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Beautiful Edward. Very beautiful. This is my new desktop background.
One more from the say day...
Beautiful Edward. Very beautiful. This is my new desktop background.
Those expensive replacement Minton tiles were worth every penny.
A Newfangled Way to Count the Trees in the Park
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Eric George, arborist, in Central Park, where a complete inventory of trees was completed.
By LILY KOPPEL
Published: April 6, 2008
On a frigid morning in January on the east side of the Central Park Reservoir, Eric George, 28, was mystifying joggers and dog walkers alike. He wore a backpack with a G.P.S. receiver and carried, in one hand, a data collection unit resembling a portable credit card machine, and in the other, a strip of wood known as a Biltmore stick.
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Mr. George used a clinometer to measure the height of a tree. He also used a G.P.S. device to locate trees.
“We get looks,” he said at the time.
Mr. George was collecting information for a comprehensive inventory of Central Park’s trees, the first of its kind to use global positioning technology to pinpoint the exact location of each one.
Some of his other equipment had older origins. The Biltmore stick, for example, was developed around the middle of the 18th century to determine a tree trunk’s diameter. And to ascertain the width of each tree’s crown, Mr. George used no equipment at all: he counted the paces it took to get from one end of the tree’s canopy to the other.
Stopping before a black cherry tree, he logged the species name, which was translated by his computer into the Latin name, Prunus serotina. Then he entered the tree’s other data: its height and diameter, its condition, and its percentage of dead wood.
Dead wood, Mr. George said, was a result of a largely invisible “underground battle,” taking place throughout the park, among competing tree roots for prime real estate.
The Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit group that manages the park under contract with the city, hired the Davey Resource Group, based in Ohio, to conduct the survey with a team of certified arborists, including Mr. George. The final count: 24,132 mature trees (informally defined as higher than chest level with a trunk diameter of more than six inches). The arborists noted an additional 2,000 saplings, one to six inches in diameter.
In a 1982 survey, a group of 16 volunteers spent an entire summer tramping through the park to come up with their count of 24,595 mature trees. With the new technology, Davey’s four-person team took less than six weeks as they found trees with G.P.S. devices instead of plotting locations on paper maps.
The survey was completed in March, producing, for each of the park’s trees, a computer file storing its long-term history. With this record, park workers can assess the maintenance needs of each tree, track continuing threats like Dutch elm disease and find new planting opportunities.
Neil Calvanese, 59, who started working at the park in 1981 as a tree climber, is now vice president of operations for the conservancy. He found the precise information from the Davey survey “a dream.”
Mr. Calvanese noted that there was data from so-called centennial trees, some of which have been in the park since it was completed in 1873.
The most breathtaking tree in the park, in Mr. Calvanese’s opinion, is an American elm in the East Meadow, which has grown to 59 inches in trunk diameter from 44 inches in 1982. “People come into the park and miss that,” Mr. Calvanese said.
He called the stand of elms along Literary Walk, at the southern end of the park’s central promenade, the greatest in the country, and noted a wealth of “specimen trees,” which assume perfect form and stand out from the surrounding landscape.
The Davey survey reflected the park’s effort to cultivate ornamental trees, Mr. Calvanese said, as well as an increase in trees bearing fruit, like cherries and crab apples.
“The park is more cultivated than in the ’80s,” Mr. Calvanese said, adding that visitors today would not be likely to see initials carved into the bark of beeches as they were years ago. In the mid-1970s, fiscal problems in the city led to a decline in maintenance. Mr. Calvanese said workers were accustomed to finding all sorts of things in the branches of trees, including stashed picnics and even a treehouse.
Today, Mr. Calvanese said, “New Yorkers are very protective of their park.”
The survey concluded that the park’s efforts to reduce invasive trees, which produce lots of seed and take over shrub borders, had been successful: the number of Norway maples was 860, down from 1,302 in 1982. The Norway maples and Sycamore maples, European imports, are being replaced with native species like the red oak, black oak and sugar maple.
“There is now an incredible wealth of information about one of the world’s great stands of trees,” said Mr. Calvanese.
The new data is largely a managerial tool, providing a snapshot of the entire park, Mr. Calvanese said.
In the future, he said, he would like to be able to distribute hand-held G.P.S. devices to park visitors so they could take self-guided tours of the park’s vast collection of trees.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times.
Central Park
The Whinnying’s Welcome, but Wariness Greets a Stable
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times, 2005
Horse and rider, one of Central Park’s enduring images.
By GREGORY BEYER
Published: May 4, 2008
THE closing of the Claremont Riding Academy in April of last year did not bode well for the future of horseback riding in Central Park. But a lesser-known effect has been the strain on the parks department, which for years kept horses at the stables, on West 89th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. Since the closing, the department has had to haul horses in a trailer from a stable at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
“It’s a real inconvenience,” said the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, adding that the closing had greatly diminished the department’s mounted patrol units and rendered scarce one of Central Park’s most charming images, the horse and rider.
