"The Catcher in the Rye" and the Pond in Central Park

In the “The Catcher in the Rye” by American writer Jerome David Salinger,  Holden Caulfield asked "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?"
 J.D. Salinger was born and raised in New York. He  grew up on Park
Avenue. The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. A best seller for life, the book has sold over 120 million copies all over the world. The main settings for the Catcher in the Rye is New York City. 

“The little lake”  is located several hundred feet from  Grand Army Plaza and 5th Avenue.

The Pond is one of Central Park’s seven naturalistic water bodies. It’s hard to believe that this setting – like almost all of Central Park – is completely man-made.  It is one of my favorite  places in the Central park.  I had been working in midtown Manhattan for 13 years and visited this place at least once every month.  The pond  is pretty in every season.   When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park, they imagined a  direct reprieve from the city’s busy street.

At the northeast end of the Pond  there is Gapstow Bridge. If you're a fan of Home Alone 2, you know that  this  is the area where Kevin meets the pigeon lady. Gapstow Bridge is one of the icons of Central Park, Manhattan in New York City. The first bridge was designed by Jacob Wrey Mould in 1874 and was made out of wood.  Due to excessive tear and wear, it lasted only twenty years and  was replaced by the present simple stone structure in 1896, by Howard & Caudwell. 

Working closely with creators of the Central Park Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, Mould designed many of the park's notable landmarks, including  Belvedere Castle,  and  a great number of bridges.

Stretching 76 feet in its full length, the arched Gapstow walkway made of Manhattan schist—rock dating back 450 million years and uncovered from the great Wisconsin Glacier about 12,000 years ago.

 If you look at the north from the bridge you see  Wollman rink which replaced part of the Pond in 1951 with an ice-skating rink.  Facing south, the bridge  offers the quintessential view of the city, with the Plaza Hotel and other towers rising behind the backdrop of trees reflected, amidst the ducks, in the waters of the Pond.

Sanremo bridge

Official site of the Central park says: "Bearing a striking resemblance to the Ponte di San Francesco in San Remo, Italy, Gapstow Bridge is yet another example of traditional architecture in Central Park".
I found at least two other bridgges in Europe that look similar to Gapstow Bridge.One of the is  Ponte di San Francesco, Subiaco, Lazio, Italy, about 45 miles east of Rome.
 And the second -Ponte medievale di Laurino, by Costa del Cilento , also on Italy.

Ponte di San Francesco

Ponte medievale di Laurino

Atlas - a bronze statue on 5th Avenue and “Atlas shrugged” by Ayn Rand

     There were two famous brothers in Greek mythology – Prometheus and Atlas and both were punished -   first Atlas and later Prometheus.  There are two sculptures of the two brothers  near Rockefeller Center in New York.  You can find more details in my old post about Prometheus. 

     Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan is a very crowded street and only in the early morning you can make the picture of the statue of Atlas as if you are alone on one of the famous streets in the world. The monument sits in in front of Rockefeller building across from St. Patrick's Cathedral.
It is the largest sculpture at Rockefeller Center.

     This huge bronze figure was created by sculptor Lee Lawrie with the help of Rene Paul Chambellan in 1937. Chambellan also created small Nereids and Dolphins on the fountain near Rockefeller center. 

    In Greek mythology Atlas is the titan of astronomy and navigation. He was a leader in the war between the Olympian Gods and the Titans.   After the war was lost, Atlas received the harshest punishment by King Zeus:  he had to hold up the heavens with bare hands and bear their weight on his shoulders forever. Atlas instructed the mankind in the art of astronomy.  A lost traveler can use the statue as a compass -the North-South axis of the sphere on Atlas' shoulders points towards  the North Star as seen from New York City.

  You can see this statue on the cover page of one of the most published books in the world, “Atlas Shrugged”  by Ayn Rand.  The theme of the novel, as Rand described it, is "the role of man's mind in existence".  "If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders--what would you tell him to do?" Rand wrote, answering, "To shrug."  

  The book, describing a dystopian United States, was first published in 1957. John Galt is one of the main characters of the book. He is the leader of the of society's most productive citizens believing that world, where individual is not free to create and have a profit, where every person is a slave to society and government, will end in the chaos and disaster.  John Galt believes that the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society. Galt was an engineer and invented a  new type of motor for the company he had been working for.

     Forced by his employer, for the "social good," to share his part of profit  with his fellow workers, who contributed nothing to the motor's development, Galt walks out of his job, determined to "stop the motor of the world." 

   Ayn Rand   (Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction writing her career.

  She supported Kerensky Revolution ( February 1917) and criticized the Bolshevik Revolution ( October 1917). She graduated from University of Petrograd in 1924 and in 1925, after obtaining permission for visiting relatives in the United States, Ayn came to USA. Her first novel "We are living" was semi-autobiographical and was set in Soviet Russia.

Ayn was so impressed with the skyline of Manhattan upon her arrival  in New York Harbor that she cried what she later called "tears of splendor”. Later she wrote about New York: "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline”. Rand wrote much of the book in New York and based many of the novel's fictional sites on real places in the city.

The story of Atlas Shrugged expresses Rand's philosophy rational self-interest. She wrote:

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors(…)And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it."  “"Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others”

    “Atlas Shrugged” debuted on The New York Times Bestseller List at #13 three days after its publication - and was on the list for 22 consecutive weeks. Objectivism movement originally started out as an informal gathering of friends, who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment on East 36th Street in New York City to discuss philosophy. Later Rand   promoted her Objectivist philosophy, lecturing students in Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT.

