Central Park in December

The sight I most wanted to see in New York, though I am neutral about specific sites and much more interested in getting a general picture, was Central Park, and today I saw it. Taking the subway was easy enough, so was buying a bite to eat at an expensive grocery store. The store, a nec plus ultra of its species, had an incredibly tempting healthy buffet, but I didn't want the hassle of finding out how it works, and the dried fruit and nut mixes were expensive; so I settled for white chocolate and key lime cookies, which taste good and at least contain protein and carbohydrates. My voice had recovered a little but was very low, so my polite responses to the cashier's civilities were lost, and she, to employ the vernacular, looked at me funny. Then I began to ascend Fifth Avenue at the southeastern corner of the park. It had begun to snow and the scene amid the skyscrapers was filmic, except for the worn paint and fissured and patched asphalt on the streets, nasty wetness of the sidewalks, puzzling frequency of SUVs, and the annoyed honking of car drivers, among them the mindbogglingly pervasive swarm of taxis. In front of a black skyscraper the snow was particularly effective, and the crimson berries on a tree in the street mediuman were a fine finishing touch. I liked the pots of evergreens along the streets, too, and the streets' ample width.

Then and later, I especially liked the more traditional skyscrapers. Columbus Circle has its share of lurid modernities, among them the Trump Tower, which has a very Las Vegas sensibility: black and slinky as a pair of tights, and of a coppery sheen. But further along the east and to the west of the park there are truly majestic edifices that bear the marks of the old countries whence the New Yorkers of the 19th century and earlier came. The highest resemble castles; the lower are merely apartment buildings with the familiar Georgian scrolling or Baroque flair, but they stretch up and up. They are so diverse in style and size that they did not intimidate me, and I love buildings in which people can clearly live well. But it irritated me greatly to spot an inscription, "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (hopefully I've repeated the phrasing correctly), on an uglier specimen of Fifth Avenue architecture, because it felt like the epitome of hypocrisy. To me the churches also looked like temples not to God but to the smug egos of the builders. If a building still looks boring and pompous, constructing it out of blank grey stone and squelching the architectural life out of it won't pass for wholesome humility. At least it was pleasantly bizarre to find a blandly simplified English church, in the style of the medieval countryside, transplanted into a hectic city street.

I thought that Central Park would be much more like Prospect Park, a continuous plain of grass and trees, freely open to the sidewalks around it. Instead, it was hedged about in short stone walls, cut up by streets, and crowded with buildings, at least where the zoo is. It is also immensely hilly and it has an even fierce aspect at times. The charm of iron and delicately engraved, fine-grained stone are fully exploited, and winter scarcely detracts from its beauty. In the southern stretch the Frick Collection appears on the other side of the road, a corniced grey edifice that rises from the iron-fenced green lawn with a lovely, grave, ancient Greek serenity. I had intended to visit it, but upon holding an examination of my purse this morning it seemed wisest to desist (admission is $15), and, to be barbaric but truthful, I think that photos of its exhibitions are quite as satisfactory. As for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it may be embedded in the park, but it is the rump that looks out upon the beauties of nature, and not a very lovely rump either; the festive end looks out onto the Avenue. I didn't enter it either, for the same reason as the other (and the museum demands 20$ admission! the nerve!).*

Near the Metropolitan Museum there is a small hill surmounted by Cleopatra's Needle, an obelisk ca. 1500 BC that looks as old as it is, in a good way. It lies at the Great Lawn, and when I walked toward this lawn in order to find a walkway up to the obelisk, that name reminded me of Prince Caspian and the dancing congress of the fauns. The resemblance to Narnia was even increased a moment later, when I saw a gloomy stone staircase ascending the slope to the obelisk, under the shadow of two hemlocks, with a black lantern at the corner. There are other half-forgotten but well-kept oddities in Central Park, originating at different epochs in its history, and I thought that Belvedere Castle (designed 1865) was a beautiful surprise. It is a little castle on the top of a rocky crag, overlooking a lake that has a Japanese aspect, and it is so picturesque and perfect in its way that it's difficult to guess why Walt Disney has not sunk its claws into it yet.

Now to digress on the snow. At first it was a delightful frosty brightener of the scene, and I could even hear it rustling peacefully; then it coated my coat and melted in my hair and flocked down so densely that one couldn't see farther than a city block; and it set a treacherous soft cover of powdery snow on the ground upon which one could, and I did, slip (I performed an awkward quarter split at an intersection, but managed to keep from falling on my posterior by stretching out my hand); and at last it blew from the north in stinging pellets that made my face luminous in a ruddy and not beatific manner, and assailed my eyes, and ran down my cheeks and the tip of my nose as it melted.

At any rate, I spotted the Museum of Natural History across the street, with its immensely squat Ionic pillars in the Tuscan style (well, what I mean is that they have Ionic capitals but smooth shafts; hopefully Tuscan is the right term). Squarely in the entrance there rises a hilarious heroic statue of a bronze Theodore Roosevelt astride a horse; in lusty political incorrectness, a Native American guide stands to his left and an African guide stands to his right. I've never thought of Teddy as a man of action, and the sculpture is in positively outlandish taste. It might seem impossible to improve upon this, but sharing the stage with the 26th president and his minions, there are two evergreen dinosaur sculptures that lumber to the left and the right of the entrance, illumined with threads of Christmas lights and holding up Christmas wreaths in their talons.

There's more to tell but I don't remember it now. Long story short, a good time was had. Even if I had the money, however, I would not want to live in Fifth Avenue. There are beautiful and stately apartments along it, but mostly it feels obscenely rich and unreal. Walking along the windows of Harry Winston, Mikimoto, Gianbattista Vian(? I wasn't paying much attention to the shop windows, but that store caught my attention with a breathtaking wedding dress whose skirt looked like ridges of lime-flavoured whipping cream), and so on and so forth, the most pleasant emotion that was provoked was contentment that I am not wallowing in plenty where others have none. Wealth and class are all right in their place, but I do not like it when they become an excuse for blocking the rest of humanity out of existence, literally or figuratively, as much as one can.


*[As has been pointed out, the $20 admission is merely suggested. I misread the website and apologize for the unjust allegation.]