And so, with an eye toward the picturesque as well as the practical, the parks department and the Central Park Conservancy plan to build a one-story brick stable, to house five horses, near the Central Park Zoo, at Fifth Avenue and 63rd Street. The Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the plan on April 8. Construction of the stable is expected to begin this summer and be completed by the fall.
But not everyone is completely happy about the project. Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, a preservation group, said his wariness of the plan had less to do with the individual building than with what he called a larger pattern.
“Our broadest concern, really, is the slow accretion of buildings within the park: just a little building over here, a little building over there,” he said.
For example, Mr. Bankoff said, SummerStage, at the Rumsey Playfield near 69th Street, was supposed to be temporary.
Mr. Benepe said his department had considered building a stable outside the park, following the precedent set by the Claremont stables. But the location near the zoo seemed practical, he said, because facilities for animal maintenance and feeding are already in place.
Horses have not actually lived in Central Park since the mid-1980s, when the zoo’s pony ride closed, according to Philip Abramson, a parks
department spokesman. At one time, the police precinct in the park also housed horses, as did the building that is now the North Meadow Recreation Center, at 97th Street.
But Mr. Benepe sees the stable as helping to revive a long tradition “The bridle trails,” he said, “have been kind of lonely.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/ny...ml?ref=thecity
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
What a nice day to stroll in the park today - people in row boats, on bikes, dance skaters, a preacher proselytizing from the Naumburg Bandshell, wait, what was the last one? I was somewhat surprised - listening to Bible is usually not on the "What to do in Central Park" lists.
The Central Park Conservancy's priorities raise an eyebrow - apparently political expression is not allowed, but religious propaganda if perfectly all right. I only hope the fees will go to a good cause - like feeding the ducks or cleaning up the used condoms in the woods north of Bow Bridge.
It actually sounds appropriate - the church helping cleanup the sin. Perhaps they can even send missionaries talk to the sinners.
A 150-Year-Old Map of Central Park Still Comes in Handy Today
David Dunlap/The New York Times
An 1858 map of Central Park is on display for another week in the old Arsenal on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: June 12, 2008
“It is the most important work of American art of the 19th century,” Sara Cedar Miller said.
She was referring to Central Park, not to the 3-foot by-8-foot pen-and-ink map over her shoulder. But the two are inseparable. The enormous map depicts “Greensward,” the plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux that won the park-design competition in 1858.
In honor of its sesquicentennial, the original plan is being exhibited publicly for what may be only the third time in its history. Besides the painstaking craftsmanship of it, with hundreds of thousands of stipple points for vegetation (“I picture Olmsted and Vaux and all of their friends stippling at the last moment,” said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner), the map is astonishing because it is simultaneously so modern and so antique.
It lays out the framework of the park as it exists today with a prescience that few master plans achieve. You could use it to navigate through many stretches of the park’s 840-acre expanse. Yet it also is a product of a long-ago, almost Arcadian time, as shown in features like a formal flower garden — never constructed — that would have been laid out as intricately as lacework.
The map is the centerpiece of “Celebrating Greensward: The Plan for Central Park, 1858-2008,” which will be on view in the old Arsenal at Fifth Avenue and 64th Street until June 19. Ms. Miller, the historian and photographer for the Central Park Conservancy, curated the show with Jonathan Kuhn, the director of art and antiquities in the Parks and Recreation Department.
The Arsenal’s third-floor gallery, ordinarily closed on weekends, will be open this Saturday and Sunday, as well as every weekday, from 9 to 5.
Admission is free. There are 71 photographs around “Greensward,” showing the park as it burgeoned and bloomed, as it decayed in the 1920s and revived in the 1930s under the Works Progress Administration and the stewardship of Robert Moses, then as it went into a tailspin in the 1970s before beginning another renaissance under Mayor Edward I. Koch’s parks commissioner, Gordon J. Davis.
Actually, the Arsenal gallery is worth visiting if for no other reason than its cheerfully casual air. It sits among the parks department’s administrative offices, with city employees scurrying back and forth, meeting casually at tables around the gallery; a welcome antidote to the exhibition-hall-as-temple approach.
Mr. Benepe stood before the map recently as he envisioned a late-night stippling bee. As it happens, “Greensward” was drawn up at Vaux’s house, at 136 East 18th Street, and his son once recalled that “there was a great deal of grass to be put on by the usual small dots and dashes, and it became the friendly thing for callers to help on the work by joining in and adding some grass to Central Park.”
