Daily News from New York, New York • 50

20(3 SUNDAY-KEWS, APRIL 196? 0zce a Sylvan Retreat lor Nature Lovers, Century-Old Central Park Today A ttracts Those Who Want Amusement, Mot Solitude -'A 1 t-s (NEWS foto by Fred Morgan). Conducted Tour Walking tour through lower Central Park, conducted by Henry Hop Reed Jr. reveal changes in park ince its opening a century ago. Qnetime carriage drive, (shown in 1895 foto) has become crosstown speedway. (Fata courtMT of Miuenm of the City of New Tork) By JOHN GREGG "TJRIZZLE or shine, a group of New York siasts will gather at the W.

72d St. entrance to Central Park today for this year's second walking tour sponsored by the Museum of the City of New OI K. At about 2:30 they'll begin trailing Henrv Hope Reed Jr. under the arbor of wisteria, not yet in blossom, and lower part or the Dark was steeped in the overflow and mush of pigsties, slaughterhouses and bone-boiling works," Olmsted recalled later. "The stench was sickening." Even Forced fo Import the Dirt The area was so barren and untillable that topsoil was imported from across the Hudson River and dumped over the land before anything was planted there.

New Yorkers of that day saw "lines of carts, drawn by farm horses that came across the ferries, filled with the red soil of New Jersey." Thousands of men scrambled over the tract with picks and shovels, barrows and crowbars. Tens of thousands of trees and shrubs, including many imports, were carefully planted. The Chinese gingko tree "was then a rarity in this country. But it took to the soot and smoke of the city as readily as a chimney sweep. The pines were less around its base was rutted with erosion.

Olmsted and Vaux, he said, were against statues in the park. "They destroy the natural effect, besides being harmful for the soil." Reed explained. (At the dedication of this Maz- zini memorial, on May 29, 1878, agea. wnite-beardea illiam Cul-len Bryant got a sunstroke that caused his death two weeks later. The poet, then editor of the Evening Post, is generally credited with being first to suggest that the city set aside a large parcel of land for a public park.) The ground behind the statue, now occupied by the Tavern on the Green, was once the Sheep-fold.

A flock of Southdown sheep was kept there until 1934, according to Reed, and a shepherd grazed his charges on the meadow across the drive. WfE sprinted across the drive, beating a solid steel bank of oncoming cars. "Olmsted would have been horrified to see this road today," Reed remarked. in gMagbSAgSMuis--' K'' I In the old days, he said, the drive was where people went to show off a smart team of trotters or a fancy, lacquered buggy. From 5 until about 7:30 P.M.

in Central Park used to be the best time and place to see New York's fashionables, taking their turns around the drive. In the winter sleighs coursed over the road big family-sized Canadian cutters, one-man sulky sleighs and Russian sleighs upholstered in luxurious furs. In those days, people used the drive to enjoy the park. "Now the drive is used simply to get uptown or downtown faster," Reed lamented. Like the rest of the city, Central Park was man-made.

Its SiS acres, stretching from 59th St. to 110th St. and from Fifth Ave. to Central Park West, were acquired by the city in the late 1850s, when it was, for the most part, a craggy, swampy, wretched wasteland. Over 200 squalid shacks had to be swept away.

"The low ground uuwu an aspiian pain nuo xne oome people nave complained that the tour doesn't go through the top of the "park, where the terrain is wilder," Reed said the other day, as we trolled over the winding route will take this afternoon. "But that's just the point. I want to how people how the park has changed over the years how the whole idea of what a park should be has changed." Reed enjoys a reputation for spending; long hours in city archives and libraries, steeping himself in the lore of an area before actually conducting one of his tours for the museum. And it shows. He Knows What Washington Wore On the walk he is to lead through Wall Street two weeks from today, participants will learn not only that George Washington was inaugurated in the old Federal Hall down there, but that he wore a brown broadcloth suit manufactured in Hartford, for the occasion.

In today's tour, Reed will blend botany with history, adding a touch of regret at the slow deterioration of this mid Manhattan oasis. Wearing a tan raincoat, his necktie whipping out in the wind, the tour leader pointed out a London plane tree, with the bark which flakes off in patches, giving it a mottled yellow and olive-colored hide. Its roots buckled out of the ground. "You see that?" Reed shot a finger toward the knuckled base of the trunk. "Erosion.

It's caused by the rain water washing off these asphalt paths. The paths are supposed to be gravel, to absorb water." He identified a hawthorn bush, then a common hackberry with sprays of twigs known as "witches brooms" sprouting from its branches. Reed nodded toward a ledge of rock jutting out from the lawn to our right and said that the smooth ridges streaked across it were etchings left by the Wisconsin glacier, which retreated over the park some 12,000 years ago. "Olmsted and Vanx," the guide went on, invoking the names of the men who designed Central Park Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux "were striving to recreate a natural wilderness within the city. That's why they did not coi-er that glacial outcropping over there.

They thought the setting here should be such that someone stepping off the street would be taking a step into the country." To further the desired illusion, the two landscape architects had the crosstown drives cut deep through the park, to keep them out of sight. The few buildings included in the original design were get down in hollows where they could not be Seen at a distance. Today's vista includes hilltop brick snack bars and swing stanchions. Reed paused by the bronze bust of Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian patriot, mounted on a gray granite shaft. The soill- tfc'oto courlesy Mukucu ei Lite City oi New York An eascnrsion to the Central Park Zoo to see the lions is still in style, but not those turn-of -the-.

century derbies. Zoo has been enlarged since the food old days. i.