01/07/2012

Central Park



The park as a place to go has cropped up a few times before, in For What Is Chatteris and Trafalgar Square. Parks have been one of those places that have played an important part in  social and cultural life  but often pass unnoticed. They are just there, part of the scenery most of the time. Frankly, they are not that exciting most of the time - depending on your age and location, good for feeding the ducks/playing on swings/walking a dog/drinking cider and cans of Tennents/eating your lunch on a bench/writing graffiti on a bench/setting fire to a bench.

 Yet they have served as a useful backdrop for a fair number of songs, a useful place to set a little story of love or loss in 3 minutes. Curtis Mayfield’s Um Um Um Um Um, covered by Major Lance and Wayne Fontana, is a study of existentialist angst set on a park bench: “Walking through the park, it wasn't quite dark, there was a man sitting on a bench. Out of the crowd as his head lowly bowed he just moaned and he made no sense. He'd just go Um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um” .He might have had a can of Tennents too. In the Chi-lites' Have You Seen Her, the narrator is sat on a park bench watching the children play and asking passers-by if they have seen his lost love.  Billy Stewart’s Sitting in the Park has been mentioned before and remains one of those songs that seems virtually impossible to do a duff version of, though with particularly good covers by  Georgie Fame and Alton and Hortense Ellis. (Groovin' - surely set in a park - ’ is another song that appears to survive any interpretation intact, though the original by the Young Rascals remains the definitive one). Reggae outfit the Chantells took the same theme of being stood up in a park in Waiting In The Park. Parks don’t really seem a good bet for a successful date judging by the numbers of people sat there patiently waiting for their partner to turn up.

Since the early days of pop,  songs have also appeared about specific parks as well as parks in general. The American ones sound brasher and more exciting than the English ones. Freddy Cannon sang of New Jersey’s Palisades Park in 1962, complete with fairground sounds and tinny organ that sound like the rides at Weymouth fair. Jim Webb immortalised the melting Macarthur Park in Los Angeles in his over wrought classic about a possibly metaphorical cake, first recorded by Richard Harris and covered scores of times since. Then there’s Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park with auroras and switchblade lovers. English parks tend to be more sedate.  Even the Small Faces’ very urban Itchycoo Park, supposedly based on Little Ilford Park in Newham,  mentioned the bridge of sighs and dreaming spires. Kathryn Williams sang of Newcastle’s Leazes Park with a gentle melancholy. The Zombies sang of Hertfordshire’s Beechwood Park in a forgotten piece of very  English psychedelia that paints a wistful remembrance of an English past:” Do you remember summer days, just after summer rain. When all the air was damp and warm in the green of country lanes.” (The song came from their 1968 album Odessey and Oracle. When the Zombies first hit the charts much was made of the group members having 50 'O' levels between them. Surely  St Albans Grammar School should have taught them the correct spelling of 'Odyssey'.)

London and New York both have famous parks, of course – Hyde Park and Central Park – but their musical treatment has also been rather different, perhaps reflecting the different way these places have been seen. Hyde Park, in fact, has not figured that much in song, odd perhaps given its significance for demonstrations and open air concerts over the years from Blind Faith and the Stones onwards: maybe its history and royal connections make it too unlikely a topic for pop songs. Its main musical focus, in fact, has been Speakers Corner, referenced amongst others  by Bob Dylan in TV Talking Song  and in the Bacharach-David song, London Life.  I once saw a wonderful example in Hyde Park, though, of the past and present merging. At an Anti-Nazi  League demonstration, amongst the ‘Pensioners/Skins/Ex-Servicemen Against the Nazis’ etc crowds and placards was a small group dressed up like Beau Brummel in Regency finery and powdered wigs under a banner headed ‘18th Century Fops Against the Nazis’. The point is that the setting of Hyde Park made one wonder for a moment if some strange time-warp had actually taken place.

New York’s Central Park provides a musical counterpoint in many ways. Mostly, Hyde Park in songs remains just that –a park. Central Park gets mythologised in a way mentioned before with American places when compared to English ones. Its reputation, of course, was once as a pretty scary place where unspeakable things happened after dark .In the 1970 comedy film The Out of Towners, the hapless couple from Ohio, played by Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, are inevitably mugged in Central Park -shortly after they had been kidnapped. So you had the 1974 hit for Thunderthighs, Central Park Arrest: “Come out, I know that you're there, I have a gun, so you'd better beware”.  You also had Ian Hunter - all the way from Shropshire -  plastering on with a trowel  as usual the American Myth  in his 1981 track Central Park 'n West. “It's like a living hell ,New York's finest rounding up the bums. The firemen get no rest, and ambulances signal death, on Central Park 'n' West.”

Things can change, however, and walking round the lake or visiting Strawberry Fields now it is not hard to forget you are in the middle of New York -  though at the last visit a sudden snow storm had left part of the Park looking devastated. The song here from 2009, Central Park by British artist Mr Hudson, fits this new image. ( Mr Hudson is often compared to Sting but this track reminds me more  of Prefab Sprout.) Whereas the Ian Hunter type of song makes Central Park even more ‘American’ than it is, this story of heartbreak makes it sound rather European: it could almost be set in Paris, the Hudson Hotel aside, with Jules and Jim on their bicycles.


Parks in song often take on an extra dimension. They are not just places to pass away a work lunch-hour or a Sunday morning. They are the spark for more epic and noble thoughts than thinking about your pork pie  and crisps or what that dog is going to do. Instead, they are the setting for love and loss, hope and despair. And I guess Central Park is a grand enough landscape  for that.




45 comments:

  1. Geoff! Based on this column I can calculate when you were last in NYC I think! If you were there when a random snow storm damaged the park, it was late October of last year! The problem was that the trees hadn't lost their leaves and so sudden heavy snow meant the snow on the leaves were all too heavy for the branches. And so the branches fell. It was a weird thing for New Yorkers, snow in October, we didn't know what to do with it!

    Also, Happy July Fourth!!

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  2. I liked your story about the ‘18th Century Fops Against the Nazis’!! It reminds me a bit of the Billionaires for Bush group, where people went to demonstrations pretending to be billionaires because Bush was going to lower their taxes. Less cool costumes (they tended to wear top hats and tails, or carry croquet mallets around, etc), but it was effective as protest - it associated Bush with the wealthy in people's minds. Here are some photos: http://billionairesforbush.com/photos.php. And I guess there is a relationship here to the Tea Party too. They dress up like it's the 18th century. They are demonstrating for lower taxes and often pretend to throw tea in harbors again (like the Boston tea party of 1775). But I think the ‘18th Century Fops Against the Nazis’ thing was a lot cooler.

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  3. Wow, yes, I hadn't realized, but you're right: American parks seem full of noise and switchblades, English ones are green country lanes and spires.

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  4. As an American, this sentence was fairly impenetrable: "the group members having 50 'O' levels between them. Surely St Albans Grammar School should have taught them the correct spelling of 'Odyssey'." - From googling, it seems like O levels were some kind of high school test and usually a person passed 7 of these tests all around the same time, so 50 successful tests for one group would have been a lot? And 'grammar school' seems from googling that it is not exactly a private school but some kind of fancy public/free school that you pass an entrance exam to get into?

    Great column! It made me nostalgic and grateful for all the parks I have known.

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  5. Ha ha yes - it does seem from pop music that if someone says they'll meet you for a date in a park, they are probably going to stand you up.....

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  6. Wow, it seems like benches play a large part in British life...... "eating your lunch on a bench/writing graffiti on a bench/setting fire to a bench" - is this a sequence, where first you eat lunch, then you graffiti, then you set fire to the bench that you just used for lunch and graffiti? Or are they separate activities / different benches? Also, does the British park service keep replacing all these benches after they are burned down? At a certain point, do they just give up and accept that a particular bench will always be used for burning rather than eating lunch? I have a LOT of questions about this bench stuff.

    :)

    Happy July 4th!

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  7. "he just moaned and he made no sense. He'd just go Um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um” - I'm not sure this is necessarily about existential angst.... if it's set in New York, it is just an accurate description of the people on park benches (or subway seats, or anywhere really in NYC). In fact, I think I saw the 'um um um' guy just this morning on the 6 train.

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  8. I don't know the Chi-lites' song Have You Seen Her, but it sounds super creepy (as a kid I was taught to shout 'stranger danger' if there was a guy sitting on a park bench watching us children play.... especially if he was talking to passers-by about love...... And my nephews and nieces are still taught to shout stranger danger at strange men sitting on park benches watching children)!

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  9. Geoff, this is a GREAT collection of 'songs about parks' that you have laid out - thank you! I will be finding them all and making a playlist so I can walk through the park listening to it (I like the 'you are there' experience your blog enables!).

