Today, the Central Park Conservancy is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the selection on April 28, 1858, of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's design for America’s first major urban public park. To commemorate this anniversary, officials are renaming the 72nd Street Cross Drive as "Olmsted & Vaux Way".

The design for the park that the Board of Commissioners of Central Park accepted 150 years ago was for a "Greensward" that would be a refuge from the city, a place where the surrounding city could not and would not intrude. Today, of course, the bucolic loop drive that was an integral part of the Olmsted and Vaux plan is regularly used by the Department of Transportation to funnel traffic into and out of Midtown. Naming a section of that drive after the park's designers while still allowing car traffic there is a little like naming a school that advocates violence after Mahatma Gandhi.

Coincidentally, also today the city Department of Transportation is rolling out an ambitious strategic plan for sustainable streets that promises to bring "a green approach to transportation." But there is only one small reference to making what should already be the greenest of all streets – the Central Park loop drive — any greener. Under "Benchmarks: Enjoying the City" can be found "Reduce car use in major city parks" as a goal for 2007-2009. For a recent Streetsblog article on why car-free parks should be among the first, not a distant, step in greening the city's streets, see: http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/04/21/car-free-parks-now-more-than-ever/

For more on the commemoration of the Central Park design, go to: http://www.centralparknyc.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6407

For more on the DOT's sustainable streets strategic plan, go to: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2008/pr08_011.shtml

Ken Coughlin, Chair
Transportation Alternatives' Car-Free Central Park Campaign