 where all of the National Design Award winners will get to talk a little bit about their work and their process on the 15th as well and another Harlem focus lecture on October 16th. So be sure to check our website cooperhewitt.org for a schedule of what's going to be going on and for more information about the Harlem focus series. Tonight's event with Lane Adonizio of the Central Park Conservancy is being webcast live now that we've got it all up and running and it will be filmed and available on our website cooperhewitt.org. So I'd like to introduce John Reddick who's curated this series. He's a long time resident of Harlem active in architectural preservation and he's written extensively on its architectural and cultural history and has recently been awarded a position as one of Harlem's community scholars by Columbia University. Please join me in welcoming John. Good evening. I want to thank all of you for your support of the Harlem focus series. This is part two. We had five talks in the beginning of the year. We're going to have this is the first of the second five talks and Harlem focus has really looked at practitioners or sites or parts of history that are tied to Harlem and looking at it from the design and landscape issues and like anybody who boarded Central Park, Harlem's proud to claim Central Park as its neighbor and we had one talk in the earlier series that focused on the conservatory garden and this talk is going to take a look at the woodlands of which we're adjacent to here. I think after you take the talk if you've never been in the Ramble and to the western side of the park from this end you'll see how spectacular it is. You'll probably run out there maybe if not tonight, tomorrow pretty soon. And here to talk about that is a dear friend and colleague from the Central Park Conservancy, Lane Adonizio. Welcome. Lane is the Associate Vice President for Planning at the Park and really helps in that whole overview in terms of the balance of design, the landscape and also the public engagement in terms of the user focus on things that are really important. In this area of the park in particular the birders and the naturalists have a lot to say about what that area is going to look like. Lane? Hi. It's great to be here. Great to be here with John. We go way back and we actually, great to be around 110th Street because we have spent a lot of our time and our friendship together here on this street. And it's wonderful to be here talking about one of my favorite parts of the park, the Northwoods and really the northern end of the park. I think is one of the better kept secrets in New York. It's certainly compared to the lower part of the park with the division of the park with the reservoir in the middle there. A lot of the crowds that you see in the southern half don't necessarily always make it up to the northern half of the park. So bad for them but kind of nice for those of us who do because it's a wonderful treasure. And for people who are familiar or have some sense of the northern end of the park in particular the Northwoods, they may have, you know, you may have an idea of the, that there's a lot of rocks and cascades and water. This doesn't seem, is this, sorry. We'll just try to, it's going to go through and when we get, as we get this working, go through and start. Oh, there we go. There we go. Thank you, Sarah. It's the magic touch. And, you know, you may have a sense of it as being kind of a very natural, seeming area, rocky and trees and very wooded. With, of course, as throughout the park, you know, paths and a place to explore, you may be familiar with the fact that there's something up there called the Block House, an old fortification. And maybe that there's, you know, kind of some other secret sorts of places. This is actually the remnant of what were the lily ponds up around, up around the Block House. But there's rustic features and architecture like these rustic bridges. And that it's a great spot for birding and that we've got really amazing wildlife, you know, in this part of the park as, you know, as we do also in the ramble. But you may not be as kind of familiar with exactly what is the Northwoods within the park and how does it, what's the, exactly the history behind it and how does it relate to the, you know, the, the surrounding area. So when we talk about the Northwoods, generally the Northwoods historically was defined as this whole area surrounded by the drive when, between 102nd Street where there's that cross drive. And then, you know, the drive wraps all the way around and goes along the Harlem Mere and up around this area. So the Northwoods historically was all of this area in here. And it featured, water feature called the Lock that connected the pool on the west side that entered the park at around 100th Street and emptied into the Harlem Lake, which we know today as the Harlem Mere. And around it, some of the key landscapes would have been the Great Hill up here, of course, the Harlem Mere. And down here, if you can see this says the nursery, which was historically, before it was the conservatory garden, it actually was the propagating gardens for the park. Like the entire park, though, it may seem like it's natural and a lot of people who are not necessarily familiar with the history of the park think, oh, it's the part of the city that they didn't build on and they left it natural. They didn't leave it natural. The entire park is, as we know, designed and man-made. And it's a work of art. And when we talk about the park as a work of art, we think of it as a work of art, but certainly it's creators, Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vox, they thought of it as a work of art. And this is, for those of us who work in the park and particularly I work, I'm a city planner. I work with landscape architects. When we talk about the park as a work of art, this is kind of a key quote, this idea that Olmstead and Vox had that the park throughout is a single work of art and as such subject to the primary law of every work of art, namely that it shall be framed upon a single noble motive to which the design of each of its parts shall be confluent and helpful. So what are they saying? They're saying it's a work of art and that something has to motivate the work of art. And