     Rand died of heart failure in 1982, at her home in New York City. Rand's funeral was attended by some of her followers, including Alan Greenspan (the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006). A six-foot floral arrangement in  the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket. Ayn Rand always wore a gold dollar sign as a brooch on her lapel.

     The “Ayn Rand Institute” began operations on February 1, 1985, three years after Rand's death. More than 50 years after publication, sales are booming. According to a press release from this Institute, over 7 million copies had been sold by the US publishers as of January 2010, with sales in 2009 along being over 500,000 copies.  The numbers do not include sales from other countries. Very few novels have had an impact as continuing as "Atlas Shrugged".

The Wall Street Journal published  statistics about  "Atlas Shrugged" sales:
1980s -- 74,300 copies per year 
1990s -- 95,300 copies per year 
2000s -- 167,028 copies per year 
2010s -- 303,523 copies per year 

2012- -- 359,105 copies per year

    On the 22nd of April, 1999, the United States Postal Service has issued a stamp dedicated to  Ayn Rand.

     Part I of the American film adaptation of the   novel Atlas Shrugged was released in 2011, part 2- in 2012, and Part  will hit theaters on Summer 2014.


Learn more:

Forbes: Who is John Galt?
Ayn Rand Institute
Ayn Rand Quotes

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of "The Little Prince", in New York.

     This charming building with blue trim, and over-flowing window boxes sits on East 52 just less than a half-block from  5th Avenue. There is a plaque on the building that says that  several chapters of  “The Little Prince”  by Saint-Exupery  were written in a studio on the second floor.  On the ground floor of the building was “La Vie Parisienne” (The Parisian Life), a French restaurant.  

     Today restaurant “La Grenouille” occupies the first and the second floors – you can book upstairs lovely semi-private area. 

      Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), was a French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator. He had been working in Argentina as a director of the airmail Argentina airline- this period of his life is briefly explored   in the first 3-D IMAX fiction film “Wings of Courage".     

     Saint-Exupéry won the U.S. National Book Award for his book memoir “Wind, Sand and Stars”, that he was able to receive  a year later, in  1941 here in New York , in the hotel Astor. The hotel was on Times Square and was turned down in 1967. The French and English versions of this book were different. The author removed sections from the French and added new material specifically written for American readers.

     In 1940's the studio on the second floor was a place where Paris-born artist Bernard Lamotte lived. LaMotte attended the Art school at the Sorbonne, Paris  where he met   Antoine de Saint-Exupéry . In 1932 the artist moved to New York City.

     This studio, called ”Le Bocal” (“The Fishbowl”)  was one of the places where the famous  French writer Saint-Exupéry worked on  “Le petit prince” (The Little Prince”).

      Saint-Exupery sailed from Lisbon to New York on the last day of 1940. He planned to stay in New York for four weeks but remained for more than two years. He had travelled there on a personal mission to persuade its government to quickly enter the war against Nazi Germany.

     The writer was isolated by his inability to speak English and had little news of his family or friends. He survived a number of airplane crashes in the previous 20 years and  his health was  poor.

     Saint-Exupery wrote and drew "The Little Prince" during the second half of 1942. The writer had for years sketched the  little figure on letters, manuscript pages and restaurant tablecloths. This novel, beginning with a crash  of a plane in the Sahara desert  in 1935, in is based on his own experience.  On the fourth day after the crash,   Bedouin on a camel saved him from the dehydration.

   The novella is the most read and most translated book in the French language, and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France. It was translated into more than 250 languages with sales more than 140 million copies. “Le petit prince” is  one of the best-selling books ever published.

     The original autographed manuscript of The Little Prince are in The Morgan Library & Museum,  in Manhattan, New York City.

     Only weeks after his novella was first published in April 1943 the author-aviator joined the Free French Forces - the resistance organization founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1940 in London.  Some of   Saint-Exupéry philosophical writings were created during  his lonely flights – he often took a notebook with him.

     Saint-Exupéry took off in an unarmed P-38 on his last spy mission from an airbase on Corsica  and did not return. An unidentifiable body wearing French colors was found several days after his disappearance and buried in Carqueiranne in September.

     In September 1998 a French fisherman  found a silver identity bracelet with the names of Saint-Exupéry and of his wife Consuelo. In May 2000 diver found the partial remains of a plane near to where the bracelet was previously found. After a two-year delay imposed by the French government, the remnants of the aircraft were recovered in October 2003. In June 2004 the fragments were given to the Air and Space Museum in Paris, France.

     In April 2012 a Parisian auction house announced the discovery of two previously unknown draft manuscript pages of “The Little Prince” that had been found and which included new text. The little prince arrives on Earth and meets the first person on the planet, a completely new character, who’s described as an “ambassador of the human spirit.”

    This “ambassador” was almost too busy to speak to his inquisitive interlocutor, saying he’s looking, in vain, for a missing six-letter word. 

These two pages are the only pages from "The Little Prince" in the world apart from the manuscript in the New York "Morgan library.”

Visit Restaurant: "La Grenouille" , classic French cuisine

The Little Prince (Wordsworth Children's Classics) (Wordsworth Collection)