Prospect: A Year in the Park

Back in the High Line again

Guest Park Special!

Last fall, we checked out the wild West Side's gestating new park called the High Line. The part we toured then still isn't open to the public, but now this part is, from  Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District (or "Pricey Bistro District") up to 20th Street in Chelsea. We walked it yesterday, and it's a delight.

The concept: Take the rusting elevated freight line that germinated into a long, green, aerial vacant lot along Manhattan's western edge, and turn it into a secluded oasis with killer views and river breezes. Keep the odd vibe of a post-industrial Eden, but add eco-friendly amenities and trendy design. Last Sunday, it was all gloriously vindicated by happy crowds who waited in a long line to ascend to this garden in the sky. There's even a sunbathing deck for pallid Manhattanites to bask in (although some eco-pamphleteers claimed that the rainforest wood used there is non-sustainable--gasp!)

The garden is a calculated evocation of the original urban-meadow takeover, but using posh perennials (like this echinacea) and ornamental grasses amid the cracks and tracks, with some patches of woodland. On a building overlooking the line, an incredibly determined mullein showed them how it's done.

Speaking of views from the High Line, it doesn't get much more iconic than this: the Empire State Building and a water tower.

 

 And speaking of water towers, the High Line (on Target's dime) threw one hell of a street fair down in the Meatpacking District to celebrate the park's opening, starting with this "water tower" full of free fresh lemonade, served up by buff kids in cute T-shirts. I avoid typical "sausage and tube socks" street fairs like the plague, but how can you argue with...

 

fire-eaters and stilt-walkers, plus...

      

balloon animals elevated to the level of performance art! (These "megamites" are created by a guy named Jason Hackenwerth, who gets his very loyal friends, like this guy, to help blow them up and wear them in public.)

STREET FAIR DOGS OF THE DAY

Happiness: Your bloggeuse admires a dachshund and a Chinese Crested and gets the whole pile of puppies just handed to her! The Crested looks like Paris Hilton and feels like UltraSuede. The dachsi was just happy to get his silky ears rubbed.

On closer inspection

Since Daughter started practicing with her new high school's track team, Mom has been killing time in Prospect Park in the vicinity of the Picnic House. Here, some random discoveries, starting with the cobalt-blue hydrangeas in the gardens at the foot of the Litchfield Villa.

More botanical interest: What the hell happened to these tiny green crabapples or cherries or whatever? They were swollen and covered in soft, hairy protuberances that, when crushed, released bright orange Cheeto-like dust. I figured it was some sort of insect colonization, but when I broke one of the solid green fruits open, there was nothing extraordinary inside (like a Cheeto-shaped pupa, say). Identification clues are welcomed in the comments section.

Nearby, a newly planted tree bore these nubbin-like fruits; I think they are pawpaws, a native tree known as "Ozark banana" for its custard-like fruit, upon which both George Washington and members of the Lewis and Clark expedition supposedly snacked. The flowers have a fetid smell, and growers of pawpaw fruit (which is usually shipped frozen if at all) sometimes hang rotten meat nearby to encourage pollinators like carrion flies.

Finally...can you identify this mystery building in the park?













I never saw it before today; it's part of a fenced-off garage and utility complex near the villa, with handsome textured brickwork and a curious mossy patina. According to this guide, "This two-story brick stable and carpentry shop was built in the late 19th century to accommodate parks workers, and does the same today, though the horses have given way to trucks." 

Pilgrim rose

After a night of pounding rain, the roses growing wild near the Long Meadow released their perfume onto the wet air.

It also smelled a bit like wet dog, especially near Dog Beach, where a clueless young woman stood by as her doofy, dripping mutt leaped all over me. No "down, boy" or even an apology as I wiped the mud off; such dolts as these give ammunition to the anti-off-leash crusaders. Not the dog's fault, of course; he just suffered from an excess of unchecked happy dogness. I was reminded of the cretinously entitled parents who unleash their toddlers to hurl Cheerios around white-tablecloth restaurants and then imply that you "hate children" if you complain...

Anyway, the roses soothed my peevishness, especially since I missed Rose Night at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden last night. Here is a bonus rose from yesterday (with Pollinating Action Figure Bonus!) on the garden path behind the Audubon Center.

And here is Emily:

Nobody knows this little Rose –
It might a pilgrim be
Did I not take it from the ways
And lift it up to thee.
Only a Bee will miss it –
Only a Butterfly,
Hastening from far journey –
On its breast to lie –
Only a Bird will wonder –
Only a Breeze will sigh –
Ah Little Rose — how easy
For such as thee to die!

                —Emily Dickinson

Green mansions

June breaks my heart with its ineffable lush mystery. As I set out for my first park walk this June, the sun shone, but the sky darkened as I ventured into the meadows and woods along the East Drive. 

