Famous Ankles

Whatever else it may be, Central Park is diverse and varied and just all over the place in terms of what’s there and what you can see at any one time.  When it was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux , they seem to take to the idea of it being impossible to see in one fell swoop.  There are areas that you can see a lot of the Park, but no place that you can see the whole.  About the best you can do is go to Belvedere Castle and get an elevated view.

There are a number of ways to get there, but the primary means I’ve always done is by wandering through The Ramble and it kind of ends up there.  But, for me, the Ramble is something I do when I really want to do some twisty, curvey, wooded walking.  It’s really nice and I usually view Belvedere as my “reward” for having done the walk.  Once you get there, you can go up and take in that semi-aerial view.

The body of water is called Turtle Lake and this time it was pretty well covered with some sort of pond scum.  I think it’s “duckweed”, but that’s a guess on my part.  Few ducks, but quite a few turtles.  The area in the distance is one of the many lawn areas that dot the Park.  Some are much grander (the Great Lawn and Sheep’s Meadow are two famous and wonderful ones).

The inside of Belvedere is a Park exhibit on the ecology of the area.  Mostly, though, what people do is go up this tiny circular stone stairway to the top to get the best view.  I don’t think I’ve ever done it without running into someone coming the other way and one of us has to back out ’cause it’s too small for two.

One of my more odd pleasures in doing the Ramble walk is seeing what’s right next to Belvedere Castle.  It takes a few pictures to capture it all, but I’m used to putting up too many pictures.

It’s the official Central Park weather station.  I always get a kick out of it thinking it’s the source of all the “current weather” reports on NYC.  There are no signs and I’ve never seen anyone in there, but it’s definitely a weather station…or an alien communications station…nah, it’s a weather station.  It’s completely enclosed in a secure fenced-in area but I have my secrets for getting fence-free pictures.

-H

This entry was posted on September 30, 2007 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Central Park, Manhattan, Wanderings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.