The Real Menace in Central Park
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

As causes go, the abolition of cars from Central Park is one of the best around. For one thing it is invincibly righteous. For another, it, unlike many causes that are invincibly righteous, is eminently attainable.
The presence of cars in the park bespeaks a superannuated attitude toward both cars and cities. Back in the 1930s, when cars were admitted into the park for the first time in any important way (they were there as early as 1899 as a gimmick, taking their place beside carriages), they possessed an almost incalculable symbolic status. They represented modernity, freedom, the American way. Nothing, not even Central Park, was thought to be too good for the almighty car.
One of the main agitators for cars in the park – and everywhere else – was Robert Moses, the former parks commissioner, among much else, who may be said to have preferred cars to people. Certainly he preferred suburbs to cities, and the marriage of cars and the park seemed, as far as he was concerned, to be the best use that could be made of either.
But now, seven decades later, we have come to feel very differently about such things. We see Central Park as a retreat from cars and a too importunate city rather than as a picturesque impediment to cross-town traffic.
In advocating the abolition of cars from the park, one merely insists on fidelity to the original vision of the park’s creators, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. It was one of their most inspired tricks to submerge four transverses along the 2 miles of the park to allow traffic – carriages, of course – to pass East and West, unnoticed by the users of the park.
Surely this pair would never have countenanced the ever-present murmur of automobiles in their beloved park. Today, with the exception of weekends and a brief respite on weekdays, cars are a nagging and inescapable reminder of the city’s proximity. Few are the areas of the park where you can now feel completely free from the sound of traffic or its implicit menace.
As you travel to such places, if you can find them, you are instinctively aware, as you cross the roads, of the implied danger of these alien, two-ton contraptions. And so it happens that, even in the Park, our best haven from the city, there settles in a state of constant alertness, an inability to relax, to free ourselves from apprehension. This is reasonable when you consider that in February of 1998, two runners were hit by a taxi that went out of control, and that only a few months later, two cyclists were sent to the hospital after they had been run over by cars.
The most offensive areas of the park are the entrances and exits on 59th Street at Sixth and Seventh Avenues (though the 72nd Street entrances on Fifth and on Central Park West are close behind). Due to their inept and insensitive planning, you might as well be on a freeway. Indeed, even when cars are not present, it is extremely difficult for a pedestrian to find his way amid the fractious tangle of concrete roadbeds. It is also worth observing that 59th street is the main entrance to the park and thus the first experience of it that most tourists have as they head north from Midtown.
Yet it is one of the paradoxes of traffic in the park that its very scarcity is the best reason for its outright abolition. That is to say, there is enough traffic to spoil completely the bucolic air of the place but not enough that, if that circulation were denied, it would be a source of irritation to those drivers who make use of it. The overwhelming majority of cars that pass through the park are taxis and limos, for whom it would be only the slightest inconvenience to head a few blocks in any direction to find a serviceable transverse or avenue.
What we need is scrupulously to preserve the transverses – which are more than sufficient – and to relandscape the entrances for cars, especially around 59th and 72nd Streets. The park ought to feel less open, the city less apt to seep invasively into it, as it is allowed to do now.
On a recent trip to Paris, I was struck by the devastation that has been visited upon the Place de la Concorde, one of the most famous, most beautiful, and until recent years, most charming places in the world. Now no one goes there, or if they do it is through necessity and in the fervent desire that they won’t die in the process.
The problem is that the place has been given over to cars. You would no more think to spend any time there than you would to stand idly in the midst of a rushing river. That this square has incalculable historical resonance in the minds of the French has not spared it from such devastation. Surely its considerable beauty is largely intact; only no one can appreciate it unless he is speeding by in a car.
The Place de la Concorde is very different from Central Park. But they are both united in being casualties of a catastrophic failure of judgment on the part of the municipal officials to whom we have committed their care.