The transverse roads will… have to be kept open, while the park proper will be useless for any good purpose after dusk; for experience has shown that even in London, with its admirable police arrangements, the public cannot be assured safe transit through large open spaces of ground after nightfall.
These public throughfares will then require to be well-lighted at the sides, and, to restrain marauders pursued by the police from escaping into the obscurity of the park, strong fences or walls, six or eight feet high, will be necessary.
The park, in other words, was seen from its conception as intrinsically dangerous after dark, a place of “obscurity,” “useless for any good purpose,” a refuge only for “marauders.” The parks of Europe closed at nightfall, Olmsted noted in his 1882 pamphlet The Spoils of the Park: With a Few Leaves from the Deep-laden Note-books of “A Wholly Unpractical Man,” “but one surface road is kept open across Hyde Park, and the superintendent of the Metropolitan Police told me that a man’s chances of being garrotted or robbed were, because of the facilities for concealment to be found in the Park, greater in passing at night along this road than anywhere else in London.”
In the high pitch of the initial “jogger” coverage, suggesting as it did a city overtaken by animals, this pragmatic approach to urban living gave way to a more ideal construct, one in which New York either had once been or should be “safe,” and now, as in Governor Cuomo’s “none of us is safe,” was not. It was time, accordingly, to “take it back,” time to “say no”; time, as David Dinkins would put it during his campaign for the mayoralty in the summer of 1989, to “draw the line.” What the line was to be drawn against was “crime,” an abstract, a free-floating specter that could be dispelled by certain acts of personal affirmation, by the kind of moral rearmament that later figured in Mayor Dinkins’s plan to revitalize the city by initiating weekly “Tuesday Night Out Against Crime” rallies.
By going into the park at night, Tom Wicker wrote in the Times, the victim in this case had “affirmed the primacy of freedom over fear.” A week after the assault, Susan Chace suggested on the op-ed page of the Times that readers walk into the park at night and join hands. “A woman can’t run in the park at an offbeat time,” she wrote. “Accept it, you say. I can’t. It shouldn’t be like this in New York City, in 1989, in spring.” Ronnie Eldridge also suggested that readers walk into the park at night, but to light candles. “Who are we that we allow ourselves to be chased out of the most magnificent part of our city?” she asked, and also: “If we give up the park, what are we supposed to do: fall back to Columbus Avenue and plant grass?” This was interesting, suggesting as it did that the city’s not inconsiderable problems could be solved by the willingness of its citizens to hold or draw some line, to “say no”; in other words that a reliance on certain magical gestures could affect the city’s fate.
The insistent sentimentalization of experience, which is to say the encouragement of such reliance, is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.
Central Park itself was such a “story,” an artificial pastoral in the nineteenth-century English romantic tradition, conceived, during a decade when the population of Manhattan would increase by 58 percent, as a civic project that would allow the letting of contracts and the employment of voters on a scale rarely before undertaken in New York. Ten million cartloads of dirt would need to be shifted during the twenty years of its construction. Four to five million trees and shrubs would need to be planted, half a million cubic yards of topsoil imported, 114 miles of ceramic pipe laid.
Nor need the completion of the park mean the end of the possibilities: in 1870, once William Marcy Tweed had revised the city charter and invented his Department of Public Parks, new roads could be built whenever jobs were needed. Trees could be dug up, and replanted. Crews could be set loose to prune, to clear, to hack at will. Frederick Law Olmsted, when he objected, could be overridden, and finally eased out. “A ‘delegation’ from a great political organization called on me by appointment,” Olmsted wrote in The Spoils of the Park, recalling the conditions under which he had worked:
After introductions and handshakings, a circle was formed, and a gentleman stepped before me, and said, “We know how much pressed you must be … but at your convenience our association would like to have you determine what share of your patronage we can expect, and make suitable arrangements for our using it. We will take the liberty to suggest, sir, that there could be no more convenient way than that you should send us our due quota of tickets, if you will please, sir, in this form,
leaving us to fill in the name.”
Here a packet of printed tickets was produced, from which I took one at random. It was a blank appointment and bore the signature of Mr. Tweed.
As superintendent of the Park, I once received in six days more than seven thousand letters of advice as to appointments, nearly all from men in office…. I have heard a candidate for a magisterial office in the city addressing from my doorsteps a crowd of such advice-bearers, telling them that I was bound to give them employment, and suggesting plainly, that, if I was slow about it, a rope round my neck might serve to lessen my reluctance to take good counsel. I have had a dozen men force their way into my house before I had risen from bed on a Sunday morning, and some break into my drawing room in their eagerness to deliver letters of advice.
Central Park, then, for its underwriters if not for Olmsted, was about contracts and concrete and kickbacks, about pork, but the sentimentalization that worked to obscure the pork, the “story,” had to do with certain dramatic contrasts, or extremes, that were believed to characterize life in this as in no other city. These “contrasts,” which have since become the very spine of the New York narrative, appeared early on: Philip Hone, the mayor of New York in 1826 and 1827, spoke in 1843 of a city “overwhelmed with population, and where the two extremes of costly luxury in living, expensive establishments and improvident wastes are presented in daily and hourly contrast with squalid mixing and hapless destruction.” Given this narrative, Central Park could be and ultimately would be seen the way Olmsted himself saw it, as an essay in democracy, a social experiment meant to socialize a new immigrant population and to ameliorate the perilous separation of rich and poor. It was the duty and the interest of the city’s privileged class, Olmsted had suggested some years before he designed Central Park, to “get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools, reunions which will be so attractive as to force into contact the good and the bad, the gentleman and the rowdy.”
The notion that the interests of the “gentleman” and the “rowdy” might be at odds did not intrude: then as now, the preferred narrative worked to veil actual conflict, to cloud the extent to which the condition of being rich was predicated upon the continued neediness of a working class; to confirm the responsible stewardship of “the gentleman” and to forestall the possibility of a self-conscious, or politicized, proletariat. Social and economic phenomena, in this narrative, were personalized. Politics were exclusively electoral. Problems were best addressed by the emergence and election of “leaders,” who could in turn inspire the individual citizen to “participate,” or “make a difference.” “Will you help?” Mayor Dinkins asked New Yorkers, in a September 1990 address from St. Patrick’s Cathedral intended as a response to the “New York crime wave” stories then leading the news. “Do you care? Are you ready to become part of the solution?”