Upon seeing a photo of Yoko’s great grandfather while visiting japan John Lennon said “that’s me in a former life” to which Yoko replied “don’t say that, he was assassinated!” The great grandfather was a powerful banker murdered out of jealousy.
When he was 40, John Lennon was finally starting to come out of seclusion of (in his own words) baking bread and being a house husband. He had spent the last 5 years raising his son, Sean. He wanted to start making music again. to inspire John on his new creative journey, Yoko arranged for Lennon to sail a boat from Newport to Bermuda. Sailing had always been part of his life. His father was a sailor and he had grown up in a sailing town, Liverpool. It was a port where American rock and roll records would come in with the boats. Growing up, his band was inspired by this new music and would listen and emulate American rock and roll legends like buddy holly, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry and turn it into something new with an English perspective. When asked how he first learned to create songs, Lennon replied, “first I took a song that I like, then I changed the lyrics, and then I changed the melody for a new song.” while taking care of his son Sean, Lennon would play his favorite songs of theirs in his apartment overlooking Central Park.
On the voyage to Bermuda, Lennon’s boat encountered a tremendous storm. One by one, the crew members went down sick. When the captain asked Lennon to take the helm, he quipped, I only have these puny guitar muscles. He did take the helm and successfully rode out the storm, recounting, “Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear. I actually began to enjoy the experience and I started to shout out old sea shanties in the face of the storm, screaming at the thundering sky.” Lennon also compared the experience to when The Beatles were at their peak, saying he felt “centered” and “in tune with the cosmos.” An album double fantasy (named after a flower he saw in Bermuda’s Botanical garden) was filled with songs inspired by his voyage and time in Bermuda. He was coming back late to the Dakota with Yoko after recording songs for a new album, when he was gunned down by Mark Chapman... a crazed fan who’d been obsessed with Lennon. Lennon’s prophecy had come true.
Lennon was immediately rushed to st Luke’s hospital on 59th street in a cab. The doctors valiantly tried to resuscitate him, massaging and pumping his heart to no avail. The song that could be heard on the hospital speakers over Yoko’s wails was “all my loving”.
To commemorate his life, Yoko proposed a tear shaped park named strawberry fields that emanates from the intersection of 72nd street and Central Park west and slopes down to the main loop of the park. A black and white mosaic donated by the city of Naples is situated at the center of the tear, with benches around it. Often times you will hear people singing Beatles songs with a guitarist in the background waiting through the air as you pass through. The grades in the park are very gentle. Always curvilinear, you feel them slip into the park. They never seem to end, curves always round hills or mounds so you never know where they lead. A light green patch of sunlit grass draws you in, before you know it, there’s a meadow overlooking skyscrapers, or a playground, or a collection of boulders. Thousands of men and so much dynamite were used to sculpt the land especially at the southern end of the park. It is artificially made nature. The effect of this large human intervention is to create such a natural fluid environment that frees people for activity, contemplation, discovery and delight.
Imagine mosaic (Lennon memorial)
Sitting on the benches by the imagine mosaic, and looking up at the sky through the tall trees, it’s hard to imagine a time when central park didn’t exist. Landscape architecture takes decades to realize... it’s not like architecture where buildings are assembled in a couple years.... it’s a slow art form. Even a complicated project like the Sydney opera house only took a handful of years to construct. A tree may take decades to mature. For this reason, landscape architects must have tremendous vision and foresight. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely father of Central Park than Frederick Olmsted.
Olmsted was supposed to attend Yale in the 1800’s but a bad case of sumac poisoning in his eyes derailed his college plans. Between sailing to China as a deck hand to failing at multiple attempts at farming to filing bankruptcy for a magazine venture to documenting the daily lives of slaves in the American South as a journalist for the New York Times, nothing in Olmsted’s early life trajectory would’ve suggested that he would go on to change the face of American cities, start the landscape design field profession in America, find success in securing public access to Niagara Falls, and help create one of the first national parks in America, Yosemite.
