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n Central Park Mall in winter with aged elms and two small replacements in the foreground. Note the differing branching structures of similar-aged trees.
Central Park Mall
Most of the elms on the Mall and along Fifth Avenue were replanted in 1920. Four decades later, the architectural space of the Mall would have paralleled a Gothic cathedral, with trunks forming the arcade between the nave and the side aisles, arching high to form a ceiling of filtered light. Every forty feet the stroller would cross a threshold of four trees. For visitors looking ahead, the lines of trunks marking perspective distance would have appeared as nearly solid walls. A long slice of the sky above would have formed a line drawn to infinity. The grove is now considerably aged. The majority of trees is quite old; others are middle-aged. But there are a few random, individual replacements that are very young and, because of their youth and the fact that they are a different species, appear out of place. Both their form and size are completely unlike the older generations, and they even vary considerably in form from one to another. The spatial architecture of Olmsted’s Mall is lost to these individual replacements. The intentional rhythms of the large elm trunks and the contrast of this geometry to the rest of the park are felt only peripherally, as the Mall grove now mostly blends into adjacent trees.