everything about the way that it's designed has to support that. What was the purpose? Well, going back to before the park was built, that Manhattan was developing very quickly and it was understood that if the island of Manhattan continued to be developed at the rate that it was in the middle of the 19th century, that it would be consumed by buildings and streets and all of the stresses and conditions that go with urban life. And so the park was constructed, sorry, it was very much an effort of moving earth and of draining swamps and of directing the stormwater to create lakes. And what was that single noble purpose? Well, Olmstead and Vox talked about that the purpose of the park was really to supply for the hundreds and thousands of workers who would not have the opportunity to in the summer go and see the country, that it would give them what they called a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them inexpensively what a month out of town in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is at great cost to those in easier circumstances. So there's a little bit of a myth sometimes that gets propagated that Central Park was built for the wealthy and that it was about people in their carriages and it was about the elite. Nothing really could be further from the truth. As this kind of clearly states and as the creators of the park and the proponents of the park really advocated for from the very beginning, it was above and beyond all else. It was for the people who wouldn't have the opportunity to go to the country. And so the design, this is the Green's word plan, and the design was to within this 843 acres. It actually initially was not quite 843 acres because some of you may know that the park initially didn't include this portion of the park when the land was acquired for the park initially, it only went up to 106th Street. But that the park was to within those acres of the park was to create a sense as you moved through it of an idealized version of the countryside. So if you think about what you might see, if you actually were had the opportunity to go out to the countryside, you might see meadows, you might see woods, lakes, streams, but you would never see them quite in the in the kind of concentration and the idealized way that you see it in the park. So what they were doing is they were creating something like it was a composition. It was a composition. And instead of it being a composition made out of paint, it was made out of landscape. But it was a composition in which all of these elements, which were which were mimicking elements that you would find in an actual rural environment were constructed in such a way that you know, on a single walk in a very kind of concentrated area, you would come across all of them. And in their Greensworth plan, what they did is they they had photographs where they showed the existing the existing environment and then renderings of what the proposed would be and how they would shape the land. And in this case, it's it's the lake, it's the land that was the lake before it was created. And so the way that they would create this escape was through what they called the constant suggestion to the imagination of an unlimited range of rural conditions. And the the landscape scenery that you see in the park was very much inspired by what you might find in the same period in painting. The Hudson River School of painting was very much focused on landscapes and rural landscapes. And so if you look at images from some of the more famous paintings of the Hudson River School, you see mountains and you see I'm sorry, you see mountains and meadows, and you see these idealized rural conditions, which the park, for example, the sheet meadow, sought to recreate, you would see open bodies of water that would create this this pastoral serene experience. And you would see an on the left is a painting called Kindred Spirits by Asher Durand. You would see what was called picturesque environments. And these were the more wild seeming areas that would stimulate the imagination and the areas that you could get lost in. And this is a particularly important and interesting painting for those of us in Central Park. It was by Asher Durand and it is a painting that depicts Thomas Cole, who had recently died when this painting was was painted with William Cullen Bryant, who was the poet and the journalist and one of the major components for the creation of Central Park. And they are standing on a cliff in this idealized version of that actually depicts a number of different landscapes in the cat skills that you can never actually see from one vantage point. So they're kind of all super imposed on each other. So it is this idealized version of a natural landscape in the cat skills and it is becomes the epicenter of this human moment. And what I think is really interesting is what you see on the right is an early photograph from the Ramble. And you can see the same kind of spirit and character in the landscapes that Olmstead and Vox created as you do in the painting that Asher Durand created. So to the Northwoods. Here is an image just showing the Northwoods today, but we want to go through a little bit of the history. And what you see here is this is the land before. Keep forgetting what I did with my pointer. This is the map before the park was built. And this would actually have been roughly 106th Street here. This would be Central Park West. That's because the park was initially only went up to 106th Street. This would have been Central Park West and Fifth Avenue and 106th Street. And over here around West 100th Street entered a rivulet, a stream called Montaigne's Rivulet that flowed in a northeasterly direction towards this swamp, the Harlem Creek and the swamp area here that would be eventually added to the park and turned into the Harlem Mirror. And we had a number of fortifications in this area. Fort Fish, Nutter's Battery and Fort Clinton. And McGowan's Pass, which was the old post road, went up through these embankments. And there was, there's a pedestrian path up here today that went through today. If you're familiar with this area of the park, there's an overlook at Fort Clinton and at Nutter's Battery. The old post road would actually come up here. Up here is the mount, if you're familiar