The Park
City dwellers everywhere tend to be passionately chauvinistic about their parks, and it is not hard to see why. Parks remind urban men and women that the metropolis has not forsaken the countryside, and that greenery can coexist with asphalt and concrete. San Franciscans are fiercely proud of Golden Gate Park, Bostonians of the Common, Washingtonians of Rock Creek Park, Londoners of Hyde Park and Parisians of the Bois. Central Park is unquestionably one of New York’s greatest civic centerpieces and showplaces. Simply, appropriately and unpretentiously named, and elegantly laid out, the Park is one of the things that makes New York life possible and gives it an oasis. To the Dakotans, the Park is even more: it is their front yard.
When the city purchased the acreage for Central Park in 1856, it did so not a moment too soon. Had it waited just a few more years it would have been too late. The land would have become far too valuable as commercial real estate, and what is now preserved as Central Park would be covered with asphalt and masonry.
The concept of Central Park was grandiose in scale, considering the fact that in the 1850’s the Park was by no means “central” to city life. It was, however, placed in roughly the center of Manhattan. It was an even half-mile wide and two and a half miles long which gave it over eight hundred acres, or more than twice the size of London’s Hyde Park, which, prior to Central Park, had been the epitome of big-city parks. To Londoners in 1856 the size of New York’s new park seemed outrageously pretentious. New York was a city of less than 700,000 people; London’s population was 2,363,000, more than three times as large. The park took nearly ten years to build and cost over nine million dollars, a staggering sum in those days. By the end of the Civil War, most of the work on the park had been completed, though the problem of squatters’ shacks—particularly in the park’s northern reaches—would continue for a number of years.
When the city commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted to design the park, it displayed a rare genius and sensitivity. Hardly ever before in the history of the United States had the principles of art been applied to the embellishment of nature or the landscape in a public park. Olmsted laid out walks, fountains, lakes, formal gardens, five miles of bridle paths, vistas, great grassy areas and a wide quarter-mile-long Mall leading into the park from its main entrance at Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Other sections were left wild and wooded with a ground cover of wildflowers. As one of the great landscape artists of the century, Olmsted went on to design Prospect park in Brooklyn, Morningside and Riverside parks in Manhattan, Fairmont Park in Philadelphia, South Park in Chicago, Mount Royal Park in Montreal and the campus of Stanford University in California. But he always considered Central Park his most important achievement.
The Park’s effect on the social habits of New Yorkers was immediate and profound. For one thing it brought the city’s rich and poor together for the first time. To be sure, in those decorous days the sense of class differences was deeply ingrained, and the rich and the poor, when they entered Central Park—the rich in their smart carriages and the poor on bicycles or on foot—maintained respectful distances. Before the completion of Central Park it had been unthinkable for a lady to ride horseback in the city. Well-bred ladies rode, but only in the privacy of their country places. Just ten years earlier Fanny Kemble had scandalized the city by riding her horse down Broadway. But then Fanny was an actress, and a certain amount of unorthodox behavior was expected of her. Now all that was changed, and for a lady to ride her horse in the Park—accompanied, of course, by her groom or riding master—was suddenly comme il faut. The fashionable riding hour for ladies was in the morning, before breakfast. That was when scores of society women trotted out in their gray face veils, high-buttoned jackets and long riding skirts, riding sidesaddle or “the Queen’s seat” as it was called. Members of real society, of course, had their own private stables. But the Dakota, not to be outdone, maintained a stable for tenants at Broadway and Seventy-third Street, two blocks away.
In good weather a feature of New York life became the afternoon carriage parade, between four and five o’clock, along the Mall. For this, everyone turned out—the old rich, the nouveaux and members of the demimonde. Throngs of curious onlookers and tourists lined the entrance to the Mall to observe this unique phenomenon and to catch glimpses of Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Vanderbilt in their elegant carriages. One could also usually spot this or that famous actress of the day, a celebrated courtesan or two, and Josephine Wood, the mistress of New York’s most expensive fancy-house. One of the snappiest equestrian outfits belonged to the notorious Madame Restell, society’s most popular abortionist. The seats of her barouche were covered with rabbit fur, her tack was of sterling silver, her coachmen wore gold epaulets and on her horses’ heads were cockades of ostrich plumes.