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  10. I think parks are so often the setting for love and loss, hope and despair - even when the landscape isn't as as grand physically as in Central Park with all its bluffs and lakes - because they symbolize a space that isn't functional. It's not a space for work or a space of travel (like the train/bus/airport), or a city where people do functional work-related things. It's a space entirely given over to non-productive activity (walking, thinking, sitting, reading). It's an escape from the conveyor belt. And therefore a space opens up for the emotions and thoughts that are sidelined by daily mundane life - the love and loss, hope and despair.

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  11. Geoff, I am definitely feeling that you could write a book on the differences between U.S. and UK approaches to their cultures, geographies, places, identities, as expressed in music. As someone who has lived in both countries, I find this thread that runs through the blog really fascinating. This column on parks is a great example, with your observation about the American parks sound brasher and more exciting than the English ones.

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  12. I wonder if parks are so often the sites of songs about love and loss because they are liminal spaces - they belong to no one, you don't live there or work there, they are empty of associations.... so they can feel quite free but also quite lonely.

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  13. Martha - far more baffling than the O-levels and grammar school was surely the mention of "pork pie and crisps".....:) Believe it or not, the English eat little pastries filled with sausage meat (pork pies). And then crisps are chips. Geoff: is this a traditional thing to eat in a park then, pork pie and crisps? The one time I ever went to a park with an Englishman in England, he ate something he called a cornish pasty. And a banana. But not a pork pie, nor crisps. He was a bit rebellious though, as a personality, so maybe he was breaking the unwritten code of pork-pies-in-parks.....

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  14. The eating lunch/graffiti/setting fire to bench tends to be done by different people, Maggie!

    Have You Seen Her can seem a bit creepy if you read the words but is actually a rather touching song, written by the great and much under-rated Barbara Acklin.

    Pork pies arent obligatory. They can be replaced by, yes, cornish pasties - or hard-boiled eggs, cheese sandwiches or Spam..

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  15. Ah, I see:) It still seems like a quite a specific list of options though (either a pork pie or a pasty or a hard boiled egg or cheese sandwiches or Spam). And none of these things sound very appetizing. Why not slices of red peppers dipped in guacamole? Why not a shrimp cocktail? Why not a brie and bacon wrap? Why not.... anything that isn't so BRITISH / boarding school cafeteria-like? What if people don't like hard boiled eggs or Spam or the other things, and take a Mediterranean pasta salad and a blueberry muffin to the park - do the other British people stare at them in a hostile fashion and whisper things? Does the person eating the croque monsieur induce pity and perhaps the withering offer of a spare pork pie while heads are shaken in disbelief? Like Maggi, who had a lot of questions about park benches, I have a LOT of questions about this picnic-in-the-park aspect of British culture..... :)

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  16. Yes, you're right. I went and found the song - Have You Seen Her - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVYxKRXDT2I, and it actually doesn't come off as creepy at all when you listen to it.....

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  17. Geoff, I was curious about your comment about Barbara Acklin being underrated.... Would love to check out other songs by her - are there any others in particular you'd recommend? The only one I know, I think, is "Love Makes a Woman"....

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  18. I was thinking of her as a songwriter as well as singer - she also wrote Oh Girl and Too Good To Be Forgotten for the Chi-lites. She sang the original version of Am I The Same Girl, covered by Dusty Springfield and Swing Out Sister, who relied heavily on the original arrangements.

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  19. Thanks Geoff!:)

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  20. I love Curtis Mayfield’s Um Um Um Um Um! Here it is for anyone who doesn't know it!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTJuW3pBKqk

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  21. The Wayne Fontana version is cool too - I think it got into the top 10 in the UK - but the original is better:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi3fp2-QYPM

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  22. Have always wanted to go to Itchycoo Park:) Here's the Small Faces song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGEgRnvFzLY. Apparently it's in a place called the Wanstead Flats, near Marriott's Manor Park home? I hadn't read about the Little Ilford Park in Newham that you mentioned Geoff.....

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  23. I remember that song London Life! The Anita Harris version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-olFlO7gsk.

    It was sad, I remember in 2009 reading an interview with Anita Harris, where she said that she was now penniless and homeless.

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  24. I think theres always been a controversy about where Itchycoo Park really was..

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  25. Here is the Zombies song, Beechwood Park - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRpt-QydqaM. A hugely underrated song, from a massively underrated band, in my opinion. The lyrics are such a good example of nostalgia rooted in place!