with the mount. And the drive today actually then turns this way and goes around, but that path goes up and overlooks the Harlem Mirror. So Montaigne's Rivulet entered the park, went northeasterly into the swamp area here. And in the transformation of the park into the landscape that we know today, it was created into what would be the lock, the pool up here and the lock. And so here's an early 1873 map of the park. So Montaigne's Rivulet would have come in here, the 100th street pool, and then once you cross the drive, you are in the north woods and its central feature, the lock, which is actually, if you look at this here, a fairly open body of water, kind of similar to the pool. And the way that this was created was by taking Montaigne's Rivulet and expanding it, excavating and damming and directing all the storm water to flow into it to create this water feature. And so what you had was this series of cascades. This would be the cascade, I don't know if you can see up here this rustic bridge. So that's the rustic bridge, if you're familiar with it, that leads from the pool down into the cascade right before you go under that first major bridge, which is Glenspan Arch. This is Glenspan Arch. Are people familiar with this section of the park? Does anybody know Glenspan Arch? What's different about this? Does anybody know? Yes. This originally, the span was wood. It only lasted a few decades and then it was replaced with the stone arch that we know today, which we'll see in a photograph in just a minute. So the water from the pool went down that cascade and became a stream under Glenspan Arch and then really opened into this wide pool, more open water, series of cascades, and then Huddlestone Arch right up here behind Lasker Rink, which was not there in the 19th century. And then after that it went under Huddlestone Arch and it emptied into the Harlem Mirror. So there was this real connection. This water body, Montaigne's Rivulet, was transformed into, I'm sorry, the stream was transformed into a watercourse that went through the entire north woods and connected the pool to the Harlem Mirror. This is, yes, right here is where Lasker Rink and pool is today. These are those lily ponds that were up by the blockhouse. And you can see, this is kind of, would be from the early 19th century. You can see the north woods is very much kind of growing up. And you can actually start to see in this shot, it's kind of a lovely shot, but you also start to see what would be the beginning of some of the issues throughout the woodlands of trampling, actually, because that's not actually a path. And here, again, this is in the, this is a shot in the 20s. This is Huddlestone Arch back here, so the end of that water course. And you can see, you know, the wonderful rocky character of the landscape and the trees. But you also can, if you really look, you start to see signs of erosion and degradation of the landscape. We'll move through the, you know, the thirties and forties and then enter Robert Moses, Parks Commissioner, in 1934, with kind of a new, a new vision and a new plan for the park. And the park, really in the early part of the 20th century, was really starting to become very deteriorated. And certainly the woodlands was, that was certainly the case. Trampling, erosion, very difficult to manage. And this is something that we still deal with today. An urban woodland environment is, you know, it's not really nature. It needs to be maintained. But it's a lot of landscape to maintain. A very intricate landscape that does have its own dynamic. And so maintaining it and keeping out, say, invasive species and keeping the environment healthy is a real challenge. So one of Moses's kind of first, first things that he did in 1934, when he became commissioner, is actually to designate three areas in the park as bird sanctuaries. One of them is the one that we see here and the one that if you're familiar with the Central Park, I have a bird sanctuary. It would be this little landscape known as the Hallet Bird Sanctuary on the pond in the southeast corner of the park. The other two were the ramble, really the southern half of the ramble, the area that we know as the point. And then up here in the northern end of the park, overlooking the Harlem Mirror, that fort landscape with Fort Clinton and Nutter's battering. And, you know, very often, you know, when I talk about the bird sanctuaries, I get the question, oh, I didn't really think of Moses as a bird guy. And, you know, was he really a nature enthusiast? And, you know, I think when we look at Moses and the areas that he that he cordoned off as bird sanctuaries and we look at kind of his later relationship with these landscapes, it was very much, I think, a way to and a reason to fence off an area that he didn't know how to deal with. That was a maintenance problem that he hadn't kind of, you know, figured out to crack yet. These areas had become largely overgrown in the early part of the 20th century. Olmston and Vox were gone, their successor Samuel Parsons was gone, and really there was nobody maintaining them and they became very kind of trampled and eroded on the ground plain and then overrun with these aggressive self-seeding species that made them, you know, unhealthy and overgrown. So that was kind of Moses' tactic. So this is, I'm sorry, this is, this would be the bird sanctuary overlooking the Harlem Mere. So just to orient you, here's, this is a survey from 1934, which is why it's a little difficult to read, but what you see here is the Harlem Mere. This is 105th Street, the Conservatory Garden, so Fifth Avenue, 105th Street entrance conservatory garden, and then that path that goes up, the drive over here and you see here bird sanctuary and the fence kind of going around. The other area that Moses had made into a bird sanctuary was down here, the point in the Ramble. So here's the Central Park Lake, this is the Ramble, and what you see in this area is that by the 1950s Moses is now ready to develop this area and he proposes a recreation center for the elderly. So once, basically for Moses, a successful healthy park was a place where people were, there was programming, there were people doing active sort of constructive things and these kind of wild areas didn't really, you know, didn't