieval-art collector extraordinaire. For the first quarter of the 20th century, Barnard prowled the French and Italian countryside, going from abandoned churches and monasteries to farmhouses and even pigsties in search of medieval art objects. He acquired some 700 pieces, including major parts of four cloisters, and transported them to New York, where he opened a museum in 1914 near what is now 190th Street.

  Barnard’s enthusiasm for medieval art was nearly matched by that of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who envisioned a new city park on the heights of upper Manhattan with a great museum devoted to the Middle Ages. Between 1917 and 1927, Rockefeller bought several Washington Heights estates, underwrote the Metropolitan Museum’s purchase of Barnard’s collection and hired the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to fashion the treacherously hilly site into Fort Tryon Park. The new Cloisters—designed by the architect Charles Collens under the curatorial guidance of James J. Rorimer of the Metropolitan—opened in 1938, barely three weeks after Barnard’s death and three years after the park was dedicated.

  The Guardian of Gramercy Park

  By ERIC KONIGSBERG | June 19, 2008

  ARLENE HARRISON CALLS HERSELF THE mayor of Gramercy Park, and she does not just mean that she knows almost everybody who walks through the lush, private two-acre expanse in the East 20’s well enough to say hello. Ms. Harrison’s influence over that particular piece of prime Manhattan green space and its neighbors—some 900 units in 39 buildings border the park—is felt in the “Keep off the grass” signs and the holly bushes she had installed recently “to block out the streets and the sidewalk.”

  Since Ms. Harrison started the Gramercy Park Block Association in 1994, after her son was attacked and beaten up in front of their apartment buildin
g at 34 Gramercy Park, she has effectively remade the area in her own image.

  She has added to a list of regulations (no dogs, no feeding of birds, no groups larger than six people, no Frisbees or soccer balls or “hard balls” of any kind) that, in turn, have served to dictate how the park is—and is not—used. Most recently, she helped pave the way for Zeckendorf Realty to redevelop a 17-story Salvation Army boarding house on the south side of the park, and for the company’s plan to convert the 300 rooms into 14 floor-through apartments plus a penthouse duplex. The company would not confirm the transaction.

  “It will change the neighborhood for the better,” she said. “It will be less use on the park.”

  Indeed, while a key to Gramercy Park—or, more precisely, an address that entitles one to such a key—is among the most coveted items of New York real estate, under Ms. Harrison’s stewardship, the park has become perhaps the least-used patch of open space in the city. Most days, in nice weather, one would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of people in the park at once, and few linger.

  “Honestly, we don’t use it that much,” said Gale Rundquist, a real estate broker who has lived on the park for five years. Still, she said, access “adds a lot to a listing; it’s panache.”

  Over the years, Ms. Harrison and her supporters have feuded with O. Aldon James Jr., president of the National Arts Club (which is on the park and thus is entitled to keys), and his supporters. The rift has essentially come down to access (he is for more, imagining the space as a delightful one for arts club functions).