turns out that central park isn’t a thickly-forested den of thieves and murderers shrouded in eternal darkness, after all. my father was not a fan of new york when i was a kid, and, absorbing his opinion, i always pictured central park as this incongruous tangle of forest that was tolerated, rather than cultivated, by the rest of the city. as though the colonization of manhattan had gone just fine until they got to the center and discovered why the natives had given them such a bargain: the epicenter of the island was indomitable jungle. as it turns out, it’s quite lovely on a summer’s afternoon, and filled with sun-dappled tourists, new yorkers, and those wacky rollerskaters.