In August 1857, 36 year old Olmsted found a job supervising a new public works project— Central Park. For 5 million dollars, (or the price of a single luxury apartment lining Central Park today), NYC had acquired 778 acres of land in 1853. The land was filthy and squalid, with the stench of rubbish and pig sties and slaughter houses abound. Rocky, swampy and treeless... one cannot imagine the land would eventually be transformed into Central Park.
Olmsted initially worked under retired military veteran, colonel Egbert Viele who would curiously come to work in dressed in military attire. As you would expect from a military mind, Viele’s plans were very functional but dull. Unsatisfied with Viele’s lack of imagination, the city announced a public competition.
Half dreamer and half pragmatist, Olmsted’s winning ‘Greensward’ plan merged the rational with the poetic. The separation of different modes of traffic was a new concept that Olmsted introduced into the world of landscape park design. First, transverse roads cut into the park in section linking the east side of Manhattan to the west. Second, earthwork berms hid the traffic from the pedestrians above. Third, loops of pedestrian circulation with pedestrian bridges and carriage roads for horses under stone arches interlace the park creating a flowing three dimensional circulation system. As a result, the park is a lot different from the European precedents Olmsted had visited with his father in his 20’s. Instead of formal geometries, Olmsted opted for meadows and woodlands. Central Park was more chaotic than its European counterparts. The pathway design always forking and offering options and different prospects at the horizon reflects a new type of public space, distinctively American and democratic.
To sculpt the land, gunpowder blasting, pickaxes, and horse carts were used to move millions of cart loads of soils. 450 million year old Manhattan schist was exposed, streams, lakes and reservoirs were designed and controlled with an intricate system of piping and valves. The entire nature in the park is like an artificial stage set.
The ambitious project occupied Olmsted’s whole heart. He would remark, “If a fairy had shaped a job for me it could not have fitted me any better. It was naturally outgrown of my previous life history. and it occupied my whole heart.” Olmsted worked himself to such exhaustion that he fell asleep while driving a carriage with his family in the park one day. The accident left him with a leg so badly broken that one of his legs would remain 2 inches shorter than the other for the rest of his life. While he was recovering from his injury, his staff would have to carry him around the park. At times he would crawl on the ground to better survey construction progress. Olmsted maintained that for his designs to be robust, he needed to design with a 40 year outlook in mind. Plants and trees need time to grow in, and new activities are always being introduced to daily life. It’s staggering to imagine that within 150 years of its conception, Central Park has accommodated the advent of cars, recreational sports like basketball, baseball,and tennis, children’s playgrounds, bicycling, electricity and large scale concerts— Olmsted had designed Central Park with such foresight, that it could accommodate all these activities seamlessly.
After Central Park, parks became a central part in American life. Suddenly it seemed every city in America needed a great park came to Olmsted for assistance. Indeed, Olmsted and his sons would go on to transform 355 public landscapes in America including Buffalo, Boston, Niagara, Washington DC. Similar to how Lennon modified American rock and roll music to make Beatles music, (English digesting American culture)... Olmsted adopted formal landscape ideas from England, and transformed the English park idea to become more American . Under his guidance, parks in America became more democratic and open for all people to enjoy. Parks also became more integrated into the city with the 3 dimensional circulation systems and traverse roads. (Integration into cities was further developed in the Emerald Necklace of Boston with the concept of a system of parks integrated into the city, not just one park). This concept of democracy was very important to Olmsted, as he witnessed a lot of injustice in his travels to the south where he observed the effects of slavery and inequality. The democracy wasn’t just limited to races though, when they first started phasing Central Park’s opening, the first attraction that was opened to the public was the pond in the south for ice skating. Ice skating was an activity that both women and men could do together. We take it for granted today, but back then in America it was quite a radical idea that women and men could be equally mobile in public places. (It’s funny women at that time wore such huge dresses they could not tie their ice skate laces by themselves, so there were people by the rinks whose sole job it was to lace women’s skates).
