Maintaining Beauty With Barbed Wire
In the interests of maintaining the high level of upkeep that Central Park now enjoys, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Central Park Conservancy, I would suggest a simple and cost effective expedient: barbed wire.
True, this unsavory byproduct of the modern age appears to contravene the bucolic ambitions of the park's designers. But then, so do those endless ranks of fences that the conservancy has already set up to protect the park's verdant lawns. Indeed, they are present in such profusion that it is scarcely possible to turn anywhere in the park without being reminded of the conservancy's solicitude for the park's well-being. To date, however, the conservancy has favored snow fences, whose wooden staves can splinter and break the skin, as well as those mesh fences around the Great Lawn — and most everywhere else — that mete out admirable orthopedic punishment to anyone who tries, as many do, to jump them. But even these are simply no match for the chastening efficiency of barbed wire. Just unfurl a few feet — or miles — of the Devil's Rope. Given that the conservancy, to whom Mayor Giuliani's administration ceded control of Central Park in 1998, has invested nearly $350 million since its founding in 1980, do you really think they are about to let you destroy their handiwork? Certainly not!
Over the past few months, the conservancy has placed billboards on the Mall, as well as beside the Sheep Meadow, the East Green, and other spots throughout the park. Like some piece of conceptual art, these images show you the prospect you are seeing, from exactly the same angle at which you are seeing it, but as it appeared in the bad old days — the 1980s and '90s — before the benefits of the conservancy.
To understand what the park once looked like, you would have to go back in time or, better still, to Brooklyn. In Prospect Park you see something of how Central Park looked in the 1970s.
On a recent visit, I found Prospect Park to be a charming expanse of open fields ,with a few more bald patches than in Central Park today. As I entered from Grand Army Plaza, there was a little more trash on the ground, though it vanished deeper into the park. But largely missing were the fences that proliferate in Central Park, the fences heaped upon other fences, the fences whose clashing patterns of buckling mesh and splintering staves create a dizzying wavelike effect. By contrast, Prospect Park looks almost unfinished, a riot of free spaces.
Some might say that this boundless zeal to improve Central Park directly contradicts the stated aims of the designers of the park. Well, the hard-nosed conservancy has every reason to be impatient with such Transcendentalist twaddle as Olmsted's statement that he wished to inspire "a sense of superabundant creative power, infinite resource, and liberality of Nature." Indeed, they could, with excellent reason, turn Olmsted's own words against him, invoking the park's potential role in exercising "a refining influence upon the most unfortunate and most lawless classes of the city — an influence favorable to courtesy, self-control, and temperance."
If Manhattanites needed further proof of the conservancy's exertions, they need only consider that half of the Lake has been dredged to look like a strip mine, while the quarter-mile parallel to the Mall has been blocked so the conservancy can do something or other. It would have been unsporting to do this work in the winter. No one would be there to appreciate it.
In fact, many of the conservancy's projects are "on display" for years at a time. A case in point is the recent work on the Bandshell. In 2003, a sign on the worksite's chicken-wire fence assured parkgoers that the work would be completed "in the fall." Shrewdly, the conservancy never indicated which fall. And so, on the day of the festivities marking the 150th anniversary of the legislation that created the park, the conservancy fenced off half of this area.
And yet, it would be unfair to accuse the conservancy of dragging its feet. In September 2004, a sign went up stating that the boarded-up Bethesda Terrace Underpass would remain closed for four weeks.
And yet the conservancy saw fit to keep it under lock until March — of 2007 — by which time it had cleaned or replaced all 15,876 Minton tiles, mostly the 19th-century originals, at a cost of $7 million. But even then the terrace was not really opened, despite a ribbon cutting attended by the mayor. Several dozen earthenware tiles, such as you might place on the floor of your bathroom, were set into the floor of one bay of the underpass, an operation that took an additional two months. And no sooner was that amendment carried out than the tiles of the next bay were torn up. I spoke with a worker who said the next bay's tiles would be taken care of as well.
"So it sounds like four more months," I said.
"Nah. It will be finished by Wednesday."
How was that possible? "On Wednesday," he said, "the conservancy is having its annual fundraiser." Four days later, the place was a pristine expanse of bunting, tents, and finger food.
