Escape the Concrete Jungle: A Mini-Vacation Guide to Central Park
Meeting urgent deadlines and answering relentless emails can be draining. Offices, apartments, and the concrete grids that surround us can feel like cages we need to escape. A few years back, I found myself craving a vacation to somewhere, anywhere, but couldn’t afford a day off. So, to remedy my exhaustion and redress my feeling of confinement, I started taking one-to-two-hour mini-vacations in Central Park, which is only ten minutes from my apartment. They sent me back to work rejuvenated and ready for the next task.
What follows is a brief sample tour of the park. In one hour, you’ll travel through wilderness, climb to a castle atop a rocky outcrop, and rest beside rocking water. Let’s get to it.
The Ramble
Head southeast from 77th Street and Central Park West, then north along West Drive, and you’ll reach Balcony Bridge, whose two east-facing alcoves offer vistas of the Lake. This span always makes me want to fling my tenor at the couples drifting by in rowboats. From there a quick jaunt northeast past London planes will bring you to the rustic Oak Bridge. Cross it, and you’ll be in the Ramble, the most tightly packed of the park’s forest environments. Black cherries and Chinese scholar trees will instantly be letting less light through.
When I first visited the Ramble, I was surprised to discover that Manhattan, one of the densest urban areas in the world, has such rampant flora at its heart. I always feel like I’ve teleported somewhere upstate. It’s hard not to lose your sense of direction while following its circuitous paths under foliage that blocks out the sun. The intentionally labyrinthine layout immerses the visitor in mystery and surprise.
My advice is: embrace the feeling of being lost and surrender to what you are experiencing. The Ramble is the best place in the park to practice Japanese “forest-bathing” (shinrin-yoku). Focus, one by one, on the details that your five senses are taking in. There are the repeated rising trills of whippoorwills. There’s the sweet honeysuckle fragrance of the black locust trees. You’ll also find sharp outcrops here and there that are actually bits of Manhattan bedrock protruding from the topsoil. What’s more, there’s all the understory—clematis and hyssop, sage and buttonbrush. New Yorkers are lucky to have so convincing a wilderness in the middle of their metropolis.
Belvedere Castle
Consult your compass, weave north and then cross the bridge that spans the 79th Street Transverse Road. From there stroll past the lilacs and wisteria up Vista Rock until you reach the ramparts of Belvedere Castle. Its architecture evokes Disneyland and Courtly Love. The walls are made of the same local shist as the rock that supports them, so they seem not so much built as naturally grown. Two protruding turrets rival the skyscrapers around the edges of the park. We all need more romance in our lives, and this at times Romanesque and at times Gothic bastion provides it in spades.
The parapet hosts an observation deck that faces north. Look out through the columns and learn why this attraction has the name “Belvedere” (“beautiful view”). You’ll be able to admire, in one sweeping vista, the Pond, the Great Lawn, the vast Reservoir and then cityscape in Harlem beyond the park’s north end. When I want to contemplate the park as a whole, I come here.
Turtle Pond
Make your way down from Vista Rock on the path that leads northwest, and you’ll pass between ornamental cherry and yew trees. Then swivel and head northeast past the newly renovated Delacorte Theatre. You’ll find the little wooden dock that leads out over the Turtle Pond hidden behind the emerald leaves of willow oaks and the fir-like foliage of white cypresses. Walk out to its end and lose yourself in the many shades of green you encounter in and around the water.
At first, I usually see just reeds and nitella blooms, then they appear: painted and snapping turtles, red-eared sliders. You’ll find some surfacing, some rocklike on the rocks, some on a slomo hunt for dragonflies. Many of those who live here were pets before, the kind a kid keeps in a cardboard box until their parents say the little turtle will have to go back home. That “home” is here. After a solemn ritual on the shore, they tilt and tilt, and then Kersplash! Goodbye. It’s soothing to watch these lackadaisical reptiles going about lives free of deadlines, emails, and responsibilities. They don’t know how to rush. Plus, water gives its own solace. Its rocking and lapping are especially good at replenishing the exhausted.
The Obelisk
If you head northeast off-trail, you’ll cross lawn, pass elms and lindens and eventually reach a grove of magnolias that offer up white, pink, and purple flowers. They are relatively short, shrub-like trees and can’t compete with the red-granite pillar that rises seventy feet high behind them. Though officially called the Obelisk, it’s popularly known as “Cleopatra’s Needle.” Three and a half millennia this Egyptian boast has been around. The hieroglyphics heap the pharaoh Ramses the Great with titles such as “Ra’s Chosen One,” “Son of the Sun,” “Giver of Life,” and “Treasure of Osiris.” His conquests, too glorious for papyrus, insisted on the lastingness of stone.
We’re fortunate to have it. In 1877 Isma’il Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, offered it as a gift to the United States, and the railroad magnate William H. Vanderbilt donated the money needed to ship it from Alexandria to Manhattan and install it in the park. My visits here always move me to reflect on the transience of human success. Ramses ruled over a vast empire that broke apart thousands of years ago. Now the inscriptions that list his conquests proclaim dominion to the unconcern of picnickers, joggers, and Canadian geese. Triumphs come and go. What we always have is the richness of the sights, sounds, scents, tastes, and textures around us.
This is only a sample of the limitless variety Central Park has to offer. The next time work and the other demands of your life leave you with a need for a vacation but little time to take it in, open up a map of the park, choose three or four attractions, and go off-grid for an hour to visit them. The abundance and tranquility of the park will send you back to your desk refreshed.
Author Bio
Aaron Poochigian is a poet, classics scholar, and translator who lives and writes in New York City. His translations include Stung with Love (Penguin UK) and Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” (forthcoming from W.W. Norton). His work has appeared in such newspapers and journals as The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, and Poetry Magazine. His new book is Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park. Learn more at aaronpoochigian.com.