Pythian Building 70th street
The Pythian sits like a sphynx on on 70th street, quite out of character to it's brownstone townhouses of the neighborhood. I walked past this building everyday for 6 years on my way to work before learning of its significance in a newspaper article. In the words of a New York Times architectural historian Christopher gray, "The Pythian Temple’s ground-floor colonnade, with Assyrian-type heads, is centered on a brilliantly glazed blue terra-cotta entry pavilion. The windowless middle section steps back at about 100 feet up, with four seated Pharaonic figures similar to those of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Two more setbacks rise to a highly colored Egyptian-style colonnade, and to giant urns carried by teams of yellow, red and green oxen." The building was originally designed by theater architect Thomas Lamb to serve as a lavish meeting house for the secret society, the knights of the Pythias established after the civil war. It originally contained a gym, billiards, bowling alley, 13 lodge rooms.
Like the sphynx, the sands of time have cloaked its secrets. For those willing to peel the layers of time from the building, an unexpected reward about it's role in rock and roll history is revealed. (Side note: Before Koolhaas became Koolhaas, he had spent a year researching the history of certain New York City buildings like Coney Island, New York athletic club, and Rockefeller center. His resultant book ‘Delirious New York’ would become the theoretical underpinning of all his later work about urbanism. He studied in depth the adventurousness and craziness of New York architecture, and unpacked it for his own projects). As membership declined, the Pythian building was converted to recording studio. It was the site where bill Haley recorded ‘rock around the clock in 1954.In 1958, buddy holly moved to nyc. Up till then, he had usually recorded in Clovis New Mexico, west of his hometown in Lubbock Texas. He recorded a new song at the pythian in October 1958 with an elaborate orchestral arrangement. that song "true love ways" was intended as a wedding present to his new wife, Elena, whom he had recently married 4 months prior. Two months prior to their marriage they had gotten engaged after their first date! Buddy had been smitten with Elena. within a few hours after he had first summoned the courage to ask music publisher receptionist, elena, on a date, he had proposed and by the end of the night they were engaged. Their wedding kiss picture is mounted on a wall at PJ Clarks restaurant over table 53 at 63rd street in midtown Manhattan commemorating the date.
“Her date with Holly was her first date with anyone, Elena said. When he proposed, she recalled, “I said to myself ‘Is he insane or what?’ I said to Holly, ‘Do you want to marry me now or after dinner?’ ””
Four months after the True Love Ways recording, Holly and Valens, and Richardson went down in a plane crash in the midwest Iowa while touring the Midwest states. it was called the day the music died. holly meant so much to so many musicains. at the nobel literature award ceremony in Stockholm, Bob Dylan, who saw holly in concert on that ‘Winter Dance Party’ tour 4 days before the plane crash recounted, "Something about him seemed permanent and he filled me with conviction,” Dylan said of seeing Holly on stage. “Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened, he looked at me right straight there in the eye and he transmitted something, something I didn’t know what. It gave me the chills.”
In England, holly's music was equally moving to young high schoolers John Lennon and Paul Mccartney. they would skip school to play holly for hours. To the liverpool duo, buddy was unlike any musician at the time. Holly showed them the possibility of writing their their own songs, playing their own guitar solos, creating songs from 3 simple chords, writing their own lyrics and, for John, wearing glasses without being self conscious.. in a tribute to holly, the pair named their band new band the "Beatles" alluding to the buddy's backup band insect name, "The Crickets". up till then john would never wear his glasses in public. He was blind as a bat. McCartney tells a story how one night after jamming guitar together, Lennon walked home without glasses. playing cards story. Mccartney told a story where john told him he was so incredulous that he saw a couple people playing cards outside their house at 11:30 on a winter’s night. The next day, when Paul walked by the house, he realized what John had thought was a card game was actually Christmas nativity scene, Jesus, Mary and the baby lit up on someone's yard! John’s eyesight was so bad he mistook the nativity scene statues for card players! now that john wore his glasses and was able to see.. with Holly’s music in his mind, he was able to see clearly the possibilities of rock and roll music. Their first hit, Love Me Do, was a result of hours of buddy holly jam sessions.
