Fenster writes:

I thought the idea of Central Park with 100 foot glass walls was nuts but heck I suppose if you left the park intact it might not be so bad.  Let the condo owners with the blocked views deal with it.

Then I read–no great surprise, really–that the cockamamie idea was all about Manhattan real estate.  The idea is to dig down so that the 100 foot glass walls rise up to the current street level.  The current condos keep their view of the park and we create a vast new swath of real estate to overlook the park, from the street level down.

But what of the park, you ask?  In order to create the views from the units in the sunken wall Central Park is required to be scraped down to the bedrock.

You could argue I suppose that this is the true “natural” approach to park design, and that Olmstead was a hopeless romantic engaged in a giant con game aimed to simulate the natural world.  Perhaps that is how the project won a skyscraper competition recently.

I really shouldn’t even write about this tripe since that process gives more weight to the notion than it deserves.  It is essentially frivolous and I should not be distracted.  And it gives the perfectly good word “tripe” a bad name to boot.

So to cleanse myself of the whole mess I decided to take a walk in another of Olmstead’s creations, Boston Arnold Arboretum.  Here are some early spring shots.  Get there before the excavation starts.