Where the flower garden was supposed to have gone, you will find Conservatory Water — better known as the model-boat pond — today. It got its unusual name because it was originally intended to complement a conservatory nearby that was never built. But one was constructed farther uptown in 1899 and stood until 1934. Its site is now occupied by Conservatory Garden.
“You have two features in Central Park with the name ‘Conservatory’ in them and no conservatory,” Mr. Benepe said, reaching for Kurt Vonnegut’s words to finish the thought. “It’s like cat’s cradle. No damn cat, no damn cradle.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/ny...on&oref=slogin
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
June 17, 2008, 10:26 am
Storm Left Central Park a Little Less Green
By David W. Dunlap
Douglas Blonsky, left, the president of the Central Park Conservancy, and Christopher Nolan, a vice president, examined the scene of storm destruction in the Ramble on Monday. (Photo by David W. Dunlap/The New York Times)
It would be a sad census in any case, but the tally of trees lost in Central Park to high winds during last Wednesday’s storm comes with particular ill grace in the middle of the Million Trees NYC campaign.
“You felt it was like a tornado,” said Douglas Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy and the administrator of Central Park.
According to the conservancy’s survey, 33 trees were significantly damaged, 24 of which have already been removed.
The largest trees lost, measured in diameter at breast height (four-and-a-half feet off the woodland floor), were a 44-inch red oak and a 42-inch pin oak in the north woods of the park, a 42-inch black oak near the tennis house, a 36-inch linden near the Great Lawn, a 34-inch black locust on the Great Hill and a 33-inch American elm on the Mall.
By species, one American elm was lost, one bitternut hickory, three black cherries, three black locusts, one black oak, two ginkgos, one green ash, two hawthorns, three lindens, one little-leaf linden, three Norway maples (this may not be the worst news from an aboriculturist’s point of view, since this is considered an invasive species), one pin oak, one red maple, one red oak, one Siberian elm and one white oak. The identities of seven trees have yet to be released, pending notification of next of kin.
On a tour of the Ramble on Monday morning, Mr. Blonsky spotted a scene of double destruction, where a large part of a tall black locust had crashed down on a black cherry, destroying the smaller tree. The locust may be salvageable, he said hopefully, but its condition must be carefully assessed.
He said that storms since then, including one on Monday afternoon, had largely spared the park. “Nothing of significance” has been lost since June 10, Mr. Blonsky said — just “a few small trees in our woodlands.”
Given the density of the foliage in the newly restored Ramble, there might be a benefit to this turn of events. “We hate losing any trees,” Mr. Blonsky said, “but getting some sunlight on the ground is not a bad thing.”
And now the campaign can refashion itself: 1,000,033 Trees NYC.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...le-less-green/
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Last edited by brianac; June 17th, 2008 at 04:43 PM.
Serious subject, but this is funny.
By species, one American elm was lost, one bitternut hickory, three black cherries, three black locusts, one black oak, two ginkgos, one green ash, two hawthorns, three lindens, one little-leaf linden, three Norway maples (this may not be the worst news from an aboriculturist’s point of view, since this is considered an invasive species), one pin oak, one red maple, one red oak, one Siberian elm and one white oak. The identities of seven trees have yet to be released, pending notification of next of kin.
I wonder if the American Elm lost on the Mall has left an unsightly gap. Too bad.
About New York
Bronze Eagles Owe Survival to Drug Dealer
Robert Caplin for The New York TimesThe four eagles on the City Employees War Memorial in Central Park are reproductions; the originals were stolen. Two have just been recovered.
By JIM DWYER
Published: June 18, 2008
When the price of scrap metal rises, the parks and cemeteries of the world are mined by thieves. Statues are decapitated and delimbed, hacksawed into pieces that can be carried off and sold for their weight, not their grace. One age’s bronzed glories have often become the phone wires or car bushings of the next.
United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York
Two stolen eagles were recovered last month after a falling-out between a drug dealer and a customer, prosecutors said.
Here, today, a story of endurance — both of statuary and a man.
Since 1926, a memorial honoring the sacrifices of city employees in wartime had sat in the Mall in Central Park, just up from the Naumburg Bandshell. It was an iron flagpole on a pedestal of Deer Isle granite, with four bronze eagles at the base. The sculpture, known as the City Employees War Monument, was designed by Georg John Lober, who also created the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in the park and of George M. Cohan in Duffy Square.
Such works and many like them are cast in bronze, an alloy of copper and tin that is particularly durable. They could easily take on time and weather, but not a strong market in scrap metal. “Entire statues were carted off in the 1970s,” Adrian Benepe, the commissioner of parks and recreation, said. “They would be mungoed — a police term for the stealing of scrap metal.”
