Early one morning, years ago, I met a brisk little man with a long wooden pole in Stuyvesant Park. He wore a round leather cap. At the end ofhispolewasacoffeecan,swingingon a nail. He put somethinginto the can and thenpokeditupamongthebranchesofa tree, rattling it about. I approached to ask what he was doing. “Feeding the squir- rels,” he said, hurrying on to the next tree. Over his shoulder he carded a sack filled with almonds, filberts and walnuts. Up in the tree, nailed t o a branch, was another tin can. Using his pole he filled the can in the tree with nuts. He quickly circled the park, filling cans as he went.

“There’s nothing for the squirrels t o eat,” he said. “If we didn’t feed them they’d starve. When I’m finished here I go on to Madison Square. I’ve been doing this for thirty years.” He explained that it was a job and he was paid by a park association founded back around the First World War, before the huge Beth Israel Hospital complex began to rise up around the park, blocking out the sun. Stuyvesant Park was a posh residential district then, surrounded by elegant townhouses. Only a few remained; the last of the old ladies in the association were dying off. Before long his job would come to an end.

“I used to leave the nuts on the ground,” he said, “but then the bums began to move in and would eat them all up. I tried hiding them in the bushes but the bums rummaged around until they found them. For awhile I even buried them but bums would scratch them up again. This system works pretty well. Sometimes a bum manages to climb up into a tree for the nuts, but it’s more than most of them can handle.” He finished filling the last can, unscrewed his long pole in the middle, and strode briskly off in the direction of Madison Square.

There was always a lot to see in Stuyvesant Park. In the daytime it was a park like any other, filled with kids and ice cream vendors in good weather, and dog-walkers whatever the weather. At night,in all but the rawest months, it was a gay cruising ground. Prostitutes from 14th Street and Third Avenue sometimes brought their clients to the park. Overlooking one end was a tall building housing a drug detoxification program run by Beth Israel. Friends of the patients, most of them black, would stand along the park’s iron railing and shout up to the faces pressed against the wire mesh covering the windows. Sometimes the friends would hang about all evening, drinking beer or wine from bottles in brown paper bags. Once, early in the orning, I met a dog-walking regular named Jack, looking troubled. He said there had been a murder, and pointed across the street. A couple of policemen were standing next to the body of a black man lying on the sidewalk. Police cruised the park regularly, not botherin t o get out of their cars, but just drivin through slowly. One hot afternoon I saw some police with a black teenager backed up against the railing. His chest was heaving. His shirt was torn open and sweatglistened on his skin. The chronology oftheseimpressions hasescapedme. All I can remember is the event and the weather. One spring morning, for example, I saw a black man in a heavy over- coat standing in an open place, gazing up at the sky with a rapt expression. He was there at noon, again that night, and still there in the same place and attitude the following morning. By that time he had soiled his pants; the odor was unmistakable and a dark stain ran down one leg. I asked if he needed any help. “No, no, I’m not of this world,” he said. “You all want to feed me but I don’t need to eat or drink. A woman brought me soup. I appreciate her thought, I thanked her, I thank you, but I’m above all that now. I’m leaving this world behind. God wants me to rise up. I had two houses in the Bronx, I had awife, I had money, but I was too much of this world. I was held down.I’monahigherlevelnow,I’m rising up. You’re way down below me. SoonIwillriseupandbegone.”Hewas shaky on his feet, but managed to keep himself upright another two days. On the fourth morning he was gone. I moved away in 1972; I don’t know what the park is like now.

Gramercy Park is one of the prettiest in the city. The grass is thick, the trees well-pruned. Some of them are identified by wooden plaques. Ohio Buckeye, for example. A tall iron fence surrounds the park and the gates are locked. Keys are held by residents of the buildings facing the park, but I’ve never seen it crowded. Nannies bring children there. Immaculate inwhitetheysitonthebencheswhile the children play. The girls jump rope, singing songs, while the boys play catch, or push toy trucks along the graveled walks. The children, of course, are white. The nannies are about evenly divided between black and white. But I’m just guessing, I don’t really know what the proportions are; I’ve never counted. Occasionally an old gentleman will beall sitting there too, reading his newspaper in the sun. Once I saw a black teenager in a windbreaker walk all the way around the park, banging a stickagainst the iron railings. There used to be a single-room-occupancy hotel across the street from one corner of the park, an oddity in the neighborhood. Blacks and Puerto Ricans sometimes sat on the stoop, drinking beer or wine from bottles in brown paper bags. I used to wonder if they had keys too. The hotel is being renovated now. Therents will probably quadruple.

Washington Square Park has got three playgrounds. The one for the youngest children has a chainlink fence around it and a gate with a latch so kids won’t wander off and disappear while parents and nannies are reading or talkingto each other. In the center of the playground is a large sandbox where small children dig holes with plastic shovels. Kids that age—toddlers between one and a half and three—don’t really play with each other, but they like to sit next to each other. Sometimes there are tears when they throwsand, or walk off with another kid’s shovel. I once heard a woman complaining about the dog-walkers who allowed their dogs to defecate in the sandbox. Children often dug up the droppings. The woman could not conceive how any dog-owner could be so discourteous and unthinking.