Status was conveyed by the sort of carriage one drove. The Old Guard enclosed themselves behind the closed and curtained doors of the broughams. Landaus, which could be either closed or opened to display their occupants in their finery, were for the more daring and sophisticated. The young smart set, along with ladies with “evening occupations” and others whose social credentials were less than impeccable, flaunted their fashionable outfits and hairdos in open barouches and victorias. The dogcart never managed to gain much fashionability. This curious vehicle with two parallel seats, one facing front and one facing rear, was what Mr. C. F. Bates of the Dakota drove, another indication of the Dakota’s independence from the dictates of society.
The Central Park Mall, it was soon decreed, was the one place in New York where proper young ladies and gentlemen could stroll without a chaperone. At the end of the Mall was the lake, and here the young people met their friends and formed boating parties or fed the swans. Also at the head of the Mall were the Casino restaurant and the band pavilion where, on Wednesday and Saturday evenings in fine weather, concerts were presented. The wealthy arrived for these performances in their carriages, and listened from the Casino terrace near the “carriage concourse.” The non-carriage trade rented folding chairs or sat on the grass.
In winter the lake and the pond at Fifty-ninth Street quickly made skating the most popular cold-weather pastime for rich and poor alike. When the public horse carts and omnibuses sported colored flags it meant “The ball is up in the Park”—a balloon that was raised to indicate that the ice was safe for skating. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers flocked to Central Park to waltz and figure skate on the park’s frozen waters. At night the ice was lighted with calcium lamps to illuminate the Currier and Ives scene.
When Frederick Olmsted was laying out the Park, it was assumed that all sides—north, east, south and west—would one day be lined with the mansions of millionaires. By 1910, however, this had not happened. On Central Park West the Dakota had set the pace, and this wide thoroughfare was now lined with large apartment houses, presenting much the same skyline as it does today. On Central Park South, as Fifty-ninth Street had been renamed, apartment buildings had also risen. Central Park North, 110th Street, was where the squatters had moved as the city (and, indeed, the creation of the Park itself) had relentlessly pushed its poor northward as well as southeastward into the Lower East Side. The poor occupied a kind of a no man’s land, or buffer zone, between lower Manhattan and Harlem, which had become a middle-class (and predominantly white) suburb. A small black colony had formed along Seventh Avenue, between Thirty-first and Thirty-eighth streets, in the heart of what is now the Garment District; it was not until after World War I that Harlem began to blossom as the largest black city in the world. In the early 1900’s if one lived in Harlem, one did one’s shopping along 125th Street, Harlem’s main artery, and Harlemites had few reasons to venture downtown.
Only along Fifth Avenue—“The Queen of Avenues”—had the millionaires consented to build their private palaces. By 1899 the mansions along Fifth Avenue had become a tourist attraction of major proportions, and these houses of the rich were touted to sightseers that year in a full-page article in the Sunday Tribune. Headlined, “Houses at Which Visitors to the Metropolis Look With Interest,” the Tribune story contained not only photographs of some of these houses but went on to list, in what would be considered very questionable journalistic practice today, the names and addresses of some two hundred rich New Yorkers under a subcaption, “Names of the Owners of Homes Along Fifth Avenue Where New York’s Millionaires are Domiciled.” Ten years later the idea of apartment living on Fifth Avenue was still repugnant.