    Do you remember summer days
    Just after summer rain
    When all the air was damp and warm
    In the green of country lanes?
    And the breeze would touch your hair
    Kiss your face and make you care
    About your world
    Your summer world
    And we would count the evening stars
    As the day grew dark
    In Beechwood Park...

    Do you remember golden days and golden summer sun
    The sound of laughter in our ears
    In the breeze as we would run?
    And the breeze would touch your hair
    Kiss your face and make you care
    About your world
    Your summer world
    And we would count the evening stars
    As the day grew dark
    In Beechwood Park...

    Oh roads in my mind
    Take me back in my mind
    And I can't forget you
    Won't forget you
    Won't forget those days
    And Beechwood Park...

    And the breeze would touch your hair
    Kiss your face and make you care
    About your world
    Your summer world
    And we would count the evening stars
    As the day grew dark
    In Beechwood Park...

    Oh roads in my mind
    Take me back in my mind
    And I can't forget you
    Won't forget you
    Won't forget those days
    And Beechwood Park...

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  26. Yes, on Itchycoo Park, Paul Williams has said it is "a name East End kids used to give to any local park where vagrants congregated (when I was a kid in the East End in the '60s)." The name comes about because parks was notorious for the stinging nettles.

    And Anthony Wragg has located it as Manor Park in East London specifically: "I was born and bred in Manor Park E12 and lived there between 1953 and 1967. I met Steve Marriott on a number of occasions as a youngster. Manor Park itself was not known as Itchycoo Park rather it was what us local kids including Steve nicknamed little Ilford Park due to the horrendous amount of stinging nettles there. It is still there at the bottom of Church Road E12 now minus the nettles."

    And Tony Quinlan confirms that it was Little Ilford Park in Manor Park E12: "Not `Ilford ` Park. I was born in 1949 in Manor Park and the place was a magnet to us kids. It was where I first met Steve in about 1959. He was about 11 or 12, I was 10. The reason it was known as Itchycoo Park was because of the amount of stinging nettles everywhere! It wasn`t our generation that named it, it had always been called that according to my father."

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  27. Hi there: we hold the Itchycoo Park Festival each year. Unfortunately it was cancelled this year due to bad weather, but we hope you and your readers might want to join us next summer!:

    www.itchycooparkfestival.com

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  28. I hadn't heard Leazes Park by Kathryn Williams before, but just found it - it's gorgeous! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb6s_jqGVY8

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  29. Your note about Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park reminded me of the song from that album "Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?" which is about a journey through Manhattan, to the uptown area (Spanish Harlem): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFkryLe6xi8. Just a thought, in case you were looking for another NYC song!

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  30. I'm not a huge Dylan fan but I think the song you mentioned, T.V Talkin' Song, is brilliant. Surely the best song that mentions Speakers' Corner?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CIJuDAt7IM

    And here are the lyrics:
    One time in London I’d gone out for a walk
    Past a place called Hyde Park where people talk
    ’Bout all kinds of different gods, they have their point of view
    To anyone passing by, that’s who they’re talking to

    There was someone on a platform talking to the folks
    About the T.V. god and all the pain that it invokes
    “It’s too bright a light,” he said, “for anybody’s eyes
    If you’ve never seen one it’s a blessing in disguise”

    I moved in closer, got up on my toes
    Two men in front of me were coming to blows
    The man was saying something ’bout children when they’re young
    Being sacrificed to it while lullabies are being sung

    “The news of the day is on all the time
    All the latest gossip, all the latest rhyme
    Your mind is your temple, keep it beautiful and free
    Don’t let an egg get laid in it by something you can’t see”

    “Pray for peace!” he said. You could feel it in the crowd
    My thoughts began to wander. His voice was ringing loud
    “It will destroy your family, your happy home is gone
    No one can protect you from it once you turn it on”

    “It will lead you into some strange pursuits
    Lead you to the land of forbidden fruits
    It will scramble up your head and drag your brain about
    Sometimes you gotta do like Elvis did and shoot the damn thing out”

    “It’s all been designed,” he said, “to make you lose your mind
    And when you go back to find it, there’s nothing there to find
    Every time you look at it, your situation’s worse
    If you feel it grabbing out for you, send for the nurse"

    The crowd began to riot and they grabbed hold of the man
    There was pushing, there was shoving and everybody ran
    The T.V. crew was there to film it, they jumped right over me
    Later on that evening, I watched it on T.V.

