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After nearly 150 years as one of New York's most famous and beloved destinations, after having provided inspiration for creative minds from E.B. White to Woody Allen, after a yearlong anniversary buildup that reaches a crescendo this Saturday - and, oh yes, after all those visitors, 25 million a year - is there really anything about Central Park that could still be considered a secret?
Yes, including perhaps what might be called the greatest secret of Central Park - one that few people really know, and that even knowledgeable park-lovers tend to forget. That is, the fact that Central Park is almost an entirely man-made landscape. It is not a preserved open space or a wild habitat that was saved from the onrushing city. It is not, for the most part, what New York City looked like before it was a city. It is a grand illusion - perhaps the grandest in all of New York.
"The park seems natural because it is composed of real soil, grass, trees, water and flowers," says historian Sara Cedar Miller of the Central Park Conservancy, author of "Central Park, An American Masterpiece" (Harry Abrams). "In reality however, it is naturalistic ... an engineered environment that is closer in essence to scenes created in Hollywood than it is to the creation of Mother Nature."
"I've always referred to Central Park as a 19th century Disneyland," says New York City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, whose first job out of college was as an urban park ranger leading tours of the park. "They actually created this sort of fantasyland, based on the Catskills and the Adirondacks, and on rustic architecture," Benepe says. "There was great genius in its design."
That genius belonged to Central Park's co-creators, the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. In her book, Cedar Miller quotes Olmsted as admitting to the necessity of what he called "undignified tricks of disguise, or mere affectations of rusticity" in creating this 843-acre amusement park for the masses. Like Disneyland and unlike the island it sits on, Central Park didn't come into existence naturally, gradually over eons. It was cut, dynamited, transplanted, crushed, pressed, ground, raised, leveled and graded into life - much of it done in just half...