New York City Round-Up #5

Hallett Nature Sanctuary, Central Park

The Central Park Edition: I have made many visits to Central Park during my four trips to New York City, and I have still not seen or experienced all that there is to see and enjoy in that magnificent 843-acre green space in the heart of Manhattan. So for this New York City Round-Up, I am focussing on the park, drawing mostly on information from the Central Park Conservancy, the organisation which overseas much of the ongoing work of upgrades and maintenance.

Specifically, I thought I’d look at the park’s three woodland areas—the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, the Ramble, and the North Woods. Public tours of the Sanctuary, and the Woods have now began and continue right throughout the summer by members of the Central Park Conservancy, and I have provided details and links to more information about the tours below.

The Hallett Nature Sanctuary

In 2016, I managed to squeeze in a brief visit to the newly restored Sanctuary, a four-acre section of Central Park that had been closed to the public for many years. Located south of the Wollman Rink, and surrounded by the Pond at the southeast corner of Central Park, the closest street entrance is at Sixth Avenue and Central Park South.

The Sanctuary was originally called ‘the Promontory’, but in 1934 the location was closed to the public and preserved as a bird sanctuary by Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses. It was renamed in memory of George Hallett Jr., a birdwatcher, naturalist, and civic leader in 1986. Last summer—due to ongoing restoration work—there was limited entry to the Sanctuary, but happily this year the site will be open daily from 10:00am until 30 minutes before sunset. 

Tours of the Hallett Nature Sanctuary ($15; CPC Members $10), take place each Wednesday and Saturday, from now through until July, 2017, and beyond.

The Ramble, Central Park

The Ramble

Central Park’s chief designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, described the 36-acre Ramble as a “wild garden.” The area was planned as a tranquil spot where visitors could discover forest gardens rich with plants while strolling along the paths. As you walk through all three of the sites highlighted in this post, I’m sure you will find it as hard to believe as I did that everything you are walking through has been built by the hands of many men and women. The bedrock may be permanent, but the ten of thousands of plantings, trees, lakes, waterfalls, and other park features have each been placed there by hand and machine.

Below, Isabella Rossellini, Italian actress, filmmaker, author, philanthropist, and model, shares secrets of the Ramble. Central Park's 36-acre wild garden.

If you are visiting during Spring or Autumn/Fall, look out for some of the 230 species of birds that spend time in the park—which is part of the Atlantic Flyway—as they pass through on their annual migrations.

The North Woods, Central Park

The North Woods

Earlier this month, ABC7 New York ran a story about the restoration of Central Park’s North Woods, a 40-acre forest retreat at the top left of the park, where a man-made ravine meets the Harlem Meer. Interviewed for the television story, Doug Blonsky, of the Central Park Conservancy, said the area was created to mimic sections of the terrain around upstate New York.

“Olmsted and Vaux created areas like this for the typical New Yorker to experience the Catskills or The Adirondacks," he said.

Due to the lack of ongoing maintenance over many years, the North Woods had become overgrown and neglected, but now the Conservancy has returned an open waterway to the area, and put huge boulders of Manhattan schist back in place. 

Check out the ABC7 New York story:

The North Woods renovation was part of the $300 million Forever Green campaign, which took two years to complete. Visit Central Park Forever Green, to learn more about the campaign, including more woodland restorations and the renovations of 21 playgrounds.

If You Go

Central Park: North Woods…

Make sure you check out the 90-minute North Woods tours ($15; CPC Members $10), that are scheduled each Tuesday and Saturday, from now through July, 2017, and beyond.

I have often thought that even if you were to spend five days exploring Central Park, you would still be in danger of missing some beautiful corner of that magnificent site. There is much to discover and appreciate across those 843 acres, and I would urge you, dear reader, to at least allocate a morning or afternoon to discovering some of its many secrets. In future posts I will focus on locations and objects within the park.

More Information
Central Park Conservancy…

Man Cannot Discover New Oceans

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has courage to lose sight of the shore. 

~ Andre Gide

My 52-Book-Year: The Ways of White Folks

 Back in February, in a post titled, Writers From Life’s Other Side I wrote about how over the past few years I have been seeking out writers that have slipped under my radar, despite the accolades they have won for their writing. One of those writer’s is the great African-American author, Langston Hughes.