really make sense to him. So you can see he proposed this recreation building, he would fence in the entire Ramble, shuffleboard courts and parking and game tables, and what happened, fortunately. The birding community, which is long established in Central Park from the very beginning, from, you know, from the 19th century and of course birding just became more popular in the 20th century, but naturalists have had always gone to the Ramble in the Northwoods. And the birding community protested and this is actually a quote, this is the New Yorker poking a little bit of fun at Moses, because Moses actually literally did say serious bird watchers will be allowed in the area in the early morning hours during migration season and all orderly adults will be admitted during the day. So serious bird watchers and orderly adults. It's very interesting. He felt the same way about the Bronx. I never heard that point before about the sense of order and all of that. I'm sure you look at tenements and everything in the same way you're talking about the Ramble in a way, it's like he doesn't know how to control it, it's just too much activity for him and trying to bring order to that. Right, right, no exactly, and I think for Moses you know, you know disorder and environments that he couldn't control, and you know I think I mean you know Moses was absolutely I think he was in his in his way looking to do public service, but the environments that he didn't understand he had his approach to. So the naturalist's win and the Ramble is preserved, but what you see in this is in this approach to the Ramble and to other areas of the park is that throughout the park there was during the Moses era this this emphasis on facilities and programming and it did largely very much affect this northern end of the park. So here this would be the Great Hill in the late 1930s and you know the Great Hill was it actually was one of several carriage concourses in the park, so this would be one of the places at a high point where carriages could go up and initially this is a path around the Great Hill right now, but initially it was actually part of the carriage drive and so you could go off and get you know views of the surrounding landscape. So you see game courts this is more shuffleboard and horseshoe courts added up there. The Harlem Mirror here's an early 19th century shot of the Harlem Mirror like the rest of the park really meant to be this Sylvan idealized version of nature and Moses redevelops it in the 1940s and he redevelops it with a concrete edge and a walk and a fence all the way around and this is you know again a response to how do you maintain this natural edge was very difficult and heavy use but it really starts to very much urbanize this area and a large boathouse that was again it's a recreational purpose you could boat on the mirror but the character of the landscape it gets lost and certainly over time deteriorates and so that by the 1980s you can you can see the deterioration you can see the burnt-out boathouse which had been added to over time so you have you know a large line of empty buildings and finally Lasker rink and pool so this would be at the terminus of our Northwoods where that that water course made its way into the Harlem Mirror and there were these you know wonderful falls you have Lasker pool and rank added and there's a view of the pool and rank so there's that's the facilities era where Moses really makes his has his imprint on the park by overlaying these facilities what happens in the woodlands is is really neglect and erosion and deterioration so you can see the effects of this actually by the by the 1980s mountain biking in the woodlands vandalism of people trampling the woodlands by very very serious mountain biking was having a huge impact and you know through through the the 70s and into the 80s very very quickly actually in a period particularly after Moses left where you start to see just complete decline this is actually the lake and the ramble more of the same but by the late 70s citizens mobilize and we start to see in the woodlands one of the first places that we start to see it is community groups going in and volunteer groups and organizing youth to reclaim and restore the park so small-scale efforts to get back in and work in the woodlands and eventually the conservancy is formed and we kind of continue that in the woodlands very much a kind of incremental way of working whereas you might see you know in the sheet meadow was a major capital restoration project these are kind of different sort of environments so much more of a kind of hands-on incremental effort but eventually some you know some more heavy-duty work and so in the 1990s we did do a project to start to reclaim the lock that that water body and to do some excavation to get some more open water because it had completely slowed down to a trickle and with these with these improvements over time and improve maintenance this is Glen span arch so those of you who were not familiar with the previous arch with the wooden the wooden trusses this is the arch today with these improvements and gradual and improved maintenance we start to see you know a somewhat healthier landscape and some more use and you start to see kind of what what the landscape really offers so this is all the northwoods today really extensive effort to with our in-house staff to maintain to remove invasives and to kind of introduce a greater variety of plant material but we still have the lot that the impact from many many decades of neglect and abuse you can see you know a lot of an awful lot of deadwood and the lock kind of reduced to a trickle deteriorated paths the infrastructure in these areas have not been comprehensively reconstructed and then there was August 18th 2009 which was if you're not familiar with it or people familiar with the microburst that happened in the park are people aware of it so this is a storm that we have never seen anything like it it was it literally was about 25 minutes we lost 500 trees and it looked as though a tornado had hit the park and here's some images so it came back into the park the next morning and this is some of what we saw and what's interesting about this is that this microburst it was about 25 minutes and it was entirely above 90th Street