Joggers in Central Park

About 120 years ago, a man named Frederick Law Olmsted had an idea which convulsed New Yorkers with its innocence and its wildness. He decided that what New York needed was a park, not one of the tiny plots of grass hemmed in by houses, what in London would be called a square and what in New York is usually a frowsy bit of grass and a ring of small trees surrounded by railings, as in Gramercy Park.

Mr Olmsted was listened to, however, because he was an architect, he was a famous landscape man and the author of a – and it still is – classic study of the South before the Civil War called 'The Cotton Kingdom'. 

If Mr Olmsted had wanted to wreck buildings and otherwise make his park where New Yorkers lived, he most certainly would have been stopped by the city fathers, as also by the grafting politicians who had a lucrative stake in the tenements and the brownstone houses and the brick and sandstone trade and the markets and the rest of the physical status quo. 

But Mr Olmsted was a visionary. So much so that, at the time, he was thought to be more than a little dotty. He wanted to put his park north of the city, way out in the country where the land was cheap. And while he was arranging the contract with the city, he was indiscreet enough to say why the park should be built there and then, in the 1850s. He said that was the direction in which the city would surely expand and the great thing was to collar the land and get a perpetual lease on it before the developers shared his conviction that the next civic slogan would be, 'Go North, Young Man!' 

Now, at that time, the heart of the city was up from the Bowery to about 23rd Street. Very few people lived as far north as 42nd Street. About 20 years later, the first generation of robber barons would build mansions up in the 70s among all the greenery and away from the madding crowd. And Andrew Carnegie even put his place deep in the woods at what is now 90th Street. 

Well, Olmsted got the lease and drew his design and it was accepted before the interests had any interest in what is now the Upper East Side and Upper West Side. So he got his park and nothing about his original plan has had to be changed. It goes two and a half miles from 59th Street to 110th and he gave his park the defiant name of Central Park and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the doctor and essayist, father of the great Mr Justice Holmes, wrote a humorous piece called 'Mr Olmsted's, quote, Central, unquote, Park' making the usual facetious point that it was a park two miles north of the city it was supposed to be in the middle of. Today, of course, we look on Ormsted as a prophet and one of the city's great benefactors. For Central Park is a blessed rectangular oasis in a jungle of buildings, which is why to Europeans it looks smaller than it is. 

It is, in fact, bigger than the entire kingdom of Monaco over which the former Grace Kelly rules so benevolently. It's a rambling park with many meadows and a lake and a reservoir, and little rolling hills and great outcrops of Manhattan's rock. But you never look at a skyline of grass. It's enclosed on all sides with high-rise buildings, museums, some skyscrapers built by people who were just too late in second guessing Olmsted about which way the city would grow. I'm lucky, I live high up on top of a 15-storey building and look out across the whole park to the west side and, beyond the buildings, the Hudson River and over that, the western sky. And because the park slopes down from west to east, I'm at the angle of a plane coming in for a landing and as the scrawny winter trees go to blossom and then to dense green foliage and then to the fall colours and then to sentinels standing in fields of snow, I bless Frederick Law Olmsted. 

Now, a few years ago, I was forced by my room-mate to get up from the typewriter once a day and crack my bones and go for a walk round the reservoir over which we look out. And this was, always, for me a tedious chore. I see no point in walking on a gravel path in sight of meadows and pasture when I could be out in the meadows in pursuit of a little white ball 1.68 inches in diameter. And then I stopped this daily walk, claiming that I was putting my family at risk since too often such walkers were pounced on by muggers and worse. And soon, every visitor to New York chanted the dread message, 'Stay out of Central Park!'. 

Then Mayor Lindsay, in what must be his one supreme civic achievement, installed in the park something like two or three hundred high sodium lamps and the muggers slunk away, so much so that while nobody in his or her senses would go romping in the park at midnight, by day it is now about as safe as any big city park. 

During the bad days, I used to look out in the mornings and never see a human being. Nowadays I look out and you'd think they'd switched the site, the route of the annual run around France. From about 7 a.m. on, the reservoir is ringed with a continuous file of loping, panting figures, male and female, in T-shirts and bunched-up shorts. It used to be that if you went for a walk there, the hair on the back of your neck would stiffen as you heard the loping tread of some maniac behind you and when he went passed you, you breathed again. 