 

In this bridal month, everything is a symphony of green and lacy white. But as the sun disappeared, I became more aware of the intense quiet, broken only by torrents of birdsong. (Are there more robins this year than ever?) The "Rose Garden," bereft of roses, was empty of people (and its pools still empty of water). But it did hold these honey-scented flowers on a tall shrub (anyone care to identify?)

By the time I reached the Vale of Cashmere nestled in its sunken grove, I had picked up a fat walking stick from the undergrowth for show. The pool there is already turning to muck and the lovely jets of water weren't on...not a good sign. Why are these lovely spaces, in a green-starved city, allowed to languish? Perhaps because they are too well hidden; we all claim to want seclusion, but as city dwellers, we are wont to speak softly in such places while carrying a big stick.

The air of verdant menace extended to this overgrown path near Battle Pass. It's identified on a sign nearby as "Tunnel Arch Bridge," but I just call it "M. Night Shyamalan Underpass."

I emerged from my solitary explorations onto the drive just as a rain shower began. Perhaps it's a legacy of growing up in this city in the Seventies and Eighties that I felt I had pushed my luck, gotten away with something.

Baby greens

I wait all winter for it: the return of the leaves. I call these young ones "puppy leaves," because they are so fast-growing, soft and floppy. After interminable months of skeletal branches, they bust out in a frenzy of photosynthesis, not to mention flowering, fruit-forming, and other hijinks.

This sweet gum not only has baby sticky-balls forming (underneath), but pom-pom/Brussel-sprout action, too. Seeking to enhance my botanical vocabulary, I got more than I bargained for. Brace yourself for some major-league botanical dirty talk in this Wikipedia description of the blossoms of Liquidambar styraciflua:

Staminate flowers in terminal racemes two to three inches long, covered with rusty hairs; the pistillate in a solitary head on a slender peduncle borne in the axil of an upper leaf. Staminate flowers destitute of calyx and corolla, but surrounded by hairy bracts. Stamens indefinite; filaments short; anthers introrse.

Anyway [fanning myself to calm down], I now present a baby album of tree leaves from the park's Long Meadow this morning. Straighten your anthers, plump up your peduncle, and let us begin.

 

Not sure what these are—it was more shrub than tree—but look how they make stained-glass in the morning sun! They also have balls, little nubby green ones, probably flowers-to-be.

      

Left to right: Baby ginkgo, baby oak (what kind of oak? "Red oak" is probably too obvious), and young buckeye (I think), with flowers up top.

And lest our coniferous friends be left out, here are new growth "candles" on...

    

...white spruce (Picea glauca) (I think), left, and Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus), right. For more Fun with Tree IDs, go here.

Finally, a bit of Long Meadow dog action. I loved this guy because he gave his whole joyous greyhoundish heart to the pursuit of his Frisbee, and I love this picture because he looks like a cool logo.

For May, a bright bouquet

It is May Day, and this is how things are supposed to be on May Day, even though this was actually taken yesterday.  Why do they call this tree a "redbud" (Cercis canadensis), when it is a Crayola "orchid"-color-bud? (No complaints about this overcast May-Day morning, however, because it is mild out, and the wet breeze from the park smells like moss and ferns and maple sap.)

This particular "red"bud was carrying on outrageously behind the back of one of sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor's vigilant pumas. Did you know that the term for a sculptor who specializes in animals is an animalier? (It's said "animal-eer," not a Frenchified "aneemal-yay" as I'd suspected, which is why it's good to look things up.)

I'm still high on poetry from yesterday's Poem in Your Pocket Day, so heeeere's Emily:

THE SPRINGTIME’S pallid landscape

  Will glow like bright bouquet,

Though drifted deep in parian

  The village lies to-day.

  

The lilacs, bending many a year,

  With purple load will hang;

The bees will not forget the time

  Their old forefathers sang.

  

The rose will redden in the bog,

  The aster on the hill

Her everlasting fashion set,

  And covenant gentians frill,

  

Till summer folds her miracle

  As women do their gown,

Or priests adjust the symbols 

  When sacrament is done.

                    Emily Dickinson

Divine drug

As a little girl fond of 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzles, I used to fantasize that I could disappear into those impossibly lush and complex fields of flowers. Yesterday, I did, here outside the Litchfield Villa. The blue-shirted figure (whose puzzle pieces could be confused with the small chunk of blue sky) is Carmen, the prodigious and visionary volunteer gardener of this miraculous hillside along Prospect Park West.

When I researched the villa, I found no evidence that its gardens were ever this glorious even in its Gilded Age heyday. Grace Litchfield, the lady of the house, and her railroad baron husband Edwin, would surely be proud (although they may still resent eventually losing the mansion to the park that was built around it).

I asked Carmen if she had planted every one of these bulbs. "Oh yes," she answered. "It makes me feel alive!"

The tulips are the brasses in this ensemble, but note some subtle woodwind harmony from these bluebells.

Next fanfare will come from the fence's crown of clematis, but even their buds are lovely, like delicate pursed lips about to speak.

