Central Park On August 31st 2020

 I ran super hard on Friday (a real race! I'll get back to that.)  So I basically took the weekend off from working out,  and my physical therapy was at 10:30 this morning at Rusk over by the UN.  It was a cool day so I was playing with the idea of running home. But traffic and congestion made me consider Central Park. I jumped in and accessorized Taxi after therapy and went up to a 110th Street. I figured I do a loop and start and finish at the top of the hill.

 Central Park was full of surprises. First, I forgot that the top of the park was not the top of the hill. I was at the bottom of the Harlem Hill. Not really a big deal.

 But upon entering the park up in Harlem I noticed right away how quiet the park was compared to Prospect Park. The roadway didn't get any busier as I got downtown, nor did the grassy areas. No pods of kids.  No pelotons of cyclist.  I guess I forgot that Central Park is really a tourist attraction. People who live in New York City live in Brooklyn and go to Prospect Park to wreckreate.  But compared to Prospect Park, Central Park was pristine. The grass look like a golf course and wherever things were being repaired when neatly fenced-off.  The park was not being used as a warehouse for all the trees destroyed by the hurricane a couple of weeks ago. It frustrates me how conservancies and alliances can have earmarked money for special things even when there's no one around to appreciate them. Prospect Park has to have to have special projects to have citizens collect garbage and the smaller parks in the outer boroughs have nothing.  Anyway I didn't mean to go on a political rant, but there is a great unevenness and how parks are maintained in New York City.

In any case the park was very quiet. About a quarter mile into my run I noticed people looking into the woods. Because we were on top of a hill we were about 20 feet from a hawk hanging out on a branch looking for lunch.   I took a picture but I'm not going to post it here because you're better off Googling a picture of a hawk on a branch. About four miles into my run I did notice something interesting. One cop car is not interesting but then I saw 2 and looked over.  Three then four. Three then four. 

For a second I was thinking about these lyrics from Alice's Restaurant

You know, if one person, just one person, does it, they may think he's
Really sick and they won't take him

And if two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and
They won't take either of them

And if three people do it! Can you imagine three people walkin' in, singin'
A bar of "Alice's Restaurant" and walkin' out? They may think it's an
Organization!

but only a second.  It stopped when I saw what the cops were doing.  All thoughts of Arlo Guthrie will push through my mind when I saw that for police cars and all the cops that came with them regarding the fuckin  statue of Christopher Columbus

Holy Ship! (Voice to Text did that and I'm going to leave it there).  Melt it down and turn it into something useful for the Native American population or put a plaque next to it explaining what a piece of crap he was but until people woke up everyone thought he was okay.  But the police have a lot of better things to do. Or maybe this is a way of giving these officers a little bit of a paid vacation. Maybe they're being rewarded for something and get to spend 8 hours leaning on a car in Central Park.

anyway, I made it back to the top of the park and felt pretty good so I did a loop that included the 103rd Street transverse.  It's the first time I've been there since I saw the movie  about the Central Park 5  and read the autobiography of the Central Park jogger. NYRR organized a lot of races that use that area as a Finish Line. I ran a lot of them. I also helped measure the Central Park marathon where the Finish Line was right there. It's a different kind of place when I go there now. I guess if the police send a small Squad to protect a statue of a rapist and murderer it would make sense to put a plaque where someone was raped and left for dead?