“The Gates,” by Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, drew hordes to Central Park. When I visited the park a week ago last Sunday, I thought I’d never seen it half so crowded.

Visitors to “The Gates” may have taken the opportunity to ponder the role of sculpture in the park. It’s a dismal story.

The park’s designers, Vaux and Olmsted, specified in their 1858 Greensward Plan but a single sculptural work for the park. This was the Bethesda Fountain. They felt that future sculptures that would inevitably be deposited in the park should be placed only along the formal Mall. Elsewhere, sculpture would clash with their naturalistic landscape design. They conceived Central Park as itself a work that would yield a complete aesthetic experience. Sculptures intended as objects of contemplation in themselves worked at cross-purposes to this conception.

An egregious example is the Delacorte Clock (1965), in the pathway separating the zoo from the Arsenal in the southeastern part of the park. This mechanical clock, with its dancing bronze animals, is perfectly charming and might fulfill its purpose in any number of other locations in the city. But it bears no relation to the park landscape. Compare it to Vaux’s lovely Denesmouth Arch, just beyond the clock to the north. Vaux’s bridge carries the 65th Street transverse, and melts into the landscape as an integral element of the Romantic garden. Not so the clock.

George T. Delacorte, who gave the clock to the park, also donated Jose de Creeft’s “Alice in Wonderland” and the Delacorte Theater. Perhaps such “benefactors” thought they were doing a service to Central Park.

The Alice in Wonderland group, north of the Conservatory Water on the east side of the park, is another case in point. But, people say, “Children love it!” Well, children would love it anywhere, and – as Henry Hope Reed, former Curator of Central Park, points out – children love Central Park anyway.

What of Balto? I hear my readers asking. Would Vaux and Olmsted begrudge the bronze husky his perch on the schist? Perhaps. Yet I like Balto. The hero dog of 1925 led a sled dog team through an Alaskan blizzard to bring diphtheria serum to the children of stricken Nome. Later that year, prominent New Yorkers, among them the artists Edwin Blashfield and Taber Sears, succeeded in erecting a statue of Balto, commissioned from the renowned Brooklyn animal sculptor, Frederick George Richard Roth. When the Times reported that Balto had died in his heroic endeavor, they had exaggerated the husky’s demise. Balto, alive and well, attended the unveiling of his statue. The Times headline said: “His Effigy Unveiled, Balto Is Unmoved” – until another dog sauntered by.

By and large, Central Park has suffered a surfeit of inappropriate incursions. If “The Gates” refocused New Yorkers on the aesthetic primacy of the park’s artfully contoured pathways, they may yet have rendered a service in reorienting us from the notion that the great park is a dumping ground of specious benefactions.