The culprits, actually, were not dog-walkers at all, but bums, derelicts, bag-ladies, people of that sort. There is no accurate word for them yet. State mental hospitals have been following a new policy in recent years; patients who are both harmless and incurable are simply turned loose. A friend who is a social worker recently described an attempt to have one of her clients admitted to Bellevue. The
woman shouted, wept, ripped off her clothes and urinated on the hospital floor. The doctor refused to admit her; a guard dragged her back out onto the street. My friend described this in a shaking voice and said she would write a letter of complaint. You see such people all over the city, oddly dressed, in earnest conversation with themselves, huddled in corners, shouting four-letter words at the top of their lungs, poking through trash baskets. One strange dementia leads people to festoon themselves with bright bits of cloth, plastic flowers, spoons hanging from a piece of string, crumpled paper, feathers. They’re as fussily decoratedas Christmas trees. They all seem t o be men and they all seem to be black. Come to think of it,they look a little like African witch doctors. Sometimes the nuts are panhandlers too, sometimes not. A friend told me once that whenever the temperature dropsbelow zero in the city the Sanitation Department sends a special truck down to the Bowery to pick up bodies. I’ve often wondered if that is really true. Usually the nuts relieve themselves in the narrow space between parked cars, or in phone booths, or doorways, but some of them use the big sandbox in Washington Square Park. I think it’s because they want to bury their droppings. But I didn’t tell the complaining woman any of this; it would have taken too long to explain.

The park was renovated a few years ago. New sod was laid down in all the grassy areas. Most of it has been scuffed away by now and the ground has been trodden down in to a kind of hard pan. Nothing can grow there. You couldn’t drive a knife into the dirt. This is precisely what is meant by the word desertification. It’s happeningin the Sahel and it’s happening in Washington Square Park.

When the weather is good the park is filled with young men hanging about, most of them black. I doubt they show up in the unemployment statistics because the government only counts people looking for work. Sometimes they are nodding, more often drinking beer or wine out of bottles in brown paper bags. They run their words together. “Hey man don gimme nuna that. Hey man whuz doin.” It sounds as if their tongues had been turned numb and thick by a massive dose of novocaine. They show up day after day. I sometimes wonder where they live. Washington Square is in the heart of the Village, which is not exactly a black neighborhood. Perhaps they commute. An old German doctor in Africa once explained to me why the whites of the eyes of local blacks were often yellow: protein deficiency. The blacks in Washington Square often have yellow eyes too. It gives them a kind of bleary, unfocused look. But some of the blacks have eyes like hawks, are smartly dressed, ride ten-speed French racing bikes, carry expensive tape decks, play excellent chess at the chess tables in the southwest comer of the park, do dazzling maneuvers on hundred-dollar skateboards, read Kant. I can’t understand why these accomplished young men want to hang around Washington Square Park, all day. Even playing with my kids I begin to get restless after an hour.

A week or so ago I bought them Good Humors and they sat down on a bench to eat in the serious manner of children. Across the way were two white men and a white woman drinking beer out of bottles in brown paper bags. But I don’t think it was beer which explained their strange, fluid, weaving gait. They were constantly moving, almost as if they were dancing, but their knees were bent and their motions and gestures were all drawn out, as if in slow motion. The two men had taken their shirts off and the woman was wearing a brief halter, bare in the middle. Their skin was as white as thebellyofatoad.Noneofthemhadany teeth—I’d guess they were in their late thirties, but it was hard to tell—and they were grinning, lips wet, eyes half closed, falling into each other’s arms and then pulling back again, making croaking sounds. It wasn’t talking and it wasn’t laughing. It was croaking. “What’s the matter with those people?” asked my seven-year-old daughter, Susan. “Are they drunk?” I tried to explain but she looked as if I wasn’t making any sense.

There’s nothing unusual about drunks or addicts in the park. Even on the coldest nights of winter there are usually a couple of people standing around, stamping their feet, collars up, drinking beer or wine out ofbottles in brown paperbags. When the weather is good they’re pandemic. They vomit in the bushes, stagger along the paths, stretch out on the benches snoring loudly. They smash their bottles on the pavement, crunch up their beer cans, beg for quarters, get into fights, urinate, against the sides of trees. The nannies and the college girls from NYU turn away. On summer nights the crush is not to be believed. A friend told me what it was like and after dinner we went for a look. I go away in the summer; I’d never seen it before. The park was standing room only and evey drug known to man was for sale. One walk around the fountain, which took quite a while, weaving our way through the mob, brought a dozen offers of cocaine, methadone, heroin, marijuana, LSD, barbiturates, amphetamine, angel dust, Quaaludes. The beer and the wine were just for wetting the whistle. Cops wandered through but made no arrests. “Loose joints,” the black kids said, flashing something in the palm of a hand. “Mexican brown.” I thought of Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, about the interesting similarities be-tween mystical and drug-induced experiences. I remember wondering if there were any place in America more perfectly integrated than Washington Square Park on a midsummer’s night.

There’s a new park behind the Jefferson Market Public Library. It stands on the site of the old Women’s House of Detention. It used to be called the House of D. I don’t know where the women’s jail is now. The park is very well maintained by a voluntary committee. At the moment it is filled with blooming daffodils and tulips and a lot of other flowers of which I can never remember the names. The grass is so lush, deep and vibrant it seems almost incandescent. The city owns the park and plans to build something on it eventually. So far the planners haven’t been able to decide what and they probably haven’t got any money anyway. In the meantime it’s a park, or at least a green place. Various suggestions have been made for its use as a real park. One was to make it accessible from the library; another was to reserve it or mothers or nannies with small children. The problem with both plans was he need for a fulltime guard to keep the bums out. Local residents are unhappy enough as it is with Eighth Street; the last thing they want is another place for the bums and the drunks to hang out. There’s been quite a lot of argument about it. So the Jefferson Market park is surrounded by a twelve-foot-high cyclone fence and the gate is kept padlocked.