it was really focused and what you see here is the darker colors the reds are the most the greatest number of trees lost nothing below 90th Street so it's something like a tornado but instead of being rotating winds it pushes down and so the greatest impact was certainly in the northern end of the park you know including really the greatest in the Great Hill in the pool area and the north woods and so this is you know in the north woods area some of the damage and this is the cleanup operation we had our in-house staff and then a number many many crews come in contractors come in and it was kind of like a logging operation for a couple of weeks this is the log pile the big one we had a couple but this is the large one over by just north of the east meadow where we cleared out the logs too and what you see is in a landscape where you've had this amount of devastation is what's next because what you have is once you kind of clear away the debris you have a ground plane that's been left bare so yes you've lost trees and people think of oh you lost five into trees you're going to replant the trees but really the entire landscapes were devastated and if this were just you know left if you just planted trees and this were just kind of left to for the trees to grow and for the for the ground plane to recover on its own it would just be completely overtaken by by aggressive self-seeding species and that would not make for a healthy landscape so you see tons of dead wood and we did go in immediately and and do kind of an initial restoration where we removed a lot of stumps we had a field of stumps and these landscapes that where we had lost a lot of trees that were on slopes if you don't do something to stabilize the slopes the earth will just wash away you'll have continued erosion so we did erosion stabilization and planting but in the woodlands it's a more complex problem there these are these very sort of dense environments where we have always worked in kind of a more incremental way and not necessarily coming in with large equipment and and you know contractors at a large scale we've been working kind of much more incrementally and you had areas like this where you can see very quickly an area where we had a couple of very large trees becomes immediately overtaken by these by these self-seeding species invasive plants and so really out of the storms came an opportunity and a moment to say this is a time for us to do some larger scale planning for for the woodlands throughout the park including the northwoods and so one of the things that we did to start with was to begin doing an ecological study of the northwoods because they are man-made their design but they also have their own their own ecology and to look at what's going on in terms of the hydrology and the wildlife and the vegetation and so we did studies where we did where we looked at the sedimentation and what had happened to the lock over time and to transects where we we did these are basically surveys of the vegetation across certain lines and what you see here is it's a map showing in in in the lock these transects where we looked at water quality in the locks this is the pool going through the lock and one of the things we found actually what this all comes down to here is that the water quality in the lock is actually very good it's kind of where you where you want it to be in terms of the various levels when we looked at what's at what's called the habitat when we looked at the the benthic macro invertebrates which that's that's a mouthful and I don't say that too often but you know our colleges who we work with we look at this so benthic is actually bottom feeders and macro invertebrates mean you can see them but they have no no vertebrae and they are a major indicator of your habitat quality so where we see these low there's low there's medium and high even though we have very good water quality we didn't have a huge variety and we didn't have anything in the high category that would indicate a very diverse habitat so that was an interesting an interesting find and then looking at sedimentation and the different layers of what we have in the lock and trying to figure out what exactly is going on there and these are our vegetation transects that we showed you the guys taking that survey data and we looked at at out of that what we have in terms of the trees and what you see is we have an awful lot of black cherries which is an aggressive cell seeding species and end of the saplings and shrubs so we did all this analysis just to kind of to take the temperature of the health of the water body which is the central feature of the north woods the other thing we do is look at history so we looked at the footprint so to speak of the lock over time and this is the lock shortly after it was created in 1873 and this is it in 1934 and in 1982 so you can see I mean if we just kind of go over that quickly people who are familiar if you're familiar with the north woods in the lock today you think of it as a little stream with some cascades but you know thinking back to those photographs that I showed and looking at this it was lock means lake so it was actually a much more open wide water body and over time and particularly in the decades with the you know with the complete lack of maintenance in the woodlands so you don't have vegetated landscapes you just get erosion and it had almost completely silted in 1982 when the Conservancy started working in the woodlands and in the park what you see now is from our work in the 90s we had done some selective work so we got a little bit of the water back you know not not a whole lot and obviously a lot of these areas that have seeded that have silted in have been there for many decades so we can't just say let's go back to the original the original lock because we have an entirely different landscape the it's evolved there's the trees are some of them are very nice mature old trees so we want to look back when we look at restoring this landscape to trying to recreate some of that character and intent without being literal you know that huge tree has to come down so that we can get the water right there that's not the case but we do want to create areas where we have open water and these pools like we did historically you know we have