Central Park Love Song

Through an imaginative blend of personal memoir and meticulous research, Central Park Love Song: Wandering Beneath the Heaventrees (Griffith Moon Press) tells the remarkable story of America’s first great public park and the city that needed and created it. Both the narrator and the reader discover all 843 acres of the park first with his dog in NYC’s dark days of the late 1970s, during the Central Park Conservancy’s miraculous revival of the park, and then through the eyes of his children who wander with him as he had done with his dog three decades before.
With excerpts from novels, poems, essays and songs about Central Park, we visit the park during its construction, the raucous zoo hoax of 1876, and stroll with “Miss Manhattan” –Audrey Munson, model for three statues in the park and a dozen more throughout the city. We are at Jimmy Walker’s glamorous Casino and the bleak Hooverville nearby, and slip through a fence on summer nights to swim in the reservoir—Lake Manhattan to those who love it. We watch Philippe Petit perform in the park, attend Diana Ross’s summer-night concert, listen to a busker playing her harp, and experience the wondrous gift given the park and surrounding city by the legendary hawk Pale Male. The book concludes at an imaginary lunch with the narrator, his young daughter, Frederick Law Olmsted and others at work on the map of “The Greensward Plan” that eventually became Central Park.

The book’s final paragraph:
“While writing these memories of Central Park I often wished truly to relive them, that all those dear to me with whom I shared the park and others met in my imagination might gather once more beneath the heaventrees….Even now, I stroll the Promenade or the Ramble feeling far younger than I really am through a park that remains always unknowable, both fixed and ever-changing. Whether the park of wounds and neglect when I first followed Bo or amid the pervasive magic that bewitched my children, despite ‘Keep Off’ signs and the crowds and commerce of today, the wonders of Central Park remain just on the other side of that low stone wall. And so in any season, whether it’s frozen or steamy, in rain or at night, my unwavering desire will always be for that one more visit to the park.”