I’ve got nothing against tourists. I just don’t want to be around a lot of them all at once, especially when I’m trying to relax. But they do have the darnedest accoutrements  their horse carriages, for example. Everyone on them seems so embarrassed. Even the horses are mortified.

From: Vaux Populi

To: A Little Bit Country

Subject: Blackberry Picking

You are right: Central Park is often crowded with tourists, particularly the park’s southern acreage. The Isle of Innisfree it is not.

But I like the crowds, and I suspect Olmsted and Vaux would, too. Great numbers of people from different backgrounds and economic classes commingle outdoors amid the “harmonizing and refining influence,” as Olmsted put it, of trees, grass and water. Somehow, with more than 35 million visits a year, it works. The strolling pedestrians, the Lycra-clad bikers, the horse carriages, those pedicabs backed up near the statue of Balto  the greatness of Central Park is that it accommodates all of this traffic and remains inviting and rejuvenating. This owes a lot to Olmsted and Vaux’s decision to ban the geometric tyranny of the street grid from the park  nary a right angle is to be found within its borders  and their use of topography to disperse the crowds among verdant hills and dales.

There are many good reasons so many people come to Central Park rather than, say, Prospect Park. I could catalog them  the plush sward of Sheep Meadow, the boat pond, the elegant bridges  but let me suggest the Mall alone as reason enough. This is one of the finest esplanades in the world, passing under a cathedral-like canopy of American elms (the park contains one of the last great surviving stands of these excellent trees) and ending at Bethesda Terrace. If there is anything in Prospect Park  or any other urban park  that can rival that, I’d like to see it.

Since you mention crowds, I also want to draw your attention to the park’s less visited northern region, where the Old World pastoral aesthetic of the southern park gives way to a more rough-hewn American ideal, inspired by those Hudson River School paintings that hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m talking about the park that lies beyond the museum, beyond the tall pines that sway above the Great Lawn. A pasture of wildflowers descends into a deep and forbidding forest. Nearby are the bushes where my wife picks blackberries in the summer (and once caught a wicked case of poison ivy), and farther down the road primordial chunks of schist jut from the ground. Like Prospect Park, Central Park is almost entirely man-made, but here is a hint of unbridled wildness.