by Yvonne Vávra
I’m desperately waiting for the sheep to come out and stay out. Frankly, I’ve had it with spring’s ongoing commitment issues. One day it’s hot, the next it’s cold, and the only constant I can count on is that I’m always wearing the wrong thing. But I have high hopes for this weekend to be the beginning of a long stretch of Central Park filled with happy sheep.
By sheep, I mean the thousands of people flocking to Sheep Meadow on sunny days. From a distance — and with eyesight that conveniently blurs the details — I prefer not to correct the illusion. It’s more fun to indulge in a bit of time travel and chase traces of old New York, back when the meadow was, in fact, full of sheep.
Both we and those sheep, it turns out, have been lucky to end up on the meadow at all. The space was originally intended to host militia drills — a parade ground was one of the required features in the 1857 competition to design Central Park. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the commission with a design that dutifully included one. But once work began, the idea of a more romantic countryside won out. So Olmsted and Vaux created a bucolic pasture for New Yorkers to look at and briefly feel at peace.
Two hundred pedigreed sheep were imported from England, all the same color and size, to complete a picture-perfect pastoral scene. From 1864 onward, they kept the lawn trimmed and fertilized, and even produced wool that the park commissioners could auction off. When their day was done, they’d go to sleep in the sheepfold just across the meadow. And that’s where you now sit down to grilled lamb chops with a mustard-honey glaze at Tavern on the Green.
For 70 years, sheep and people shared the park peacefully, though I’m sure there are a few lost stories of impatient New Yorkers losing it while waiting for 200 sheep to cross the drive twice a day.
Like many nice things in the city, Robert Moses put an end to it. He evicted the sheep and sent them off to Prospect Park. Once they were gone, it didn’t take long for the human crowds to take over. The 1960s and ’70s, in particular, made the meadow famous for large gatherings. In March 1967, more than 10,000 people held what The New York Times described as a “noisy, swarming, chaotic and utterly surrealistic” be-in. The crowd reportedly included “poets from the Bronx, dropouts from the East Village, interior decorators from the East Side, teachers from the West Side and teeny boppers from Long Island”.
Less than three weeks later, the meadow became the starting point for a massive march organized by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. With hundreds of thousands in attendance, it was the largest antiwar demonstration the country had ever seen.
That same year brought another kind of spectacle: Barbra Streisand drew a crowd of 135,000 fans for a free sing-in, and soon the meadow was filled with more be-ins, lie-ins, and even a moon-in to watch the televised landing on the moon.
In 1970, the first Gay Pride March ended on Sheep Meadow, and in May 1975 about 50,000 people once again filled the lawn for an End-of-War Rally celebrating peace in Vietnam.
Well, to call it a lawn at this point might be a stretch. Years of political and cultural gatherings had turned Sheep Meadow into a trampled field of dust before Central Park restored it to its original grassy self. The sheep, of course, did not return. But we did, and hopefully the warm weather will stick around so that we can finally flock back to the meadow for the season.
Give me your frisbees, your picnics, your shirtless crowds. Let them proudly find the perfect blanket placement, and make the days so glorious that not a single sheep could squeeze between them. Then you’ll find me squinting just enough for a little time travel, turning the meadow into a bucolic pasture to look at and briefly feel at peace.
Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.
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