By 1910 New York was effectively out of the Gaslight Era, and this was the year that the first luxury apartment building was erected on the Park’s Fifth Avenue flank. Designed by McKim, Mead and White, it was a grand, twelve-story granite affair, built around a central court, at 998 Fifth Avenue, facing the Park on the corner of Eighty-first Street. The vast floor-through apartments offered, in addition to the customary living rooms and dining rooms, octagonal salons and reception rooms thirty-six feet long. Each apartment had eight master bedrooms and nine maids’ rooms. Unlike the generation-older Dakota, bathrooms abounded. Each apartment had ten, each with what was then the world’s most modern plumbing.*
For all its amenities, 998 Fifth Avenue was not an immediate success. Renting it was painfully slow, and it was clear that members of New York society were still unwilling to live under the same roof as others, even when they were people of their own kind. Then the rental agent, the young Douglas L. Elliman, hit upon a novel idea. If one member of Old Guard society could be persuaded to move into 998, perhaps others would follow. Elliman approached Senator Elihu Root, very definitely Old Guard, and offered him a cut rate—a $25,000-a-year apartment for only $15,000 a year. Root was sold, gave up his big brick town house at Seventy-first and Park, and moved into 998. One by one, others of Senator Root’s social circle joined him at the Fifth Avenue address, and Mr. Elliman’s successful real estate career was launched.
Still, Fifth Avenue did not experience the apartment-building boom that Central Park West had undergone earlier. The next apartment house on Fifth Avenue did not appear until 1916, and it was not until the halcyon years of the 1920’s that Fifth Avenue began to become the apartment-lined street that it is today.
The rest of New York, meanwhile, was changing with incredible speed. By 1910 New York and the entire country had entered the era of internal combustion. Mass production of automobiles had begun in 1900, and at an automobile show held at the old Madison Square Garden that year, more than fifty makers of “horseless carriages” displayed their models to enthusiastic audiences. The new cars were steered with tillers, like boats, had to be started with cranks and, like the carriages they were replacing, featured a great deal of brass to polish. Still, the following year at an Automobile Club meet in Long Island, one of these contraptions reached the astonishing speed of a mile a minute. At the Dakota, Mrs. Steinway refused to buy a horseless carriage; Mr. Bates, however, bought a Simplex, becoming the building’s first auto-owner.
By 1910 the population of New York had jumped to over two and a half million, and the horse population had declined to 108,036, as more and more Scottish coachmen were being trained as chauffeurs. Electricity had eliminated the dirty and noisy steam locomotives. Gasoline-powered taxis and buses—including the exciting new double-deckers (introduced from France) on Fifth Avenue—were rapidly replacing the horse-drawn public carts and omnibuses. In 1900 tunneling for the first New York subway had begun. Four years later, following the mayor’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, thousands of New Yorkers poured into the subway for the thrilling trip from City Hall Station up to Grand Central, then west to Times Square, and finally to the suburban reaches of 145th Street. For months afterward New Yorkers would spend their days off underground, riding back and forth on the nickle ride. One by one, the old elevated lines would disappear, to be replaced by the subway system.
Ladies who observed the laws of fashion still spent their weekdays carrying out the elaborate ritual of dropping calling cards. But now a much more exciting and efficient way of communicating with one’s friends and neighbors had presented itself—the telephone. In 1880 not one in a thousand New Yorkers had owned one of these new devices, but by 1910 one out of ten New Yorkers had a phone, and the shroud of telephone and electric lines above the streets threatened to shut out the sun as effectively as the elevated trains. Along with the subway, the popularity of the telephone made New York seem suddenly much smaller and easier to reach. Gossip traveled with amazing speed over the telephone. As in any social ritual, rules were quickly established—the hours for telephoning were in the morning between eight and noon, and a woman considered herself unfit for afternoon shopping or other household chores until her morning telephoning was completed. The average New York woman, it was reported, “looked absolutely drawn through a knothole” when she emerged from her telephone duties.
Meanwhile, though some people bemoaned the loss of the horse-drawn carriages, others pointed out, with a certain amount of truth, that Central Park now provided a refuge for some of New York’s beloved horseflesh. Horseback riding in the Park was still enormously popular, and horses that had once pulled carriages in the streets were now stabled on or just off the Park for early morning and weekend recreation.