Today, a lonely walker in the park is about as peaceful a figure as a cowboy caught in a buffalo stampede. They thud the earth with their big feet, their elbows knock the air, their tongues flop with the rhythm of the Hound of the Baskervilles. They all look drawn, drained, unhappy and close to exhaustion. They are the joggers. And when I escape into the sanctuary of a bookstore, there is no escape. The shelves are prominently displayed with handbooks on jogging. About a year ago, a publisher showed me the preliminary design for a book jacket. It showed two leathery male legs, all muscle and hair and bone, just running. The book was called 'Running'. The publisher and I agreed that if ever there was a non-bestselling book jacket that was it. It has headed the bestseller lists for ten months. 

And this mania now reaches across the whole 3,000 miles of the nation. It certainly surpasses in dedicated intensity all previous manias, such as flagpole-sitting, marathon-dancing, the yo-yo, the Frisbee, panty- raiding, skateboarding, marijuana, EST, yoghurt or the high-protein diet. Its origins are as mysterious as the origins of a folk song – it suddenly 'was'. Young people started it. They told each other it made them, as Mr Hemingway used to say, 'feel good' and then the middle-aged took it up and then more young, everywhere. Then books came out from doctors – alleged doctors anyway – saying it was a splendid recipe for avoiding heart attacks. And then, of course, other doctors came along and began to question whether it helped you get a heart attack or avoid one. The big debate was on and it still rages. 

By now the Department of Health Education and Welfare has got out a whole table of how many calories you spend in various forms of exercise. Samson pushing down the pillars of the temple is naturally at the top but joggers are right behind him and then it goes on down through swimming, tennis and, at the bottom in what seems to me an entirely gratuitous and tasteless swipe at the noblest of games, golf, which according to the table entails almost as little energy as poker. 

This table reminds me of a similar pioneer study on calorie spending put out in the early 1930s. Robert Benchley did a review of it. In those simple days, long before women's lib, it just assumed that the big calorie spenders were women in such tasks as carpet sweeping, bed making, emptying waste baskets, ironing etc. Benchley said it was no help to him since he did none of these things, but when he read that sitting in chair, thinking and tapping typewriter at rate of 20 words to the minute consumed 2,000 calories, he decided he didn’t have that many calories to spare. He stopped thinking and, as a precaution, went to bed. 

Well, now, who should get on to jogging, but – wouldn't you know – the psychiatrists, coming at us, as always, with the implication that they knew all along that jogging is a specific for depression, produces remarkable results in the treatment of drug addiction and schizophrenia. One woman therapist says, 'Jogging could well be the basis for the nation's first grassroots movement in community mental health'. At the University of Wisconsin, 28 depressed patients went jogging with a team of psychiatrists. They jogged 30 to 45 minutes three times a week. The report says it worked on the patients better than group or talk therapy. The report does not say how it worked on the psychiatrists. 

One reporter, who's looked into these studies, says he thinks he knows the answer. It's almost impossible, he concluded, to worry about your job or other such mundane pursuits when you're body is in TOTAL AGONY (the italics are mine). The same may be said of being putting on the rack or going down for the third time. There is a smart doctor in California who confirms the value of this method. He's charging $35 – that's about £39 an hour – to take neurotics, each neurotic, jogging on Malibu Beach and getting them to talk. He's made the remarkable discovery that – and I quote – 'after 14 or 18 miles, people often break down and cry or babble to strangers. Jogging is a way of reaching the unconscious rapidly.' I must say I'd let them babble to me for $75 an hour without ever requiring them to get out of a chair. 

A year or two ago, a doctor in California wrote a book on how to avoid a heart attack. After he'd finished the manuscript, its publication was held up for a while because he had a heart attack but his main thesis in his book was that human beings fall into two temperamental types, A and B. A is high strung and therefore subject to heart attacks. B is placid, less subject. Recently this doc was approached about jogging. 'Well,' he said, 'I really dread having a jogger for a patient because a jogger is, by definition, an A type.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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