Since childhood, I’ve been keenly aware of the moment early in February in the Northeast when the sun suddenly, out of nowhere, gets brighter. It’s still winter, but the bareness of deciduous branches against a cloudless blue sky gleams like crystal, stunning the eyes—a celestial antidote to Emily Dickinson’s “certain slant of light” that makes interior winter afternoons funereal. Something is substantially different.

This year, this late-winter light has been overlaid by a month-earlier spring—a climate story unto itself. But still in Central Park the branches have yet to fluff out, and you can survey the landscape with rare clarity. This is a great opportunity to marvel at the variegated shapes and patterns of the tree crowns, at the way every trunk below seems positioned to always be “in concert” with the whole.

The construction of Central Park began in 1858 and didn’t get a declaration of “done” until 1876. It wasn’t Frederick Law Olmsted’s idea to have this 750-acre green space in the middle of Manhattan, but it was his vision of what an urban park should offer the public that left us with this phenomenon.

A bloody war cleaved itself into this project, but the differences being settled on southern battlefields had already needed a hashing out in New York for the project to have got off the ground. There was bitter conflict between the Republicans (anti-slavery) who ran State government and the “reform” Democrats and Mayor Fernando Wood (pro-slavery) who ran the city with patronage and corruption.

This amazing feat was bumpy throughout and required constant reaffirmation of support between rival factions. The project went grossly over budget—nearly seven times what was original anticipated—but that was because the city wasn’t just putting down a park atop suitable land. It was blasting up hills to remove 5 million cubic feet of rocks and replace it with topsoil from Long Island and New Jersey. It also moved the existing reservoir.

Olmsted was a complex man—a nepo baby in some respects and an opportunist—but an obsessive worker nonetheless. The physical beauty of nature had a strong effect on him, enabling him to translate some of his deepest emotions into a public value: he saw green space as a basic human right. Despite the privileges of his race and social class, he had enough empathy to see that the city’s working class needed a beautiful place to go to forget the limitations that luck and the market economy placed on their lives. There had to be a place of green shoots for everyone, where people could imagine possibility and a better future.

Of course there were a lot of downs with the park. Over 150 years, the space has gone through two periods of decline and two subsequent eras of restoration. Maintenance and policing are separate issues, however: the wonder is that it got done at all. And by government.

Today It seems trite to suggest awe at infrastructure projects like Central Park or the Erie Canal or Hoover Dam. Any sense of wonder is ground down by the certitude that “things were simple back then.” We rationalize that technology has made our world too complex to think at the erector-set level; we are too sophisticated, our expectations too cosmic. Nowadays, we believe, any little country can do the brawn and the boom-boom projects. And besides that, we’ve seen it all with CGI. We were just reminded so with Oppenheimer. Why contemplate spooky actions from a distance when you can have a personally immersive experience with virtual headsets and psychedelic Van Gogh on Pier 36?

Today, even with New York City and State solidly Democrat, we can’t get anything done: we can’t make our subways work for the public and we can’t get our trash off the streets. And it’s terrifying to think that no one has a plan. (Andy Byford was not a plan.) It’s not a price tag that’s prohibitive, but a plan that’s solvent and comprehensive. Even leaving out the recent headaches of the migrant crisis and the ineptitude and corruption of Eric Adams, you still have these foundational, existential plagues to our city.

The failures of American society since the 1970s are only amplified here. Every aspect of existence is transactional. Little of the eligible population votes. The economy only works for the rich and government only works for some of the poor. There’s a perennial rotation of college-grad workers under age 35 who are stuck on adulting and don’t take life seriously enough to behave like citizens before they bolt to live in suburban houses subsidized by their parents. Men with mental health and substance abuse problems drift their way here because they know they can do it “my way” like Frank until their timed-release suicide is completed.

Thanks to Governor Hochul, the National Guard is now stationed in the subways to check bags, even though the problem for commuters is men with no physical baggage but lots of emotional problems that can flood the cars with anxiety. Remember when the Guard was dispatched to the Capitol lobby after January 6th? Remember how Americans can’t even agree that that insurrection was an insurrection?

Even when one small effort to aid any of the existential problems gains traction in New York, it gets sandbagged. Congestion pricing is struggling to move forward four years after passage in the New York State budget. Given the post-pandemic collapse of the commercial real estate market, the only thing that propels the city forward is the concentration of wealth in residential property. Some days it seems like the only reason for Central Park is to sell real estate on the abutting avenues.

For all the visible suffering and disappointments of this city, there’s not a day I don’t appreciate what people in government accomplished in the now-distant past, before we turned our lives and our city over to the market economy and capitalism became the only logical place for us. §