Frederick Olmsted may have been wrong in his vision of what sort of residences would one day surround the Park, but in other ways he was remarkably foresighted for his time. He was concerned, in addition to the Park’s design, with its having ethnic harmony. He worried about security and about inevitable problems in sanitation, care and maintenance. He wanted the Park to be accessible to all and yet, at the same time, aloof and distant—not too accessible. Aware of New Yorkers’ feelings about privacy, he wanted the Park to be a private sort of place as well as a public one, where privacy could be enjoyed. He wanted the Park to be a special place, to be entered with pleasure but also with a certain amount of respect and a touch of awe. For this reason Olmsted did not design a park that could be entered from any point along the street. He surrounded it with a high stone protective wall, pierced by carefully placed entrances. It was to be open at all times, but to create the impression, psychologically, that the Park was a particular province of its own, a little effort was required to get inside it. The device of the wall was intended to give New Yorkers an extra sense of appreciation of their Park, and extra pride in it.
Today, on a summer weekend afternoon, when Dakotans—and other Park-facing New Yorkers—look out, they do not just see a great green rectangle of trees, grass and shimmering water, though all that is still there. They also see great throngs of people funneling into the Park through one or another of its entrances—one of which directly faces the Dakota. In their new, co-operative spirit of understanding and love, it was natural that the Dakotans, who had come to think of themselves as a particularly sensitive band of people, should begin to focus their concerns on their immediate environment, which included the Park. But there was more to it than that. Just as the “Dakoterie” on West Seventy-second Street had become very possessive about their building, they had also become very possessive about Central Park. It was their Park, and, just as the Dakotans were a bit elitist in their feelings toward their address, they were also elitist in their sentiments toward the Park. As they watched the invasion of their sometimes scruffily dressed fellow New Yorkers on the average Saturday and Sunday, the Dakotans began to wonder whether Mr. Olmsted’s vision of the Park had been usurped or even lost.
The Park was still lovely, there was no question about that. But the people who were frequenting it sometimes were not. A section of Mr. Olmsted’s wall was being used by male prostitutes for solicitation. The Park was being misused and, furthermore, the city seemed to be encouraging its misuse. The villain behind all this, in some Dakotans’ minds, was Mr. Thomas Hoving, the Park’s commissioner. “Tommy Hoving,” said Frederic Weinstein, “was out to do for Central Park just what he later did for the Metropolitan Museum when he became head of that”—that is, to overpopularize the Park, and to promote it with show-biz press-agentry. In the process, in the view of some New Yorkers, the Park had begun to attract all the wrong people.
By the early 1970’s the Park had become generally unsafe at night. Still, to the dismay of her neighbors, Lauren Bacall routinely walked her dog there, even late at night—though Miss Bacall’s bold stride suggested a woman who might give any muggers a run for their money.
By daylight, meanwhile, the Park had become to some people—well, unattractive. The city, in the person of Mr. Hoving, had begun to boast that Central Park was a “people park.” Indeed it was, and on most good days Central Park was the most densely populated public park of any in the world. The city had also begun scheduling more and more Big Apple Events in the Park, more plays, more operas, more symphony performances, more rock concerts, more ethnic festivals, all of which attracted greater hordes of people. Perhaps the city operated on the theory that in numbers there was safety, but it overlooked the corollary that with so much use, the Park deteriorates. The events in the Park attracted pushcart vendors—some of them licensed, some of them not—who sold everything from toys and balloons and cheap jewelry and post cards to hot dogs, bagels, soft drinks and ice cream. The vendors, on a good day, have managed to turn Central Park into one of the city’s largest commercial centers of the junk-food trade, surely something Mr. Olmsted could never have foreseen. The vendors point out that they carry with them their own containers for used paper napkins and other trash. But food is carried away from their carts, and napkins wind up in the shrubbery, pop cans in the lake. Helium-filled balloons escape from children’s tiny hands and festoon themselves high in the branches of trees, where they hang limply out of reach of the Park’s overburdened sanitation staff.
The electronic age brought with it the transistor radio, and these devices are played, at high volume, throughout the Park, making it at times seem noisier than the streets. (In London, by contrast, it is illegal to play radios in the royal parks—Hyde Park, Green Park, St. James’s Park and Kensington Gardens—and punishable by a £5 fine.)