Olmsted initially worked under retired military veteran, colonel Egbert Viele who would curiously come to work in dressed in military attire. As you would expect from a military mind, Viele’s plans were very functional but dull. Unsatisfied with Viele’s lack of imagination, the city announced a public competition.
Half dreamer and half pragmatist, Olmsted’s winning ‘Greensward’ plan merged the rational with the poetic. The separation of different modes of traffic was a new concept that Olmsted introduced into the world of landscape park design. First, transverse roads cut into the park in section linking the east side of Manhattan to the west. Second, earthwork berms hid the traffic from the pedestrians above. Third, loops of pedestrian circulation with pedestrian bridges and carriage roads for horses under stone arches interlace the park creating a flowing three dimensional circulation system. As a result, the park is a lot different from the European precedents Olmsted had visited with his father in his 20’s. Instead of formal geometries, Olmsted opted for meadows and woodlands. Central Park was more chaotic than its European counterparts. The pathway design always forking and offering options and different prospects at the horizon reflects a new type of public space, distinctively American and democratic.
To sculpt the land, gunpowder blasting, pickaxes, and horse carts were used to move millions of cart loads of soils. 450 million year old Manhattan schist was exposed, streams, lakes and reservoirs were designed and controlled with an intricate system of piping and valves. The entire nature in the park is like an artificial stage set.
The ambitious project occupied Olmsted’s whole heart. He would remark, “If a fairy had shaped a job for me it could not have fitted me any better. It was naturally outgrown of my previous life history. and it occupied my whole heart.” Olmsted worked himself to such exhaustion that he fell asleep while driving a carriage with his family in the park one day. The accident left him with a leg so badly broken that one of his legs would remain 2 inches shorter than the other for the rest of his life. While he was recovering from his injury, his staff would have to carry him around the park. At times he would crawl on the ground to better survey construction progress. Olmsted maintained that for his designs to be robust, he needed to design with a 40 year outlook in mind. Plants and trees need time to grow in, and new activities are always being introduced to daily life. It’s staggering to imagine that within 150 years of its conception, Central Park has accommodated the advent of cars, recreational sports like basketball, baseball,and tennis, children’s playgrounds, bicycling, electricity and large scale concerts— Olmsted had designed Central Park with such foresight, that it could accommodate all these activities seamlessly.
After Central Park, parks became a central part in American life. Suddenly it seemed every city in America needed a great park came to Olmsted for assistance. Indeed, Olmsted and his sons would go on to transform 355 public landscapes in America including Buffalo, Boston, Niagara, Washington DC. Similar to how Lennon modified American rock and roll music to make Beatles music, (English digesting American culture)... Olmsted adopted formal landscape ideas from England, and transformed the English park idea to become more American . Under his guidance, parks in America became more democratic and open for all people to enjoy. Parks also became more integrated into the city with the 3 dimensional circulation systems and traverse roads. (Integration into cities was further developed in the Emerald Necklace of Boston with the concept of a system of parks integrated into the city, not just one park). This concept of democracy was very important to Olmsted, as he witnessed a lot of injustice in his travels to the south where he observed the effects of slavery and inequality. The democracy wasn’t just limited to races though, when they first started phasing Central Park’s opening, the first attraction that was opened to the public was the pond in the south for ice skating. Ice skating was an activity that both women and men could do together. We take it for granted today, but back then in America it was quite a radical idea that women and men could be equally mobile in public places. (It’s funny women at that time wore such huge dresses they could not tie their ice skate laces by themselves, so there were people by the rinks whose sole job it was to lace women’s skates).
