All Kinds of People Doing Their Thing Together

The Harvey Averne Dozen — "Central Park" (1969)

New York City has been a source of endless fascination and inspiration for me for pretty much my entire life. While I’ve never actually been an official NYC resident, outside of my first year or so on this planet, the many summers and holidays I’ve spent there and the countless additional visits I’ve made to The Big Apple over the decades have shaped who I am pretty profoundly.

My first real memories of the city are from circa 1970, when my dad took me with him for a week to visit his friends Larry and Ikie in Brooklyn. That was a memorable trip: First, I angrily confronted a security guard at the Museum of Natural History, accusing the museum of perpetrating fraud by displaying the bones of a Gorgosaur, which I had never heard of and therefore assumed had to be fake. Then I developed a serious ear infection, and when the doctor let me keep the syringe from my penicillin injection, I filled it up with water and squirted it up at the light over the sink in Larry and Ikie’s bathroom, with predictably explosive results. You could say I was “something of a handful” as a four year-old…

Still, something about NYC got under my skin during that visit, and it hasn’t let go over the ensuing half-century. Manhattan has continually cast its imposing-yet-romantic shadow across my life — as well as a few Jagged Time Lapse posts like this one, and this one — and will surely do so for ages to come. (Hell, I even wrote a song about some of my teenage summers in the city.) But for all the time I spent in NYC from the 1970s onward, I only “came around” to the joys of Central Park relatively recently.

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Honestly, I was always kind of intimidated by its vast, woodsy expanse. MAD magazine had assured me from an early age that Central Park was the place to get mugged in Manhattan, and I always felt much safer on the city’s heavily-populated concrete grid than I did on the park’s winding, tree-obscured pathways. Central Park was a place I only went into on special occasions, like for concerts or for the great 1980 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Pirates of Penzance, starring Linda Ronstadt, Rex Smith and Kevin Kline. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I really felt compelled to start exploring the place on my own; and over the last two decades, Central Park has slowly but surely become one of my favorite parts of the city — to the point where I’ll often even plan my day around being in it.

Meeting a friend for breakfast? Let’s take our coffee and bagels to the park and find a bench to schmooze on. Meeting a friend for lunch in the Village? Hey, if I give my self enough time, I can walk all the way down through the park before catching the subway at 59th. Earlier this month, my pal Yusuf and I walked off our lunch at the Lexington Candy Shop at Lex and 83rd by strolling down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, cutting diagonally (and leisurely) across the park in order to make the most of a glorious spring afternoon.

But as well as I’ve gotten to know Central Park, I still managed to surprise myself a few weeks back by actually getting lost in the park while trying to walk from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Upper West Side in the middle of a rainstorm. The trees had grown so lush and thick that I was unable look to 5th Avenue or Central Park West to get my bearings — and one or two wrong turns later, I found myself walking past parts of the park I had never seen before, like this elegant staircase…

Which was kind of exciting, frankly. The lack of other humans in the general vicinity was pretty refreshing, too; by the time I got to the west side of the park, it was raining so hard that — for the first time ever — I was able to walk through Strawberry Fields without being assaulted by someone’s off-key rendition of a Beatles or solo John Lennon song. The sweet sound of the rain rustling through the leaves was music enough, thanks.

Of course, the park becomes way more populous on sunny days, but that can be a wonderful experience, too. While so many classic NYC spots have been completely ruined in recent years by the influx of Instagrammers and/or slack-jawed yokels — I’m looking at you, Bemelmans Bar — Central Park is simply too big, too maze-like, and in some places too forbidding to ever be completely overrun by tourists and hipsters; it thankfully remains a great place to soak up the sunshine and fresh air, and for nature-, people- and/or or dog-watching. Sure, it gets a little crowded on weekends, especially south of 72nd; but there are still numerous places scattered throughout the park where you can feel like you’re genuinely getting away from it all, even when you’re just 50 feet or so away from other human beings.

Harvey Averne, a Jewish guy from Brooklyn who became a major producer, bandleader and recording artist on the NYC Latin music scene of the 1960s and 70s, was definitely hip to the magic of Central Park. Averne’s appreciation of the place as a special space where people of all walks and colors can come together to kick back, relax and maybe even make a little romance comes through loud and clear on his wonderful 1969 track “Central Park”.

The song appeared as the B-side of two different singles by The Harvey Averne Dozen — both of whose A-sides, oddly enough, have a connection to the Dakota Apartments on 72nd and Central Park West: “Lullaby from ‘Rosemary’s Baby’” (which was filmed in the building), and a cover of The Beatles’ “Get Back,” which was co-written by future Dakota resident John Lennon.

While I dig both of those tracks, I far prefer “Central Park”. If the wistful line “Why can’t the world be peaceful like Central Park?” probably triggered a few derisive snorts back in the day, the song’s jaunty melody, easy-riding groove and “high on life” lyrics perfectly capture the joy of a morning or afternoon spent watching “all kinds of people doing their thing together” from your spot on a Central Park bench, rocky outcropping or patch of grass — especially when you’re sharing said spot with someone special.

Which I had the immense pleasure of doing this past weekend, when the lovely Shannon and I visited one of my favorite spots in the park on our way across town and down to the East Village. I’ve always found the Central Park Turtle Pond to be a particularly enchanting place; between Belvedere Castle and the pond’s still, reflective water, the area gives off the fairytale vibe of a Donovan album cover, and one can usually glimpse some ducks snoozing happily along the pond’s perimeter. It was a warm and lovely Sunday evening, and the turtles were out in full force; but even though the humans were out in force as well, it felt incredibly peaceful and even dreamlike to stand there along the railing while the turtles paddled lazily around below us.

It was so blissful, in fact, that we returned to the same spot on Monday morning to visit the turtles again on our way to check out some Egyptian antiquities at the Met — and this time we were treated to the breathtaking sight of a snowy egret posing on the railing before gliding majestically across the pond. And throughout both visits, Harvey Averne’s “Central Park” was bubbling joyously in my brain.

“Love is the true vibration in Central Park,” says Harvey Averne. And I’m rather inclined to agree.

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