New York’s Central Park is a beautiful pleasure ground of meadows, ponds, forests, and trails,
nature at its best, surrounded by the great wall of Manhattan.
The park is one of the world's most-visited places with an amazing 42 million annual visitors,
putting it into the planet’s top-three most popular destinations, along with Times Square
and the Las Vegas Strip.
And although it is the most-filmed area in the world, we are presenting you yet another
movie about it, with our own personal interpretation, describing the sights, filling you in on the
history and showing the beauties in both summer and winter, when it sometimes becomes a wonderland
covered in a white blanket.
We'll show a lot more winter scenes later in the movie.
The map shows the route that we will take you on walking around, stopping at a clock,
continuing on to the Central Park Zoo, New York's oldest.
Down to the pond where we see ducks, and the stone bridge and beautiful walkways.
Continuing our walk over to the west side and then turning around and doubling back,
coming out to the main entrance, which is at the Grand Army Plaza.
Fifth Avenue forms the entire eastern border of the park so that makes a convenient route
to get into the park through various gates in the wall.
There are numerous pedestrian pathways, or you could take a horse carriage tour.
The pedestrian paths go beneath several roadways, through these attractive underpasses.
You'd never know there's automobile traffic through the park.
Delacorte Clock is one of the most beloved monuments in all the parks of New York City.
It features 6 whimsical bronze sculptures, depicting a concertina-playing elephant; a
kangaroo playing horns, a bear with a tambourine, and a hippo playing the violin, a goat playing
the pipes, a penguin on drums, as well as two monkeys with hammers that strike the bell.
It's always a big hit with the kids.
The clock was conceived as a modern version of musical clocks found in Europe and belfries
in churches and city halls dating back to the Middle Ages.
Central Park zoo is next to the clock on the east edge of the park at Fifth Avenue facing
East 64th Street next to the Arsenal.
The zoo contains a varied collection of wild animals and there's also a casual restaurant
here.
You can watch the sea lions from the public walkway without paying admission to go inside.
Other animals include penguins, snow leopard, snow monkeys, grizzly bear, red panda, cranes
and lemurs.
The zoo began in the 1860s as a menagerie, thus making it the first official zoo to open
in New York.
The zoo was modified in 1934 with some expansion and then it was completely rebuilt in the
1980s to create more naturalistic animal habitats.
In the southeast corner just below the zoo is The Pond, a calm oasis with pleasant walkways
and benches around it, and an area of 3.5 acres.
The Pond is located near one of the busiest entrances to Central Park at Grand Army Plaza,
and always has people around admiring it, but still it provides an atmosphere of serenity
and solitude.
This pond has a special endearing quality because it's one of the first things that
you might see when you're entering the park from midtown Manhattan, a beautiful touch
of nature right next to the skyscrapers of the city.
And the pond looks perfect, like something out of a painting because, well, it was created
to look that way, by careful landscape planning.
I had a chance to talk to a couple of the park employees who were there feeding the
ducks and monitoring conditions for the habitat.
“You have ducks, you have fish in there, we have turtles.
Look, there’s three turtles straight there, look, one, two, three.”
The park employees 250 people, and there are another 3,000 volunteers who help with the
maintenance and the gardening and generally taking care.
The very picturesque Gapstow Bridge is a stone bridge built from the local schist.
It's one of the most iconic landmarks in the park.
We'll have slightly different kind of look at the bridge coming up in a few minutes,
in the wintertime surrounded by snow.
If The Pond is all you see in your visit to Central Park, you're doing quite well.
If you don't have much time to walk around and see the rest of the park, at least get
here to the southeast corner and enjoy some time at The Pond.
You don't have to worry about getting lost in the park because you can generally see
the city landmarks around, and maybe you’ll be offered a map by one of the information
guides.
Of course, you can find maps easily online of Central Park, but just follow your nose,
wander along the pathways, and relax and enjoy the visit.
Sections of Manhattan bedrock are visible on the surface throughout the park, the original
Manhattan schist.
We've made our way around to the southeast corner of the park, which is the major entrance
by Grand Army Plaza, where you're going to run into some traffic, there’s some vehicles,
you’ve got your hot dog stands and kiosks set up.
A sudden contrast, some culture shock, bringing you back into the city proper.
The Plaza also has the Pulitzer Fountain of Abundance, designed by Karl Bitter and financed
by Joseph Pulitzer.
At the top of the fountain is a statue of a Roman goddess, Pomona, a guardian spiti
And now the same Plaza in the winter.
The Sherman statue is a monument of special interest here.
It was the last major work of Augustus St. Gaudens
One of the advantages of coming to New York in January is you might run into some snow,
and if you do, by all means, come up to the Central Park to really enjoy it.
Even if it’s a light snowfall that disappears from the city's streets right away, the snow
is going to be covering the beautiful hills and rocks, and you’ll see the pond frozen
over.
It's really like picture postcard come to life.
(Geese quack) In our case we were staying at Times Square
in January and there was a light snowfall overnight that was sticking a little bit at
Times Square.
It was lovely to see in the predawn darkness the white snow on statues and railings and
chairs and tables all around a rather empty Times Square at that hour of the morning.
But the snow was not sticking on streets, where it just melted as it was landing.
So we wanted to get up to Central Park to see if it was going to be covered, and fortunately
it was.
By the time I got back to Midtown later in the morning all the snow seemed of melted
down there.
If you should happen to be in Manhattan when there is a snowfall even if it's a light snowfall
head up to Central Park.
Where the snow in much of the rest of the city is going to melt right away on the black
asphalt you'll find that Central Park ccan become a magical wonderland.
As you might imagine, there is quite a complicated history to the creation of Central Park.
Prior to becoming a park in mid-19th century this land was occupied by Irish immigrants
and free blacks who had purchased land, where they raised livestock, built churches and
cemeteries, and lived as a community for close to 50 years.
From 1853 to 1857 about 1,600 residents were evicted under the rule of eminent domain to
make way for the park.
The Park Commission paid off the owners of 7,500 private different lots within the park
area, and dealt with many owners of the adjacent properties.
Construction began in 1858, when the contract to design and build was awarded to Frederick
Law Olmstead and his partner, Calvert Vaux, and by later that year some parts were already
open to the public.
The park was finished by 1873, some years employing 4,000 laborers using picks and shovels
along with sophisticated large earth-moving machinery.
By the end more than 10 million cartloads of material had been transported out of the
park, including soil and rocks, and more than four million trees, shrubs, and plants representing
approximately 1,500 species were transplanted into the park.
Olmstead was not only our foremost 19th century landscape architect, but a great writer and
philosopher as well, who made extensive travels in Europe to study parks there.
In his proposal, Olmstead said that: “the primary purpose of the Park is to provide
the best practicable means of healthful recreation for the inhabitants of all classes.
It is of great importance, he said, as the first real park made in this country -- a
democratic development of the highest significance on which...much of the progress of art and
culture in this country is dependent.
In describing the need for such a huge park, unprecedented in American history, Olmstead
correctly predicted that: "the island would soon be occupied by buildings and paved streets;
that millions upon millions of people were to live their lives upon this island, and
that its inhabitants would suffer from these crowded conditions.
The time will come,” he said, “when New York (which at that time had only half-million
residents) will be built up and converted into formations for rows of monotonous straight
streets, and piles of erect buildings.
Then the priceless value of this picturesque ground will be more perceived, and ... more
fully recognized.”
Thanks to Olmsted and the farsighted, brilliant politicians of the 1850s, we now have a place
where everybody, rich or poor, young and old, a city resident or a visitor, can find pleasure
and health within its boundaries.
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