The Central Park Zoo, though it is not a close Dakota neighbor, has long been something of an embarrassment to the city. Though the Zoo’s indoor-outdoor cafeteria is still a pleasant place to lunch, even the Zoo’s administrators admit that it is one of the worst animal parks in the country. With the exception of the always-playful seals, most of the Zoo’s animals, in their too-small cages and enclosures, look listless and unhappy.
Tall weeds of lethargy and indifference seem to have grown in the Park, a sense of fatalism, and a feeling that nothing can be done. Olmsted’s dream that the Park would be a place that would be entered with a sense of reverence and respect for nature seems far short of coming true. Grassy areas are turned to dirt from the soles of too many sneakers. The great variety of wildflowers that used to bloom there has diminished steadily over the years. Shrubs, plants and flowers are routinely pulled up and carried away. Branches are occasionally snapped from trees for games of stickball, and statues and monuments have been sprayed with graffiti—a practice which, fortunately, seems on the wane. The Park was conceived as a place where New Yorkers could escape from the sounds, tensions and bustle of the city—a peaceful, bucolic interval in the city’s life. At times, though, it seems almost the opposite.
And just when New Yorkers are about to concede that the Park may be “getting a little better,” something dreadful happens. A group of joggers is randomly attacked and bludgeoned by a band of hoodlums wielding bats and clubs and branches torn from trees. When apprehended the young men admitted that they were “out to get faggots,” whom they hated as a breed. While this is an isolated instance, and though the Park is generally considered a much safer place than it was, say, in the 1960’s, it hardly provides the kind of calm it was designed to engender. Meanwhile, maintaining this great natural resource seems to be of low priority in New York City’s scheme of allocating scarce public funds.
To be sure, Frederick Law Olmsted was designing for an earlier generation of New Yorkers. The 1850’s was a genteel, sentimental period in America, and New York was a decorous community of women in gauze dresses holding parasols and young men in polished boots communing with Nature. Olmsted certainly wanted to make his park available to New York’s poor also, but he was thinking of the poor as they were then—polite and respectful to their “betters,” and well-behaved. In the nineteenth century the less well-off tended to emulate the good manners of the wealthy. At the same time the rich were more serene, less edgy, and kinder to the poor. Olmsted lived in an era of the Grateful Poor, while in our more egalitarian age we have the Arrogant Poor, the Demanding Poor. His Park, walled like a medieval city-state, reflects the values of that older, more naïve, all-but-forgotten time, and, like the Dakota, it was really created for the nineteenth-century leisure class. The new egalitarianism—the youth revolt and the black revolt of the 1960’s—and the feeling that everyone deserves his share of whatever public property exists, and has the absolute right to use it as he wishes—are things that Mr. Olmsted would never have understood, much less foreseen.
There may also be something primal in humans’ feelings toward public places. The concept of sharing, as every parent and teacher knows, is a most difficult one to instill in children. At Rutgers, Professor Myra Bluebond-Langner, an anthropologist, recently reported on a study she is making of children between the ages of two and five, showing their “extreme respect for property rights.” In her preliminary findings Professor Bluebond-Langner notes that children’s disputes over private property (“That’s my crayon”) never last as long as those over communal property (“It’s our turn to use the swings.”) The more communal—and populous—a public place becomes, the more difficult it is to share, and the more it becomes a battleground.
Some Dakotans feel that the new egalitarianism of Central Park, which the city has encouraged, represents a perversion of Democracy. Not long ago a band of tenants spent a Saturday afternoon cleaning up the litter from that area of the Park immediately facing them. They succeeded in cleaning the Dakota’s own front yard, which was just the tip of the iceberg and, of course, a few summer days later, the area they had cleaned was just as littered as it was before. Not long afterward, Frederic Weinstein watched from his third-floor window with dismay as a Sunday picnic group tore up a park bench to provide firewood for its barbecue.
Perhaps, some people feel, the trouble is that the city has tried to make the Park too many things to too many people. Perhaps, in this era of specialization, what is needed is a variety of parks, each with its own specialty—a park for rock concerts, another for noisy sports, another for playing transistor radios, and another for nature lovers—for quiet, solitude and contemplation.