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  31. I was photographing Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park in May when I spotted lots of men walking through the park dressed in pin-stripe suits, wearing bowler hats and carrying the type of black umbrella that gentlemen use to add a flourish to their gait. Had London suddenly gone back to the 1950s? And where did they all come from? Of course I rushed over to take photos to the bemusement of the suited and booted. It was only later when my friends and I stopped a besuited man that we learned they had been at the 88th Combined Cavalry memorial service and parade at the bandstand in Hyde Park and were making their way to various hotels and restaurants and clubs etc for regimental Sunday lunches which follow the parade.

    I wish I had know about it in advance and I could have got some spectacular photos. That’s the trouble with London – there’s so much going on that you miss most of it! Still it’s a nice problem to have and I shall try to get to it next year.

    In the meantime, here are some of my photos of the men in suits and bowlers.

    http://sliceoflondonlife.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/mg_8991.jpg

    sliceoflondonlife.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/mg_8984.jpg

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  32. That is indeed what half of London looks like. The other half look like this http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4k86cSV0oTA/TjlMln4g_oI/AAAAAAAAApE/lpLthS1o0yo/s1600/dvdykeontheroof.jpg

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  33. Ha ha ha ha!!! Yes, it's like a Mary Poppins movie all over London!!

    :)

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  34. Central Park has changed a lot since the days of my misspent youth when I used to go hang out and smoke at Bethesda Fountain. At some point between then and now, residents of the Central Park East neighborhood decided that the park was getting too scruffy and was hurting their image. They formed a foundation to raise money -- tons of money -- for park renovations, and the park is now run jointly as a public-private partnership between the City and the foundation.

    The money shows. The park looks great. Roads are repaved, vast areas replanted, buildings renovated, and more people seem to be using it than ever before.

    I grew up in NY, but haven't lived there for over 20 years. In the last few years I have been visiting often, so my viewpoint is not exactly that of a resident and not exactly that of a tourist, but somewhere in between.

    Recently I took a walk from the southeast corner of the park to West 72nd Street -- about a mile or a mile and a half. In this short distance, there was a tremendous variety of things to see. Some of the highlights:

    Outdoor theater above the bandshell on the promenade. This was new, or rather new to me, and my understanding is that they have many free events there. At the time I was there, the Israel parade on Fifth Avenue had just ended, and as a tie-in, musicians were playing/singing Jewish music. Just made a quick stop there, but from the size of the crowd and the way people looked settled in, it appeared that the concert may have been going on for hours.

    Swing dancing at Bethesda fountain. This was a lot of fun to watch. An informal event, with music provided by a phonograph, and about a dozen couples dancing, enjoying themselves immensely.

    Close by, in the tunnel leading to the fountain, a far more formal event -- a fundraiser to raise money for replacing the ceiling tiles in the tunnel. This struck me as a totally surreal scene -- on a hot day, in the middle of the park, with everybody else in shorts and t-shirts or tank tops, there were men in tuxes, women in ballgowns right out of "Gone With the Wind," and formally dressed waitresses circulating with trays.

    The lake itself looked beautiful and peaceful, and the lakehouse, which used to be your basic bad hotdog and greasy hamburger dispensary has now been renovated as a fancy restaurant with outdoor seating right on the water.

    Next stop: Watching the roller skaters. With a sound system providing rap and other music, and some fencing defining an oval, an impromptu rink has been set up in the area west of the fountain. The skaters here were better than the skaters on the promenade, though I must say, at the risk of sounding provincial, that they weren't as good as the dancing skaters that gather in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on weekends near Fulton and 6th. Still, they were mesmerizing to watch, and if I hadn't needed to get going at that point, I could have stayed a lot longer than the ten minutes that I did.

    Strawberry Fields, a garden and memorial area that Yoko Ono funded in memory of her husband. This is near 72nd Street and Central Park West, right across the street from the Dakota, where John Lennon was shot and where Yoko Ono still lives. The Dakota is also the building where "Rosemary's Baby" was set, and it was a very apt choice. I swear, even on a bright, sunny, glorious Spring afternoon, looking at the scowling gargoyles and the dark intricate carvings at the top of the building gave me the chills. The building is chock full of celebrities and apartments cost millions. But if I were ultra-rich, just as I wouldn't want to go to fundraisers in dank tunnels, I don't think I would want to live in such a scary building.

    I have to say here that I don't usually go around thinking "If I were rich, this is what I would do ..." but there's something about Manhattan, with its stark contrast of super-rich and super-poor, and a relative absence of a middle class that gives rise to those kinds of fantasies.

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  35. .... ran of of space, continuing here:

    And speaking of money ... as I mentioned above, the park foundation has provided a massive cash transfusion. Renovations are going on everywhere. The lake at the southeast end is fenced in, off-limits for the next two years. I can't imagine what they're doing that's going to take so long, but already part of the shoreline is being bulldozed in what appears to be a major relandscaping effort. As you continue in the park, you pass more and more fenced-in areas -- some temporarily so while work is being done, but some permanently. By the time I came to the third little fenced-in meadow area, it started to bug me. The trees were stately and the freshly planted grass lush, but isn't the point of a park, especially an urban park, to be able to walk on the grass and sit underneath the trees? As I looked at that beautiful, but inaccessible, meadow, the fences started to remind me of frames, and the park itself of a vast series of displays -- in a city full of museums, another museum, a museum of grass and trees.

    To be fair, there are still many grassy areas, the vast majority, where you can walk or sit. But even some of these -- notably Sheep's Meadow -- where you are allowed to go, are now surrounded by fences, and the entrance gates posted with long lists of forbidden and permitted activities. It all seemed a part to me of the new, kinder and gentler New York -- more order, less dirt, less chaos, but also less spontaneity. The city as a whole feels vastly safer than it did while I was growing up there, and that's a good thing. But the price (or rather, one of the prices) is too much regimentation, and an urban park, in my view, should provide at least an illusion of a bit of wildness -- people need to touch bases with that when they live in a city -- and I can't think of anything more likely to spoil that illusion than an overabundance of fences, especially bright, ugly, plastic ones, with bits of nature displayed behind them like masterpieces of art, to be looked at and admired with no touching allowed.

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  36. It is remarkable how much even the transit hub at the southwest entrance to Central Park has changed over the years. I remember a time not too long ago — more than five years, but less than ten — when I would detour well out of my way to avoid this gritty roundabout and its forbidding maze of scaffolding. Columbus Circle was home to a shantytown in the early 1990s, and as recently as 2002, the surrounding area was still considered a little seedy, bits of pre-Giuliani New York. Enter one shiny 2.8 million square foot complex with its pricy residences, five star hotel, world class performance venue and (of course) shopping mall and it’s an entirely different scene. These days, Columbus Circle sits within (money) throwing distance of three of the city’s most expensive restaurants: Masa, Per Se and Jean Georges.

    And of course, just a couple blocks north: starchitect Robert A.M. Stern’s ultra-luxury condominium tower 15 Central Park West, where former CEO of Citigroup Sanford Weill acquired a $42.4 million penthouse in August — low floor maids’ suites sold separately.

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  37. Here's Central Park by Mr Hudson that Geoff mentioned - great song!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsDHeWir_1I

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  38. Hello, I actually wrote and sang Central Park Arrest, someone seems to have put it online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1HgW9pxrgM. Thunderthighs did my song in June of 74 though. My version wasn't released until October. As a B-side.

    Also just for fun and the memories, here I am in a park around when Central Park Arrest came out! - http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wOjmEAl3o-I/SN1ye1r5eSI/AAAAAAAADdU/_cWHpt6cva0/s320/ldp.veronica.b.jpg

    Best wishes, Lynsey

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  39. I hadn't heard Freddy Cannon's song, but this video is pretty amazing! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYDSFKLu-TA. He can dance:)

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  40. I love Billy Stewart’s Sitting in the Park, here it is for anyone else: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_m8xmL6Vck

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  41. There is also the song Gentlemen of the Park, by Episode Six (included on the soundtrack for the film Les Bicyclettes de Belsize), as another one to add to the list!

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  42. Don't forget the great Department of Eagles' song "In Ear Park"......

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  43. How about Rock Creek Park, by The Blackbyrds?

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  44. I thought of A Walk in the Park, by Beach House

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  45. Thanks for comment on Central Park Arrest, Lynsey.Lynsey de Paul also wrote a number of other hits associated with other artists, including Storm in a Teacup (The Fortunes), Dancing on a Saturday Night (Barry Blue) and Theres No Place like London (Shirley Bassey).

    Re Hugh's comment above,Les Bicyclettes de Belsize film came up in the Hampstead Way column. Trivia note: Episode Six included future members of Deep Purple!

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