Grass Grown on Purpose

Nothing about Central Park happened by accident. Two designers drew the whole plan on paper before a single tree went into the ground, and what looks like old, settled nature is closer to four hundred acres of stage set, built over years on top of solid rock.

The rock itself, hard Manhattan schist, is the difficult part of the story. Much of the park sits on stone too tough to dig through, so workers blasted it apart piece by piece, using more gunpowder over the course of the project than had been used at a famous battle fought around the same years. Every hill, pond, and gentle rise in the park was placed exactly where it is on purpose.

One open meadow near the middle kept actual sheep for seventy years, grazing there to keep the grass short long before anyone owned a machine that could do the job. A parks official finally moved the flock out in nineteen thirty-four and turned their old barn into a restaurant, and the meadow has been kept as open lawn ever since, remembered now mostly by its name.

Near the lake sits a cast-iron bridge, built in eighteen sixty-two, its curve reflected whole in the water below on a still evening. Polly landed on its rail and watched a family of squirrels cross the grass where the flock used to graze, the last of the light going gold behind the buildings at the park's edge.