Bronze turtles vanished from a fountain in Riverside Park. All the bronze ornamentation on the viaduct that carries Riverside Drive over 96th Street was devoured. And there were repeated efforts by scavengers to make off with bronze eagles at the base of the Prison Ship Monument in Fort Greene Park, begun in the 1840s at the urging of Walt Whitman, then the editor at The Brooklyn Eagle. The monument serves as a crypt for remains of some of the 11,500 people who died of starvation and neglect on British prison ships anchored in the East River during the American Revolution.
Anyway, what is the greatest human cataclysm in the city’s history next to $40 a pound?
“The eagles were halfway out of the Prison Ship Monument,” Mr. Benepe said; the weight was apparently too much for the thieves. “We put them in storage.”
In Manhattan, though, the Central Park eagles turned out to have had a special protector: a drug dealer who has been an enduring presence in the Mall over three decades. In the 1970s, he used the eagles as a place to stash his wares.
The Mall and the bandshell had a well-deserved reputation as the Home Depot of drug dealing, a place where buyers could come to get just about anything in the line of illegal narcotics. And the dealers had no end of places to hide their stuff: sewer drains, tree notches, crevices in rocks.
At some point, the drug dealer noticed that the eagles had started to come loose. Whether out of sentiment for services rendered, or the thought of further commercial opportunity, he took two of them home.
And there they stayed, as he continued to market his wares around the Mall. (The other two eagles also disappeared from the monument, but their whereabouts have been lost to history, at least for the time being.)
One of the drug dealer’s steady customers was identified by the authorities as a man with a jewelry business on Fifth Avenue in Midtown.
In time, buyer and dealer had a conversation about the eagles, and the jeweler agreed to purchase the pair for $200. This sale took place sometime in the 1990s, according to a civil complaint filed by prosecutors this month in federal court.
Central Park had started its long climb out of decline, and funds were raised for the restoration of the Mall, with its battered benches, bare lawns, and landscape in near-ruin. Working from old photographs, a sculptor re-created the four bronze eagles that had been on the City Employees Monument.
Nothing stands still. The dealer and the jeweler fell out. Last month, the dealer, whatever the source of his longevity in a trade not known for it, wound up in the hands of federal prosecutors. He told them about his sale of the war memorial eagles to his old customer, the jeweler.
On May 29, the federal authorities appeared at the jeweler’s place of business on Fifth Avenue and found the two eagles. They are now in the possession of prosecutors.
The jeweler — who, like the drug dealer, has not been publicly identified or charged by the authorities — declined to speak on the phone Tuesday.
Prosecutors intend to return the eagles to the city, half of the original four that were perched on the granite pedestal in 1926. They will not quite form a matched set, since the replicas are less than 10 years old, but the originals will definitely be restored, Mr. Benepe said. “It’s amazing,” he said. “They should have been melted a long time ago.”
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/ny...l?ref=nyregion
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Fitness
Out of the Loop and on the Run in Central Park
Bess Greenberg/The New York Times
By LIZ ROBBINS
Published: June 26, 2008
CENTRAL PARK was designed for refuge, discovery and communing with society. Not for running.
Multimedia
Interactive Map Trails Less Traveled
Bess Greenberg/The New York Times
Yet 150 years later, its 843 acres are a paradise for runners. So why in the name of Frederick Law Olmsted do so many choose to run in circles on the 6.1-mile asphalt road looping the park?
Because runners are creatures of habit. The workout is the thing, peace often found in the rhythm of repetition and the exploration of personal limits, rather than the surrounding natural space. Efficiency is of utmost concern.
Yet for those who choose to push the boundaries of Central Park, there is every type of workout — speed, hills, distance and exploration — for every kind of runner.
Start with the 4.2 miles of dirt bridle path, in three connected sections, which offer the truest sanctuary.
From there emerges a web of paved and wood-chipped trails, adding miles and topographical variety to any run.
Even at the risk of seeing those routes become more worn, coaches, local runners and staff members of the New York Road Runners shared their favorite off-the-beaten-path runs.
Consider this a primer for thinking, and then running, outside the loop.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/fa...l?ref=nyregion
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
I love that^trails less travelled, Tom Kelly's route in particular. Going to try it out my very next CP run. The 6 mile road route is a great run, but I prefer getting off the beaten path, less concrete, and more variety. Excellent.
Not to mention solitude....The last time I was back in the Loch area there were park rangers investigating the sounds of, what was obvious to everyone, a female orgasm emanating from the deep grasses of the wildflower meadow. They were laughing as they cautiously approached. Cute story.
Everytime I go for a walk there I manage to lose my bearings.
I was in The Ramble one day and a couple of the paths were closed for safety reasons, so I had to detour. I had no idea which direction I was heading until I got into clear ground and was able to pick up a couple of locations I knew.
Those noises were probably me trying to find a way out. Ha Ha.
I've never been in the northern half of the park.
Good luck on your run, try not to step on anyone in the grass.
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