A fascinating history of NYC's Central Park

By PETER TERZIAN
NEWSDAY
"Central Park, An American Masterpiece: A Comprehensive History of the Nation's First Urban Park," by Sara Cedar Miller (Abrams, $45)
Sara Cedar Miller lays down a gauntlet in the first pages of this coffee table testament: "Central Park is the most important work of American art of the 19th century." She proceeds to make a pretty convincing case. Her photographs -- of horses trotting down the park's 51/2-mile bridle trail, the vast expanse of Sheep Meadow, a path sprinkled with pink crab apple pedals -- make the park's wonders seem numberless. But the book's chief pleasure might be the maps, plans, paintings, stereo slides and early photographs that illustrate the park's evolution.
Miller stresses that Central Park is a man-made landscape, closer to something out of Hollywood than nature. In straightforward (if somewhat dry) prose, she explains why architects Frederick Law Olmstead and Calbert Vaux laid the park out the way they did. Central Park was designed in 1853, partially as a moral and spiritual landscape: Olmstead believed that people-watching was democratic and instructive. The park's roads and paths are designed for maximum social interaction.