A picture postcard that the Metropolitan Museum sells depicts the turn-of-the-century Dakota standing solitarily against the sky. In front of it stretches Central Park in winter, with well-dressed skaters comporting themselves gracefully on the frozen lake. They skate with hands joined—dancers, really—the gentlemen in their tall hats, the ladies in their long skirts and bonnets. Clearly those long-ago folk were enjoying their park, and were also treating it with respect and kindness.
Such scenes in Central Park are not just wistful memories today. The majority of New Yorkers still treasure the Park. On summer evenings, well-dressed people still turn out for symphony concerts and Shakespeare in the Park, often with elaborate picnics spread out before them on the grass. Joggers and cyclists abound, and in warm weather, teams from The New Yorker magazine and other New York publishing houses gather for lunch-hour or after-work baseball games. On winter afternoons and evenings, on the lake and on the pond, in the Wollman and Lasker rinks, hundreds of skaters still create a scene out of Currier and Ives.
It would be impossible not to note that many of the people now enjoying the Park are black and Puerto Rican, reflecting the enormous expansion of Harlem following World War II. Today, New Yorkers tend to think of “Harlem” as anything north of Ninety-sixth Street, where the Penn Central Railroad emerges from its tunnel beneath Park Avenue into the open air. Strictly speaking, however, Harlem was the area between 130th Street and 143rd Street, between Madison and Seventh avenues. In the late nineteenth century, as huge migrations of Russian and Polish Jews flooded into the city, fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, Harlem became primarily Jewish. Russian Jews dominated the 1910 census figures of the area, and next came the Italians, the Irish, the Germans, the English, Hungarians, Czechs and others from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In addition, there were 75,000 native whites, and only 50,000 blacks. Blacks did not arrive in New York in large numbers until after World War I, and, following the lead of the foreign immigrants, they moved to Harlem. Most were from the rural South, and most were poor. As the blacks moved in, the Jews moved out—north into the Bronx or, if they could afford it, to the South Shore of Queens and Long Island.
Following World War II there was a new infusion into Harlem from Puerto Rico, and the new Spanish-speaking arrivals and the older-established black Harlemites made tense and uneasy neighbors. Harlem ceased being a jolly tourist spot which had offered “stompin’” at the old Savoy Hotel and lively black entertainment at the famous Cotton Club. Now it was more like an armed camp, looked on with fear by New York’s white population. Furthermore, the limits of Harlem were bulging southward, particularly on the Upper West Side, down into the West Nineties and West Eighties.
In the 1950’s and 60’s there was a certain sense of panic on the West Side, and a feeling that the West Side would eventually “go black.” (As it turned out, this did not happen, and the West Side is currently enjoying a sort of renaissance—not in fashionability, of course, but in terms of rising rents.) During those uneasy decades, a number of white families retreated to the East Side. The Birch Wathen School, fearful that the West Side would soon be dangerous, moved its headquarters across town. During this period also, the Trinity School on West Ninety-first Street formed an alliance with the upstate Pawling School in Dutchess County, partly as a hedge against being forced out of the neighborhood by an influx of black and Hispanic poor people. (This didn’t happen either, and Trinity and Trinity-Pawling disassociated themselves from each other in the summer of 1978.)
At the Dakota, however, the mood was more serene, and there was no mass exodus from the building. The Dakotans, after all, had more important matters on their minds—preserving their precious parkside principality, their “fortress of delight.” Also, after going co-op, the new mood at the Dakota involved not only love, but a certain longing to turn back the clock. In the elegant old relic of a building, the new commonality contained another important ingredient. It was nostalgia.
Of course some people were more nostalgic about the building than others. And just how nostalgic, in terms of preserving the romantic past, would become the center of another controversy. Some people, it seemed, were treating the Dakota just the way some people treated the Park.
*New Yorkers’ puritanical sensibilities, however, would still not accept the bidet, considered sinfully European. In fact, it was against the law to install a bidet in New York until very recently. Also, for some reason, health laws dictated that all toilet seats must be of the open, U-shaped design and not of closed, oval shape.