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Travel | June 3, 2009

New book on New York's Central Park is great guide book and gorgeous gift book

Marsha Dubrow's photo
DC Art Travel Examiner
central park guidebook
"Seeing Central Park" new guidebook by Sara Cedar Miller. Photo by Sara Cedar Miller.

I like New York in June, how about you? I like New York's Central Park in any month, at any time.

That’s why I like the new guide book “Seeing Central Park: The Official Guide to the World’s Greatest Urban Park” (Abrams). It's compact yet filled with history, design details, luscious photographs, and even a map of the Park.

Author Sara Cedar Miller, the official historian and photographer of the Central Park Conservancy, guides you through America's first and most popular urban park, more than 150 years old.
 
The book includes all the park’s significant design features, from the largest, the Reservoir – with a capacity of more than a billion gallons of water -- to the smallest, like intricate carvings in stonework at the Bethesda Terrace, the "Heart of the Park". Miller includes many newly renovated and restored designs, such as Bow Bridge, the oldest and largest span in the Park.    
 
The park was co-designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux who together founded the country’s first landscape architecture firm. Central Park was their first creation, and they referred to the 843-acre Park as “a single work of art.” Vaux termed it “a magnificent opening.” Today this “magnificent opening” is considered an outdoor museum of Victorian decorative art.
 
[Olmsted, dubbed the “Father of landscape architecture”, also designed the U.S. Capitol grounds and the National Zoo in Washington, and Boston park systems including Fenway. Vaux co-designed grounds at the Smithsonian Institution and the White House.]
 
Olmsted said that Central Park’s main purpose was to “unbend the mind”, a purpose it certainly still fulfills today.
 
Some of the Park’s first’s, according to Miller who also wrote “Central Park: An American Masterpiece” (Abrams) 
 
·         America’s first sculpture park. Although Olmsted and Vaux opposed statues in the Park, it now has more than 50 bronze and marble statues. Some of the most popular are Alice in Wonderland perched atop a mushroom; Hans Christian Anderson reading “The Ugly Duckling” to an attentive little duck; and Balto, the Alaskan husky who led a relay team of dogsleds to deliver anti-diphtheria serum to people in Nome, Alaska, in 1925.
 
·         America’s first zoo. Although “Olmsted and Vaux were dead set against having a zoo,” Miller wrote, today it’s one of the Park’s most visited sections. Visitors turn from the real animals to the animal musicians in the zoo’s Delacorte Clock, which rotate on the hour and half-hour.
 
A few of the Park's many other points of interest:
 
·         The Reservoir. “Olmsted and Vaux hated the reservoir for essentially chopping the Park in two disconnected sections…they deemed the reservoir’s shape as ‘perfectly comprehensible and uninteresting…’” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis didn’t agree – she often jogged around the reservoir, renamed in her honor after her death.
 
·         “Strawberry Fields”. A memorial to John Lennon who often walked there across from his home, the Dakota Apartments on Central Park West and 72nd Street where he was shot and killed in 1980. A circular “Imagine” mosaic is surrounded by benches in this garden of peace.
 
·         “Model Boat Pond” or “Conservatory Water” where children sail model boats, which they can rent here. In E.B.White’s classic book “Stuart Little”, a mouse sails his boat “the Wasp” on the Conservatory Water.
 
·         Delacorte Theater and Belvedere Castle, a miniature Norman Gothic castle, provide the perfect setting for Joseph Papp’s Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, a free summer tradition for more than 50 years.
 
 
Central Park draws more than 25 million visitors each year. Recently this year, it tied with the Brooklyn Bridge as “New York” Magazine’s “Number One Place to Take an Out-of-Town Guest”. 
 
In the film “Fools Rush In”, a New Yorker (Matthew Perry) tells his Mexican love (Salma Hayak), “There’s a spot in the middle of Central Park, the Bethesda Fountain. If you sit there long enough the entire city walks by.”
 
When you walk through Central Park, this new guide is a fascinating companion. And especially if you cannot get to Central Park, “Seeing Central Park” is the next best way to see this quintessential New York City landmark.
 

 

 

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DC Art Travel Examiner

Marsha Dubrow's arts and travel stories have run in National Geographic Traveler, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, among others. She was a...

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