THIS IS SOMETHING FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED understood perfectly, to the great luck of anyone who has ever lived in New York City, another one of the world’s largest, shiniest metropolises, bulging with people, dreams, fairy-lit trees, rats and surprisingly high piles of garbage. In 1865, the brilliant landscape architect, who strongly believed that parks must be public, available to all, wrote: ‘It is a scientific fact that the occasional contemplation of natural scenes of an impressive character . . . is favorable to the health and vigor of men.’ The idea was not actually a fact then but a guess — but he was right.
Such contemplation, of course, is the entire purpose of Central Park, that haven of green in a dense, crowded city, where people skate and dance and run and bike and walk dogs and drink and fall in and out of love. I still get a pang sometimes when I think about Central Park; it is that expanse of wood and pond and crag and green that crowns for me the ten years I spent in that city, my second home. I got my first crush in New York, aged seven, on a boy called Alex, who had a blond bowl cut, when my family lived in Rye. I wrote a play there with my friend Erica when I was eight, called Counterfeiting Petticoats, about a group of pioneer women who printed money and drove wagons to freedom. I ran away from home there when I was ten; and then, much later, I got engaged there, in a giddy whirl of cocktails, helicopter rides and walks through the park — then bedecked with orange flags by the artist Christo. I also gave birth to my son in New York, in a hospital dwarfed by a thicket of tall buildings, and worked at a news magazine at the southwestern corner of Central Park.
After moving back to Australia, I missed many things: the perfect smoked-salmon bagels; the smell of hot sugar peanuts and roasted chestnuts; the obscene hiss of subway steam; the thickness of the Sunday New York Times; the proximity of (and events with) thinkers and authors; the lure of Broadway; the mirrored bars; the red leather booths in restaurants; the dive bars of the East and West Villages. Truman Capote said, ‘I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.’ I felt the same way: New York doesn’t belong to me or any of the thousands of other bug-eyed expats who perch on the city’s edge and marvel at the skyline’s chutzpah. But, in many ways, I belong to it.
And, most of all, I love Central Park, and will always be grateful to the far-sighted Olmsted and his design partner, Calvert Vaux, for the surprising stillness it gave me, as a mother of tiny children with an intense job and a stressed, stretched husband, in the midst of urban-jungle noise, blasting horns, shouting, advertisements distorting through cheap speakers, and the constant beeping of traffic crossings. I lived on the Upper West Side, behind a Unitarian church that held blessing services for dogs and cats and faced the park. I walked from West 76th to 59th to get to work, so every day I wove down through the park, past the stretch of Sheep’s Meadow and into Columbus Circle. When I began the research for my book on Queen Victoria, I’d walk across the park, past the mossy green Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle, to the New York Society Library.
Other times, I rode my bike in easy loops, my babies perched in big seats on the back, and walked marathons around the Jackie Kennedy Onassis Reservoir with friends, talking in rapid torrents as the lake gently rippled. I remember walking from Fifth Avenue and 50th through the park up to 80th with a close friend, laughing and swinging big bags containing boots we had bought on sale at Saks as golden leaves — the first of fall — dropped quietly around us in what seemed to be an enchanted wood. In autumn, I carefully watched the trees grow orange, then red, from my office window — there would always be one to lead, and another to trail, the others. With the branches of winter bare, each side of the park was again exposed to the other: the west could see the east again, with its fancy stores and billionaires’ houses that glittered across the quiet expanse.
In Central Park, I sat and nursed my son — a jolly baby who wanted only milk and affection — on benches lining the park’s horseriding tracks. I draped my chest with material to try to ensure no New Yorkers were alarmed — women rarely breastfeed in public there — but I was stared at almost every time. I held my daughter’s birthday parties on rugs in lush little dells, where cupcakes tilted precariously on tufts of grass. At one party, she tore her clothes off and rolled in the dirt with a giant inflatable giraffe her fairy godfather had brought from Tribeca on the roof of a cab.
When I lived in Manhattan, I often longed for my children to be able to run barefoot in summer in places other than city parks, not to fry like eggs on dirty, steaming sidewalks in the heat, nor see rats coughing up poison on our street corner, surrounded by mounds of stinking trash or suffer the round of inexplicable flus that seem to frequently plague kids, particularly in New York City. I wanted them to know a country of endless waves, broad skies and red dirt. But once we were back in Australia, I also wanted my children to know Christmas in New York, to inhale the scent of pine trees leaning against lampposts, and wander Fifth Avenue with their faces lit by the lights sparkling on the glowing panther crawling up the Cartier store, and the rows of trees wrapped with tiny, twinkling globes. I wanted them to press their noses against shop windows, and gasp at the large white Yeti at Saks, the boy wandering through a crystal forest at Macy’s, and Santa steering a gondola at Bloomingdale’s.
Especially, still, I want them to know snow, the heart-pounding rush of sleds on dirty white hills, the sudden muffled hush of blizzards, the vision of Central Park covered in slippery ice. The most magical moments in the park were in the early morning after it had just snowed and before anyone had been able to grab their sleds, when all was still and achingly pretty, and my footprints were the first to puncture the smooth white. I would take our old chocolate labrador, Hugo, running with me — he was allowed off his leash before 9 am and he bounded about clumsily and happily like a large puppy, jaws snapping at the white powder, leaping into large, crisp drifts. When the snow spotted his coat, he looked like a lamington.
It is Central Park that I will always think of, when I most miss New York. It won’t be the astounding convenience of twenty-four-hour availability; the skull-sized chocolate-chip cookies from Levain Bakery; the rooftop bars; the Catherine wheel of creative output in museums, galleries, opera halls and libraries; the endless reinvention or the eccentric people with gargantuan brains that will make my heart twinge when I remember that city. Instead it will be the hours spent running past the icy rowboat lake and up through the wildness of The Ramble, of the snow-stacked branches, the sound of my feet hitting icy dirt and the joy on my dog’s face. For me, that New York defies a million other New Yorks, and reminds me how urban some dreams are. In a city of cloud-grazing buildings, Central Park was a rectangular refuge of trees, the place where I was most at peace.