Central Park Broad Creative Piece
Entering Manhattan—a city of concrete monuments and memorials in their own right—skyscrapers tower over you, reminding you of the sheer dominance of human engineering. Down every narrow pathway, cars line the streets down the middle and flank each side for as long as the eye could see. Every taxi, every Uber, every metro bus, and any civilian car that dares to enter into the city thinking driving in would get them to their destination “faster,” pump black plumes of smoke into the air that mix with the white vapors leaking from the orange and white striped temporal construction towers that, when you really think about it, seem like they’ve been on the same streets for years. Underneath the city, trains rattle the very ground you stand on and fire through the tunnels like a bullet down the shaft of a gun. It seems, in a city where you could look down from west to east and see the edges of the island of Manhattan without any hills or green foliage or twisting branches of trees blocking your view that there is not a single inch of the island of Manhattan that has not been leveled out and built upon. In a living city that breathes its own heart beat and speaks the language of blasting car horns, the roaring of construction site machinery that seems to last years, and the flying fuck you’s across the streets between pedestrians and drivers alike, there seems to be no escape from the anxieties of modern society and the clock beckoning you to return to…wherever.
But not all is doom and gloom, of course. At the center of the city of Manhattan, Central Park stands as an almost perfect snapshot of a glance into the past. Central Park stands as a place where the angsts teen could stare into a pond for hours, hoping to find meaning from a lady living at the bottom. Central Park stands as a place for a couple that never ceases to stop throwing curses each other at home, but insist that if they just got out of the house they could relax and make things work. Central Park is a place where a single bridge seems to hold reservations in order for a man or woman to propose to their significant other while they drift across the Central Park lake. When I visit Central Park, I arrive from the 59th train station, also know as Columbus circle which has a statue of Christopher Columbus overlooking the tip of the south-west corner of the park, which, I think, has its own interesting implications. The entrance is guarded by a memorial—a thick obelisk made from white stones, towering far above my head. At the base, naked men made of gray stone are sprawled out at the edges of four fountains situated at each of the four corners of the obelisk and spew cool water into a puddle where pigeons come to take a dip on those sticky summer days. At the very top of the white-stoned obelisk is a golden statue of a male figure adorned in flowing Roman robes and a circular shield like zeus’ aegis latched on to his back. He leads with a torch in one hand and the reigns of three golden horses in the other and seems to beckon New Yorkers and tourist alike to witness the wonders within its gates. Even the rather small, cobblestoned wall jutting out like teeth across the parameter of Central Park are somehow guarding and protecting the impeding and towering skyscrapers threatening the almost primordial land. As if those little, grey, cobblestone wall could hold up those skyscrapers if they were to ever topple over.
Moving through the park, at least this part of the park, large roads filled with joggers, horse carriages, and bikers intersect. The concretes roads weave in and out of the green grass and stitch together the many attractions of Central Park which exist, like some complex spider web pulling and trapping tiny pocket-universes that each have their own culture and people and languages and traditions. Some of these little pocket-universes include: The Central Park zoo, the Shakespeare theatre, turtle pond, the Alice and Wonderland statue, the Bethesda terrace, etc. All of which a kid’s imagination would go wild. Moving in between these little pocket universes, on the roads that interweave them all, where nothing and everything exist, a variety of flowers and trees and massive hills tower over you, making you feel like a tiny ant moving around a window garden that sits in a clay pot on a Brooklyn house window sill. Looking beyond the horizon at the edges of the park, the skyscrapers cannot be escaped no matter how hard you pretend they’re not there. They tower even higher over all the stretching trees and the rolling hills and they further shrink you and compress you into a mere speck of dust. They remind you of your smallness. But the further you delve into the garden maze, the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, you become lost. The only tracking of time is the arching sun that moves up and over and away from the island of Manhattan and into the sea. I never did stay at night. Though, I rather not. I imagine that the shrinking process becomes even stronger. Somehow I imagine the darkness creeps through the trees, like an escaped eldritch horror looking to sink its insanity venom into a lost New Yorker or Tourist’s mind. I imagine in the darkness, strange unfamiliar voices creep over the hedges and echo through the hills that have now become Mount Everests. How far those voices are nobody could tell, but you don’t want to stay to find out. You don’t want to stay for long to see how close they might be. And you’d run, I’d imagine. You want to run from the strange voices in the dark and the snapping branches as feet stomp over them, but you’re forced too scared; scared of snagging your foot on a sneaky branch, or a rock that leapt too high over the little grass colored fences which divide the path and the encroaching garden. I could only imagine. But, for me, when the sun stretches its thin legs up and over the sky dome, squats down, and the chill of the air tickles across your skin, calls your name, and tugs at your shirt and says it’s time to leave. That’s when I leave.