this is kind of one of the largest the widest parts of the lock you know right there but that's just a hint of it then looking at erosion and sedimentation so what you see here is in the red are areas that are eroded the ground plane has no vegetation on it and sedimentation in that kind of mustardy color would be areas where we have where we have active sedimentation of dirt washing into and filling up the lock and then looking at desire lines which is people where when people kind of go off path and and trample the landscape and finally you know the the intent the plan is to bring back a better variety in the water body where we have some deep water pools and where we do keep some of these shallow water flats riffles which are you know the cascades the idea is to create variety variety in the landscape is from a scenic point of view it's a variety of experience and from a habitat point of view those are very much interlinked and so this is just kind of showing some of the different types of conditions that we want to create along the lock to to create different habitat and have more of a variety particularly for habitat and then finally doing work what we call the upland so away from the the water body planting and paths and infrastructure so this is the lock today and what you can see on the photograph is the issues that we're pointing out the these highly trampled and compacted areas the lack of diversity in the vegetation the sedimentation that's accumulated so all of this is is dirt that's washed into the lock from erosion and the loss of canopy from these storms the idea is to remove sediment and create deep water pools to enhance the planting and the variety enhance the stream edge stabilize the stream edge and add plantings create and recreate some of these overlook areas where there's spots to get to the water's edge and to take in views yeah and some of what you're seeing as the flat opposite side was initially a large portion of that actually was initially the water body as well so it can be a little deceptive it's already silted in and on the north end of the lock you know similar degraded paths trampled areas and we do have you know some wet areas so part of the sedimentation that's happened it has created a little bit more a condition that didn't necessarily exist historically where we have these these shallow flats and these marshy areas we want to keep part of that but to not have if you just continue to let it go it will all eventually just dry up so again selectively remove the sediment keep and expand some of these shallow kind of wet areas that's a different type of habitat enhance the stream edge create access and enhance the upland this is just showing some of the kind of elements that we that we work with and restoring the woodlands and really a very very big part of what we need to do is create and meet maintain and maintain is key the diversity of the habitat because what we have is when you allow an area that's not really natural to kind of to go on its own eventually what you get in particularly with erosion and storms what you will get is the ground plane is just ripe for these invasive species and the problem with the invasive species is that they they take over they crowd everything out they tend they typically are shallow roots so they don't necessarily even hold the ground plane in very much they don't prevent erosion very well but they spread very rapidly so you either have areas that are very bare because erosion is not being prevented or you have this kind of monolithic ground plane of these invasive species and they don't allow for this diversity which is interesting both in terms of a scenic character and habitat so kind of enclosing this is this is a quote that's not almost an invox I always try to give somebody else a shot but it's a naturalist and my microbiologist Renee Dubois who who said that while man is too often a destroyer of wilderness he can also shape and restore the natural world and perhaps even improve it by giving existential oppression expression to the genius of the place so I think that that is certainly what Olmsted and Vox did you know in this in this landscape and it's what we strive for in the restoration work that we do and and just ending on a shot of the pool and the head of the lock today and a really beautiful area that I think really speaks to the character and the potential of this landscape and we also take questions we're gonna have a microphone for people you were talking about the different species tied to the water and how it had sort of a low end but not the sort of higher end what would be some of the higher end species that you'd like to try to bring back yeah it's you know it's it's they don't sound as interesting as they are but there's a number of there's mayflies and catas flies and there are it's actually a number of the insects which you know I thought I'm not a scientist or an ecologist so we so it was very interesting to sort of see a lot of what we have you know in the low and the medium and go up to crayfish and mussels and you know that kind of thing and you think oh so they're getting bigger but actually in terms of the high the higher end it's a number of these insects that really if they if they make it past the larva stage indicate a very diverse and healthy habitat which means that in terms of wild other wildlife birds and and other wildlife that it's both better habitat for them and of course the food supply for them they feed off of those flies yes a question legend has it that the rustic bridges and the rustic benches were made from felled trees from the park if that is indeed the case were there many more made after that terrible storm there were there were not many at the time that we had the storm there's only a few kinds of wood that you can actually that work for rustic for rustic architecture and rustic features and we you also have to allow it to age for quite a long time before you can use it we also had a quarantine in the park at the time that we had the storm which meant that for you most species of trees they had to be after we after they were felled they had to be chipped to pieces less than one inch one inch squares and actually kept into the in in the park until they were so we were not we actually were you know thinking