I have been aware of Langston Hughes for a long time—years in fact—but I had never read any of his poetry, plays, novels or short stories until I read The Ways Of White Folks.

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue”.

The Ways of White Folks is a collection of short stories first published by Hughes in 1934. Hughes wrote the book during a year he spent living in Carmel, California. Arnold Rampersad, in A Centennial Tribute to Langston Hughes writes that the collection is, “marked by pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism or, contextually: humorous racism,” and adds that the collection is among Hughes’ best known works. 

The Ways of White Folks consists of 14 short stories, including "Cora Unashamed”, “Home”, “Passing”, and “Father and Son.” The fourteen stories cover the gamut of white/black relationships, and Hughes is not shy about using the 'N' word—that is nigger—often, and in all its shades of meaning.

The collection opens with "Cora Unashamed" — described by David Herbert Donald (in a 1996 review for the New York Times), as “…a brilliantly realized portrait of an isolated black woman in a small Middle Western town, who stoically survives her own sorrows but in the end lashes out against the hypocrisy of the whites who employ her.”

Two of the stories, “Home”, and “Father and Son”, end with lynchings. In “Home,” Roy Williams, a brilliant young violinist returns to Hopkinsville, the small provincial Missouri town he left seven or eight years earlier to pursue a successful concert career in Europe (during the years between the two world wars). It is not long before Roy is confronted with the racism he had left behind years earlier:

“An uppty nigger,” said the white loafers when they saw him standing, slim and elegant, on the station platform in the September sunlight, surrounded by his bags with the bright stickers. Roy had got off a Pullman—something unusual for a Negro in those parts.“God damn!” said one of the white loafers.

As he departs the station platform Roy hears someone mutter, “Nigger.” His skin burned. For the first time in half a dozen years he felt his colour. He was home.”

Over a few short weeks, the resentment from the ‘loafers’ as Hughes calls them, continues to build until their animosity and envy boils over into uncontrolled rage at this black man, who had the temerity to escape the confines of his home town and travel to Europe, where he played the music of “Brahms and Beethoven, Bach and Cèsar Franck” in the great concert halls of Paris and Berlin.

When Miss Reese, “An old maid musicianer at the all white high school,” invites him to perform for her students, her well-meaning invitation only serves to stoke the anger and resentment from many in the town.

The students went home that afternoon and told their parents that a dressed-up nigger had come to school with a violin and played a lot of funny pieces nobody but Miss Reese liked. They went on to say that Miss Reese had grinned all over herself and cried, “Wonderful!” And had even bowed to the nigger when he went out!

The story ends when Roy takes a late night walk through the town centre, and is set upon by a mob who beat and kick him mercilessly. The final paragraph is both brutal and poetic:

The little Negro whose name was Roy Williams began to choke on the blood in his mouth. And the roar of their voices and the scuff of the feet were split by the moonlight into a thousand notes like a Beethoven sonata. And when the white folks left his brown body, stark naked, strung from a tree at the edge of the town, it hung there all night, like a violin for the wind to play.

Poster from the PBS American Collection
adaptation of Cora Unashamed (2000)

Clearly, Hughes pulls no punches in his depictions of 'white folks' and their foibles, fears, hates, contradictions, and murderous natures. To be black in America, when Hughes wrote these stories, was to live in fear that whites, well meaning and otherwise, had virtually free rein to do and say what they wanted when it came to the lives of the American negro in the years following the Civil War. The truly horrifying thing is realizing that today, in vast swathes of America, little seems to have changed.

All of the stories in this collection are brilliantly realized, and each one examines an aspect of the droll, horrifying, humorous, bizarre, and often mysterious—ways of white folks. The stories are steeped in the violence, and confusion of Depression Era America, and the collection immediately drew me into its orbit of small town Southern life, and big city mysteries.

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died in New York City at the age of 65 from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers. Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” from his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which is reproduced here:

The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

~ Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes is surely a writer I need to read more of.

More Information about Langston Hughes 

On Wikipedia...

At Poets Org… and Poem Hunter… 

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture…