My ‘love affair’ with Central Park, now a coronavirus hospital

By Alex P. Vidal

“My favorite place is Central Park because you never know what you’re going to find there. I also like that when I look out the windows of surrounding hotels, it’s seems like I’m looking out over a forest.” – Haley Joel Osment

EVERYBODY who has visited and lived in New York City will fall in love with the Central Park.

State leaders, diplomats, beauty queens, sports icons, journalists, film makers, students, religious voyagers, rock stars, tourists, Hollywood heartthrobs, photographers, gangsters, comedians, ordinary folks.

Like them, I also fell in love with the Central Park.

It was in the Central Park where I officially played my first serious chess tournament in the United States—in September 2016.

It was in the Central Park where I wrote some of my most memorable and controversial articles—many of which weren’t yet published.

For a while, Central Park became part of my life.

I love the trees and the surrounding tall skyscrapers. I love the birds, the lakes and green grasses. I can spend my time in the Central Park any day of the week if I am not busy.

New York has transformed a grassy meadow in Central Park into a makeshift hospital even as it welcomed a Navy hospital ship.

This happened  to as officials scrambled to bolster a medical system becoming overwhelmed by coronavirus.

Normally a spot for picnickers and sunbathers, Central Park’s East Meadow was converted March 29 (Sunday) into a 68-bed field hospital designed as a respiratory care unit. And on March 30 (Monday) morning, the USNS Comfort navigated past the Statue of Liberty into New York Harbor, where it will provide another 1,000 hospital beds.

Meanwhile, Queens’ Elmhurst Hospital, the focus of our articles about COVID-19 this past week, and among the hardest hit in the city, has received 169 clinicians to help in its fight against the virus.

 

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“This is like an additional hospital just floated right up to our shores, and now it’s going to help to save lives,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

Death soared to 1,218 from coronavirus in New York state, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, an increase from the 965 deaths on Sunday, announced Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

In all, about 66,500 people have tested positive for coronavirus, over 9,500 people are currently hospitalized and 2,352 of them are being treated in the intensive care unit.

The number of new hospitalizations is doubling about every six days, slower when compared to last week, when new hospitalizations were doubling every two or three days.

It was on July 21, 1853 when the New York State Legislature enacted into law the setting aside of more than 750 acres of land central to Manhattan Island to create America’s first major landscaped public park; they would soon refer to it as “the Central Park.”

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the winners of the 1858 design competition for Central Park, along with other socially conscious reformers understood that the creation of a great public park would improve public health and contribute greatly to the formation of a civil society.

Immediately, the success of Central Park fostered the urban park movement, one of the great hallmarks of democracy of nineteenth century America.

By the early 20th century, vicissitudes of the social, political and economic climate threatened the fabric of the Park and caused its first serious decline.

Robert Moses, park commissioner from 1934 to 1960, received federal funding for the restoration of many eroded landscapes and crumbling structures, and embarked on massive public programming for the post-Depression populace.

When he left office, however, there was no management strategy for maintaining those improvements or educating Park visitors in proper stewardship, and for the next two decades the second — and most devastating — decline took its toll on the fragile 843-acre Park.

 

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Physically the Park was in a chronic state of decay. Meadows had become barren dustbowls; benches, lights, and playground equipment were broken, and the one-hundred-year-old infrastructure was crumbling.

Socially, the Park bred a careless, even abusive attitude towards the Park evidenced by unchecked amounts of garbage, graffiti, and vandalism. Positive use had increasingly been displaced by illicit and illegal activity. The perception—and in many cases, the reality—of Central Park was of a lawless and dangerous ruin. Despite a workforce of over three hundred Parks Department employees assigned to Central Park, there was no accountability.

New York City had abdicated their responsibility as Park stewards and, as a result, this national treasure became a national disgrace.

To help remedy this troubled situation, George Soros and Richard Gilder, under the aegis of the Central Park Community Fund, underwrote a management study of Central Park in 1974 by E.S. Savas, who was at that time the Columbia University School of Business, Professor of Public Systems Management.

The groundbreaking study proposed that two important initiatives be implemented to ameliorate the conditions in Central Park: one, that a Chief Executive Officer be given “clear and unambiguous managerial authority” for all Park operations, and two, a Central Park Board of Guardians be created to oversee strategic planning and policy, thereby instituting private citizen involvement in their public park.

 

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Cancer is more common among people who are obese than people who are at or below their ideal body weight…Amino acids arginine and omithine can help us gain less–even as we eat more…Products marked as aren’t necessarily low-calorie, and some products using artificial sweeteners contain more calories than if they had natural sugar…There were 69% increase in portion sizes at the Last Supper over the past 1,000 years, according to researchers who studied 52 paintings that depict the meal (Source: Time).

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)