Pythian Building 70th street
The Pythian sits like a sphynx on on 70th street, quite out of character to it's brownstone townhouses of the neighborhood. I walked past this building everyday for 6 years on my way to work before learning of its significance in a newspaper article. In the words of a New York Times architectural historian Christopher gray, "The Pythian Temple’s ground-floor colonnade, with Assyrian-type heads, is centered on a brilliantly glazed blue terra-cotta entry pavilion. The windowless middle section steps back at about 100 feet up, with four seated Pharaonic figures similar to those of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Two more setbacks rise to a highly colored Egyptian-style colonnade, and to giant urns carried by teams of yellow, red and green oxen." The building was originally designed by theater architect Thomas Lamb to serve as a lavish meeting house for the secret society, the knights of the Pythias established after the civil war. It originally contained a gym, billiards, bowling alley, 13 lodge rooms.
Like the sphynx, the sands of time have cloaked its secrets. For those willing to peel the layers of time from the building, an unexpected reward about it's role in rock and roll history is revealed. (Side note: Before Koolhaas became Koolhaas, he had spent a year researching the history of certain New York City buildings like Coney Island, New York athletic club, and Rockefeller center. His resultant book ‘Delirious New York’ would become the theoretical underpinning of all his later work about urbanism. He studied in depth the adventurousness and craziness of New York architecture, and unpacked it for his own projects). As membership declined, the Pythian building was converted to recording studio. It was the site where bill Haley recorded ‘rock around the clock in 1954.In 1958, buddy holly moved to nyc. Up till then, he had usually recorded in Clovis New Mexico, west of his hometown in Lubbock Texas. He recorded a new song at the pythian in October 1958 with an elaborate orchestral arrangement. that song "true love ways" was intended as a wedding present to his new wife, Elena, whom he had recently married 4 months prior. Two months prior to their marriage they had gotten engaged after their first date! Buddy had been smitten with Elena. within a few hours after he had first summoned the courage to ask music publisher receptionist, elena, on a date, he had proposed and by the end of the night they were engaged. Their wedding kiss picture is mounted on a wall at PJ Clarks restaurant over table 53 at 63rd street in midtown Manhattan commemorating the date.
“Her date with Holly was her first date with anyone, Elena said. When he proposed, she recalled, “I said to myself ‘Is he insane or what?’ I said to Holly, ‘Do you want to marry me now or after dinner?’ ””
Four months after the True Love Ways recording, Holly and Valens, and Richardson went down in a plane crash in the midwest Iowa while touring the Midwest states. it was called the day the music died. holly meant so much to so many musicains. at the nobel literature award ceremony in Stockholm, Bob Dylan, who saw holly in concert on that ‘Winter Dance Party’ tour 4 days before the plane crash recounted, "Something about him seemed permanent and he filled me with conviction,” Dylan said of seeing Holly on stage. “Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened, he looked at me right straight there in the eye and he transmitted something, something I didn’t know what. It gave me the chills.”
In England, holly's music was equally moving to young high schoolers John Lennon and Paul Mccartney. they would skip school to play holly for hours. To the liverpool duo, buddy was unlike any musician at the time. Holly showed them the possibility of writing their their own songs, playing their own guitar solos, creating songs from 3 simple chords, writing their own lyrics and, for John, wearing glasses without being self conscious.. in a tribute to holly, the pair named their band new band the "Beatles" alluding to the buddy's backup band insect name, "The Crickets". up till then john would never wear his glasses in public. He was blind as a bat. McCartney tells a story how one night after jamming guitar together, Lennon walked home without glasses. playing cards story. Mccartney told a story where john told him he was so incredulous that he saw a couple people playing cards outside their house at 11:30 on a winter’s night. The next day, when Paul walked by the house, he realized what John had thought was a card game was actually Christmas nativity scene, Jesus, Mary and the baby lit up on someone's yard! John’s eyesight was so bad he mistook the nativity scene statues for card players! now that john wore his glasses and was able to see.. with Holly’s music in his mind, he was able to see clearly the possibilities of rock and roll music. Their first hit, Love Me Do, was a result of hours of buddy holly jam sessions.
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