Caitlin Butler Activity 2

The place that I went to was Central Park. When I arrived to Central Park, it was already getting dark. I walked all around Central Park, looking and admiring the beautiful nature around me. It was amazing, just to actually take time to walk around and do nothing else. It was a great stress reliever for me! I saw people doing everything there. I saw families, friends, single people, etc. doing things like kissing, talking, walking, sitting, walking their dogs and kids, etc. It was what I expected. I knew that Central Park was already a very popular and famous park to go to. It is probably one of the main places where many tourists go to go sightseeing. I think it is so great to have a nice park to go to in a big city like New York. It is a place where one can go to escape from their everyday chaotic life. Jane Jacobs in her book titled, The death and life of great American cities, talks about her personal experience visiting Boston. At first she thought that Boston was this old run down city. The city was also known as the slum. But once she saw how people were standing in the streets just talking to one another and smiling and just not caring about how anything looked around them. It seemed not to faze them one bit. Even though their town was not so great looking, that still did not stop them from hanging out and communicating with one another in the street. She noticed this and was very amazed by it. She loved it. Just how there could be so much energy and happiness right on the streets in such places such as Boston. It goes to show her and everyone else that you cannot always take everything word for word of what someone else tells you about a particular city. Her friend over the phone told her that Boston was a basically a horrible place, when in fact it wasn’t. But of course Jacobs had to go to Boston herself to find all this out. Central Park reminds me of Jacobs experience in Boston because everyone in Central Park also stopped to talk to one another, just like the people in Boston did. I mean even though Central Park wasn’t really located on the street, it still has something like side walks where people would talk for hours. I love the idea of everyone just taking time off and talking to everyone else. This reminds me greatly of where I live in the summers, which is Long Island. Everyone there will stop right in the sidewalks just to talk and gossip. It’s an amazing thing. I think all places should be friendly like that where with people communicating with one another. It’s just good for people’s souls. It just makes everyone smile and really appreciate the simplicity of just talking to one another in a social atmosphere. Another nice thing about the park is how there are no cars at all. This is what is so great about going into parks. No distractions and fumes from the cars. You can actually hear people talk to one another. I like what Jane Jacobs had to say about city planning. She said that city planning is more vital than cars. God this could not be truer. She says how people no longer care about how things work, they only care about what is the quickest and easiest way to build something. That is it, which is so silly because isn’t it more important to learn about how things work in detail than just the quick and easy way out of things? Jane Jacobs really knows what she is talking about. She is a very insightful person and even though before this class, I had no clue who she was, I now do and will pass down to others who she is because I just love how she tells people the truth about cities and how they truly work and are. The best part about visiting Central Park was seeing the dog park. It was so big. I’ve never seen so many dogs in my entire life all at once. Since I am such an animal lover, I think it is extremely vital to carry dog parks in parks. It will not only make the person happy, but it will also make their pets happy as well! I really enjoyed just relaxing and taking a nice long park in Central Park. It is definitely a place in which I will go visit much more often now.