about and looking at do we have anything here that we can work with in terms of using it for the rustic work but it really wasn't an option you know I have never heard that it was particularly felled trees but it was branches from trees in the park so so it could be branches that were on the ground part very likely you know some of it was from felled trees yeah what species of tree do you have any idea originally they're used for the bridges well locusts would certainly be and that's particularly what we use nowadays and cedar you had two questions okay yes and I went right to the second part anyone else I have a two-part question as well I'm just referring back to the comments you made about the water slowing to a trickle through the lock where does the water come from that is in the pool that goes downstream to the through the lock and eventually down to the mirror and I'm not clear on what the causal relationship is between the fact the downstream erosion reducing to a trickle the upstream water supply if you could clarify that that'd be great sure so the water supply historically there was that stream Montaigne's Rivulet that entered and we actually are not part of what we are studying now as you prepare to do this work is to figure out how much if any of the water that still exists is from Montaigne's Rivulet which would have been you know diverted underground but we could still have underground water sources supplemented and this is kind of this is true for the water bodies and water courses throughout the park supplemented by directing the storm drainage to empty into so when you see you know storm drains in the park by and large the vast majority of them you see you know you see a sewer if you're walking down the street you know it's going you know into the storm sewer system if you're in the park it's emptying into and helping to create the streams and lakes in addition though the water features in the park are supplemented by city water and in the case of the North Woods the the Croton aqueduct which feeds or fed it feeds the reservoir the the Central Park reservoir the reservoir is no longer used as an active water supply but that connection is still there when the park was built the reservoir was being built right around the same time that the land was acquired and then when the park was built a diversion off of the pipe leading to the reservoir was created so that actually also still to this day supplements so there is water coming from the Croton reservoir and before it gets to the reservoir and Central Park there is some water coming in from there as well and then the second question was related to the erosion well the so what happened the main cause of the trickle is basically what's happening is the water the water course is getting smaller this is this happens in our lakes and ponds you know has happened historically in our lakes and ponds throughout the park particularly in the middle decades of the 20th century when the surrounding landscapes were not maintained the landscapes are not maintained if you're not removing it removing invasive is making sure to keep to maintain a variety of plantings then you don't get a solidly vegetated ground plane and then particularly where there are slopes which is a very rocky area if there's no vegetation there's nothing holding the dirt in place when it rains and and the storms washed dirt into the into the water body or the water course and it just fills it in so it's like you're you know it's like you're shoving you know shoving dirt into the water body and that reduces it to a trickle because just because it is literally silting in is that thinking about I think you think about the volume of water yeah right sure sure well the water is not being pumped and forced in so it will come in where there is space for it to go to so right well it's coming it's coming from the pool but front it's going into the pool from a pipe but it's not being forced in so if these water bodies if they silt in there's no place for the water to go it's not going to push out the it's not going to push out the dirt excuse me 100 east 106th Street used to be a canal before it was paved over is any of that water involved in Central Park does the park go over that water um east 106th Street I haven't heard it describes the connect there's the heart the Harlem Creek canal that came from the Hudson River that connected to the Harlem the Harlem Creek connected to it I'm not sure that's why I'm asking yeah and so it's wider than the other streets and it's not it's not a main concourse I just wonder where the water went to where the water from the canal went to if it's under if it's under Central Park or was it just locked up or what well yeah I mean all of the water in any of the original whether it's a canal or the original streams when as the city was built over it was they were basically diverted underground in some cases would be you know into into the storm system into the east river must be difficult to maintain the balance that you're artificially creating a natural environment because I grew up out in the west I was lucky we have Yosemite and you have a lot of beautiful areas like that so it's interesting that the way you described it that you the people here think it was natural like this but I've studied almost it before he just created this masterpiece and what struck me is you are talking about areas that look like you said we're trampled or degraded look to me just like folks were just walking through there some and lots of times when you're up and back behind half dome you want something to be open so how do you how do you reach those decisions it must be difficult like what do we want to change here what do we want to add here I mean what goes into those decisions sure yeah no it's interesting and one of the things about about trampling and the desire lines is it's kind of a it's it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy and it's and it doesn't generally start with people just if the landscape is at is well maintained and the kind of key features of how it was designed to be if that's maintained you generally won't get the trampling and the desire lines but once you know what the desire line so a desire for people for people who don't know a desire line is an area a generally