Central Park

thumb|Southwest corner of Central Park, looking east, NYC Central Park, built in the 1850s and 1860s, is an urban park between Manhattan's Upper West Side and Upper East Side neighborhoods. The park, owned by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and managed by the Central Park Conservancy, is the most visited urban park in the United States. Quotes Abandoned and forgotten in the southern portion of New York's Central Park, not far from Tavern on the Green, lie buried giant, broken molds of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. These molds are all that remains of an extravagant plan to create a huge Paleozoic Museum and outdoor exhibit in Central Park. Modeled after Crystal Palace Park Sydenham Palace, a large glass building and park outside London, the museum was to have exhibited "specimens of animals of the pre-Adamite period," including dinosaurs, extinct mosasaurs and mastodons, Ground sloth giant sloths, and Irish elk. The foundation for this museum was actually excavated in the southwest corner of the park, opposite 63rd Street (Manhattan) 63rd Street. It remains there to this day, covered with earth. Douglas Preston, Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion Into the American Museum of Natural History Macmillan 1993 9780312104566 https://books.google.com/books?id=Gc1XAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA8 8 (272 pages) August Heckscher II Heckscher disapproved of Flag Desecration Amendment flag burning by anti-Vietnam War protesters in Central Park, but he was in favor of other kinds of events: an Easter "Youth International Party yippee" celebration, a kite-flying contest, and a Ringling Brothers parade to announce the circus coming to town. This anything-goes policy extended to "Central Park be-ins be-ins," mass rallies, concerts on the Sheep Meadow, and the assembly of a contingent of the Poor People's Campaign Poor People's March on Washington. A 1969 New Year's Eve party for two thousand offered fireworks, rock music performed by the Mighty Mellotones, and dancing at Bethesda Terrace and Fountain Bethesda Fountain. There was a mass vigil on July 20, 1969, the eve of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Saving Central Park: A History and a Memoir Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2018 9781524733568 https://books.google.com/books?id=3ugxDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA8 8 (336 pages) Central Park has been ... a symbol of our national culture. In its first decade,the 1860s, the lithographs of Currier and Ives displayed to a national audience elegant New Yorkers riding in their carriages and strolling on the paths. In 1879 the democratic poet Walt Whitman noted the "rich, interminable circus" of the carriage parade "of New York's wealth and gentility'" in the park. ... A century later it appears in films as a place of sophisticated urbanity. Woody Allen's cerebral New Yorkers ponder the meaning of life as they negotiated its walks in Hannah and Her Sisters. The "yuppies" of the 1980s in When Harry Met Sally sip drinks at the ConservatoryWater#Boathouse boathouse cafe. In Wall Street a young stockbroker confronts a ruthless Inside trading inside trader on the Sheep Meadow. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park Cornell paperbacks illustrated, reprint, revised Cornell University Press 1992 9780801497513 https://books.google.com/books?id=sp93FnkRKiIC&pg=PA1 1 (623 pages) With more than 25 million visitors each year, New York City's Central Park is the most visited urban park in the United States and one of the most visited in the world. The 843-acre green oasis in the middle of Manhattan#Manhattan Island Manhattan Island also has the distinction of being the nation's first major metropolitan park built specifically for the enjoyment of the entire community, from humble factory hands to powerful business tycoons, overworked servant girls to pampered socialites. The enormous publicity surrounding Central Park's creation in the mid-nineteenth century inspired other cities across the country to build big landscaped parks of their own, including Forest Park (St. Louis, Missouri) Forest Park in St. Louis and Lincoln Park in Chicago. Louise Chipley Slavicek, New York City's Central Park Infobase Publishing 2009 https://books.google.com/books?id=fKHfjLK3c4MC&pg=PA7 7 The Custom of the Country Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along 72nd Street (Manhattan) Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park.She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be! Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin Series Penguin Books reprint Charles Scribner's Sons 1913 9780140181906 https://books.google.com/books?id=qQSHtM_rxZYC&pg=PA18 18 (594 pages) External links Clarissa Cooke, children's librarian, Celebrating Central Park in Books New York Public Library (nypl.org) November 30, 2020 https://www.nypl.org/blog/2020/11/30/celebrating-central-park-books Category:New York City