These ballfields are very heavily used today, but not much other activity occurs in the North Meadow.
Recommendations In order to determine the course of action to be taken, it is necessary to establish the desired goal. The ballfields at this time are a fact of life. Yet the desire is to recapture the open pastoral quality of the original design. Obviously a compromise is in order. The ballfields and their attendant Cyclone fencing are the biggest obstacle to the realization of the greensward objective. Their visual effect can be diminished in a number of ways. 1. The present layout of the fields, while a vast improvement over the earlier design, may be further improved by tucking the backstops close to the perimeter plantings when at all possible, allowing the eye of the beholder to obtain a vista through the center of the meadows as much as possible. Selective screening with plant materials may offer additional visual relief. 2. Fences should be eliminated when at all possible. This will be more easily accomplished should the ball playing be limited to softball, as per current discussions. Those fences remaining can be outfitted with a more visually unobtrusive material such as black mesh instead of the "heavy" galvanized chainlink. :-1ention has been made concerning the possibility of utilizing portable backstops when at all feasible, an idea which should be applauded. Then, at least during the off season, these visual mammoths could be retired from the landscape. 3. The land between the ballfields could be shaped in a manner to reestablish a natural drainage swale in the middle, shaping up to a slightly rolling character before the slightly depressed ballfields. The effect at ground level would be that of a series of gently rolling hills, the rise of which would visually block the ballfields from the eye of the viewer until he or she would move to higher ground. This suggestion assumes the additional expense of properly draining the individual ballfields. 4. The perimeter planting should be addressed in the same manner as the original Olmsted ideal: to provide an undulating appearance in the borders with singles and groups of trees without understory carefully placed sporadically along the edge. The effect would once again cause the eye to wander into the apparently "limitless greensward".
Central Park North Mcadow Historical Report
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