Without Central Park, New York would risk becoming as callow and mercenary as many of its critics maintain it is. It was Edmund Burke who first coined the famous description of parks as ''the lungs of the city,'' but Central Park is also New York's heart.
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Despite its matter-of-fact name, Central Park is romantic, nonstandardized, uncommercial, artful - and full of trees. They made the park all loopy curves even the streets crossing the park lose their straightness. The creators of Central Park turned their backs on this mercantile diagram. Central Park is the city's outdoor rumpus room.
On any given day, you can see dog walkers and bird watchers, bicyclists and joggers, horseback riders and folk dancers, soccer and baseball teams, and yes, pétanque players. Central Park is like neither it's too informal to be a drawing room, and too sweaty and boisterous to be a living room. A decorous Parisian park could be described as a sort of salon, with nothing more strenuous going on than a game of pétanque a London park is more like a comfortable living room, with people dozing in scattered deck chairs. I've always liked Napoleon's description of the Piazza San Marco in Venice as ''the finest drawing room in Europe,'' a somewhat ingratiating remark since he had just conquered the city. New York City without Central Park would be like Chicago without the lake, San Francisco without hills or Los Angeles without sunshine. Without its enchanted setting, Tavern on the Green would be just another tourist eatery, and the site of the Bethesda Fountain would be simply an ordinary street corner. Without the intervening park, the Upper East Side would blend into the Upper West Side - unthinkable. I would never see the top of the Dakota sticking up out of the trees like a spooky Transylvanian castle. Columbus Circle would be simply a circle, like Piccadilly Circus, instead of an arc opening onto a generous green wood. Without the park, taxis couldn't take those east-west shortcuts that are like sudden short drives into the country.
Without the park, meadows and lakes would be miles away, instead of just behind the Metropolitan Museum. I CAN'T imagine Manhattan without Central Park.
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