If I wax poetic, it's because today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Here is one to pocket in honor of Carmen: 

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout

to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water

Descending in the dark?

   Wendell Berry, The Man Born to Farming

 

Pictures, moving and otherwise

Yesterday was yet another in April's Interminable Winter Series, with a raw breeze blowing off the lake and making the magnolias shiver.

The woods on Lookout Hill were full of song, although a woodpecker and countless robins were the only ones I saw besides the cardinal.













These finely engineered catkins sprouted from a tree on Wellhouse Drive that had fallen but not given up. Overall, though, spring seems slow and muted; tomorrow's anticipated 70-degree sunshine should unleash pandemonium.

 

Speaking of Wellhouse Drive and Lookout Hill, here's an amazing find on E-bay: an ancient stereoview card showing the 1869 Wellhouse (still there, now used as a storage shed) with its original tower (demolished in the 1930s, according to Forgotten New York) and peaked entry hood, with the well itself in front. Note that there are practically no trees cloaking the hill behind it. Bidding is through the roof on this rare glimpse of a raw young Prospect Park; wish it could be mine.

YouTube, Ebay...if Frederick Law Olmsted were alive today, he (unlike me) would be tweeting on Twitter!

Magnificat

On Daughter's first day of Easter vacation, we skipped the park and headed here, to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, because we suspected this sort of thing was happening on Magnolia Plaza.

I don't think they have ever been this riotously gorgeous. People were stumbling around in a magnolia-drugged haze, nuzzling blossoms, taking cell-phone pictures, and just gazing into the spring sky. The breeze smelled like perfumed French soap.

There are pink ones, a few glowing buttery yellow ones, and snowy-white ones, their black branches a spare and elegant contrast.












We had lunch, bought some seeds (chervil, marigolds, black-eyed susan vine) and then headed back to the magnolias via Daffodil Hill, still at peak. Daughter objected violently when I could not resist humming Lara's theme from Dr. Zhivago and swanning about like Julie Christie.

In the Fragrance Garden, I solved a lifelong mystery: Since violets don't have any smell, where do they get violet perfume? The answer: I've been smelling the wrong kind of violets. These ones, aptly named viola odorata, emit a cloud of that elusive and haunting bouquet. I have never been to Paris, but I'm told that bunches of them are sold there on the street.

Honor is satisfied

He looks as if he's saying, "Good Lord, where did that come from?" That was my response upon finally noticing this statue of Major General Gouverneur Kemble Warren right opposite the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. 

And what drew my eye was not Warren, but this lovely backdrop of forsythia and daffodils...

...framed above by chartreuse tree clusters and below by these charming dandelion-like guys.

     

 "Everything with him was subordinated to duty," states the plaque beneath the statue. G.K. Warren led Union troops heroically at Gettysburg (where he saved Little Round Top) and a half-dozen other major battles.  But Warren spent the rest of his distinguished postwar career trying to rehabilitate his reputation after being  relieved of his command late in the Civil War. (Warren, an engineer, had been criticized as overly cautious and deliberate.) It took until 1879 for a court of inquiry to exonerate Warren--and the results were not published until after his death in 1882. Warren died in Newport, Rhode Island, and was buried there at his own request in civilian clothes and without military honors.



The best view of the statue is from behind; from here, Warren appears to glower directly at the Quadriga atop the Grand Army Plaza arch, erected to the glory of the Union defenders he led bravely, if not boldly enough for the brass of his time. 

Warren's decades-long tale of overshadowed glory, along with his flinty determination and engineer's attention to detail, find an echo in the life story of his baby sister, Emily. You may have heard of her; she married one of Warren's engineering staffers, a chap named Washington Roebling.  Since Warren was responsible for their introduction, perhaps he should be turned around 180 degrees to gaze toward a certain bridge.

BOB GUSKIND MEMORIAL 'ADOPTABLE CUTIE OF THE WEEK'

Since I didn't recruit a Greenmarket Dog of the Week this weekend, I'd like to introduce something even better: An adoptable dog of the week! The recently lost and much-missed Brooklyn blogger Robert Guskind used to do this feature on his Gowanus Lounge blog, and I felt compelled by Natasha the Pug, a Craigslist cutie, to take up the banner at least once. According to Windsor Terrace-based New York Animal Rescue:

Natasha is a ten year old Pug...she is spayed, dewormed, treated with Revolution to prevent fleas, ticks, ear mites and heartworm and is up to date with vaccinations. She is very friendly and gets along really well with kids. Her adoption fee is $200.00 and she'll get one free exam at our vet's office, one free month of pet health insurance and a microchip. If you'd like to adopt Natasha please email us at nyanimalrescue@yahoo.com for an adoption application.

As the godmother of a middle-aged lady pug, I can assure you that life with Natasha will involve a big payback of snuffly adoration for the care and love you give her!