a path that is created by people what the reason it's called desire line is I want to get from point a to point b that's my desire and so enough people walk from point a to a common point a to a common point b and that becomes a desire line because the everyone said I mean he's directing you so almost everything's curved so also you're on one side of an oval or a curved road you want to get over there and New York didn't take very long for enough people and there was a period where people said well then fill it in it was a whole theory that's what people want to walk why don't we put a path in there and there's a period where they start dropping paths in to match those desire lines and there actually are places there are environments where where that is done and where it makes sense if any of you have been to Cambridge and to Harvard University Harvard Yard you know it's very famous that you know what's you don't see some kind of formal arrangement of paths they're not in a circle they're not symmetrical it's people wanted to get from here to here and there's a path there well that's a flat space surrounded by buildings so the idea that the paths that crisscross it would kind of relate to you know which ways people need to go makes perfect sense and in an Olmsteady and landscape the idea was as we kind of talked about earlier to create this very orchestrated sequence of scenery that you move through the landscape and every kind of turn you take puts you in a new space in a new environment to replicate that sense of being in the country and so the if if you want to get from point A to point B really quickly and you can see point B from point A something has already broken down in the Olmsteady and landscape because it would have been it would have been through the topography and the plantings if it was well maintained you would just be directed by the landscape to walk through in a very sort of natural way and experience the scenery so if that's not happening that means between the loss of vegetation and between erosion your the effect has already been spoiled now I just want to get from point A to point B I was thinking particularly because he was looking at painting and building the park then in the end he was between the painting and being a movie director or making a movie because your feet are now the cogs in the film strip and he's setting up a whole system that as you move your feet you're going to these different views or experiences the same way a movie director leads you through the movie through certain signs or clues or whatever so I think you're absolutely right saying if something's missing you're missing part of the movie or constructed story because you're cutting it short by going to something else that he's directing you other way. So just to give closure to your question then the way that we deal it deal with it and make the decisions is by restoring the landscape to what it's meant to be and once you do that you know people if the landscape is you know is beautiful and well maintained people by and large are not going to go off path and also if they can get to which they should be able to get to places where they can see the things they want to see so yes you do have to make sure that if you have a water body the edge is not completely overgrown so that people can't get to and see the water body or see the birds you know feeding you know in the you have to create access and guide people just through really designing the landscape well guide people to the points where they can see what they want to see. A boat house that was up on the mirror and are they planning on restoring boating up to that area. Did you say what what was the where okay so the original that that boat house from the 1940s was roughly in the location actually a little bit east of the Dana Discovery Center so if you were to enter the park right here at Lenox Lenox Avenue and you know hang a left the Dana Discovery Center would be there the boat house would be a little bit further along but actually with all of with all of the buildings that were added on it would have taken up the entire shoreline pretty much. There's there's not currently any plans. It was almost like an amusement park and the way it was kind of set up I mean people talk about you would rent like a paddle boat or whatever and you could go out there and so to try to keep any kind of habitat there if this other activity was going on and then it was walled off that whole fencing so it really was almost like an amusement in terms of how it was used. Maybe one more question we have one more. It's been 30 years since I went on 110th because I now live on 10th and and so you lost 100th Street so my goodness. So I got off the subway and for some reason I went to Central Park thinking you were going to be in the park. So I was amazed at the green. I mean it's changed so because I I taught at Central Park East and my life with my class was there on 110th Street and when I I mean there were more people now but it's all green so I was wondering what are you going to leave it that way or the water is just changed so I was curious if that's just natural. Oh when you say it's all green. You're talking about the duck weed. Yes I thought you were talking about the landscape. Yes so we do have we have duckweed and we do actually also have algae. Duckweed is actually and when you see that kind of almost solid green that's duckweed which is actually indicative of a healthy water body and it's called duckweed because the ducks actually feed on it. Algae is is not such a good thing and we so yeah I know the the idea is to try to get rid of it. We actually have a harvester which if any of you have ever seen this boat out on the lake where our staff do go and you know try to harvest it. We do have a particular issue with it here and it has something to do with the pipes particularly that go into the mirror and what our soil and water body people have told me is that there's phosphorus in the pipes and that's that's one of the things that contribute to it so so we we are battling against it but when it's duckweed it's actually not unhealthy when it's when it's algae it is but it doesn't look nice and so we it's in the hotter months it's when it's a real issue. Thank everybody thank you very much.