Passage III

Central Park

[1]

While New Yorker's sometimes take Central Park for granted, visitors are often astonished to discover the size and variety. Nestled in the very center of the nation's largest city are 843 acres of wooded and landscaped grounds containing lakes and ponds, bogs and meadows, a castle, a zoo, and an enormous range of wildlife. Though it seems to have always been there, Central Park represents only the most recent in a series of altering transformations of this part of the country.

[2]

[1] About 450 million years ago, what is now park rested on the floor of an ancient sea. [2] After aeons of erosion, accelerated by the Ice Age and the landscape began to assume its modern appearance. [3] By the time European settlers arrived, the entire island was an oak-and-chestnut woodland, it is populated by black bears, wolves, and beavers. [4] Within the next 200 years, however, the forests were cleared for farming, and the animals were eliminated by hunters and trappers. [5] By the mid-nineteenth century, central Manhattan, being barren of trees, creating a desolate area of swamps, hovels, and pigsties. [6] Over 200 million years ago, the shifting of the earth's surface squeezed present-day Manhattan up into mountains over 12,000 feet high. (39)

[3]

In 1857 Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were given the enormous task of transforming this area into a park. Their intention was to finish the park within two years. They undertook the project with confidence and enterprise, overturning nearly five million cubic yards of rock and earth. Olmsted and Vaux hired local land developers to help plan the park's landscape.

[4]

Today in Central Park, natural beauty and human engineering work together. Although the genius of Olmsted and Vaux, once a landscape barely was transformed into an oasis in the center of urban life.