Others of Meyerowitz’ images help you see even the familiar in a new light: A winter view of Literary Walk in Central Park, with not a leaf in sight, somehow transforms this often pedestrian-crowded destination the feeling of a dense forest. Many images are arresting because Meyerowitz has the uncanny ability to find the poetic majesty in a simple landscape. And he has found it throughout the city.
The more typically urban view of peopled places has not been overlooked, however. A yoga class is shown enjoying a peaceful edge of Fort Greene Park. People relax under a glorious stand of trees in Sunset Park with the residential neighborhood and city skyline behind them. A group enjoys sitting near a pier on the water’s edge of Brooklyn’s Louis Valentino, Jr. Park and Pier. And scattered throughout are images of the varied settings at whose edges the skyline looms.
What this exhibit actually reflects is the little-known, multi-decade transformation of both the familiar and unfamiliar city parks, the wild and the designed, the well-used and the unknown, started under commissioners Gordon Davis and Henry Stern in the 1980s and enthusiastically continued under the current parks chief, Adrian Benepe. Individual park administrators have been installed. Major clean-ups have occurred all over, often started by local groups or larger nonprofits with the Parks Department coming in as a partner. The detritus of tires and mattresses that once filled places like the Bronx River are gone. Protective railings have been installed, invasive species weeded out, new deciduous and conifer trees gradually planted, and the diversity of native plant life restored – all in preparation for eventual park development as funds become available. The era of neglect and decay of the 1960s and 70s is a distant memory, as it is in many of the once-shabby neighborhoods adjacent to some of these parks.
As Benepe traveled around these known and unknown areas, he realized how useful a survey would be and sought out Meyerowitz who “understood landscapes and people in landscapes” so well. Now they have an archive that will eventually be on the Parks Department website. Since all shots are GPS-coded with time and date, “we will know how nature is functioning in the urban environment,” Benepe explains.
If global change does unforeseen damage, we will know it. Perhaps, another survey in 10 years – and a subsequent exhibit – will tell us as much as this one does now. Let’s hope the news will be good.
Urbanist Roberta Brandes Gratz is a founder of the Center for the Living City and author of the book "The Battle For Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs," to be published next month.
