The Central Park Conservancy working on renewing the lake, which means removing some sediment, draining some parts of the lake, and rescuing the wildlife in it. The NY Times witnessed the "fish rescue" in one area, and the findings included finding a 30-pound snapping turtle and almost 3,000 fish, like a bullheaded catfish and pumpkinseed sunfish. All of the inhabitants--see the slideshow here-- were relocated to another watery home in the lake.......

Gucci has been touting its love (or ♥) of New York with a new "Gucci ♥ NY" line of luxury products and 46,000 flagship store on Fifth Avenue, but its legal department never cleared the usage of the trademarked "I ♥ NY" logo. According to the Post, the Empire State Development agency was never contacted for permission. Accompanying another Post article about the "I ♥ NY" logo being used for cigarette and ashtrays, it turns......

Photo via Annulla's Flickr. Within the 843 acres of Central Park one will find 9,000 benches, and many of them tell a story (or at least a name). In 1986 the Central Park Conservancy began their Adopt-A-Bench program to raise money for upkeep. For $7,500 (way less than your yearly rent, and this is forever!) you will get an engraved plaque on one of the benches. There are also select locations with rustic handmade......

Have you re-read the classic coming-of-age JD Salinger novel, Catcher in the Rye, lately? amNewYork takes a trip down memory lane, and 5th Ave, with a pair of Holden Caulfield-tinted glasses. Apparently people like the Central Park Conservancy historian get a ton of inquiries about the New York references in the novel. The most popular question, "Where do the ducks go in the winter?" Referring to the ducks in the Central Park pond that our......

Green M&Ms have held this mythic place in many people's candy-eating consciences, whether due to fables, Van Halen's concert riders or advertising. And now green M&M's will be associated with a very real place in New York - Central Park. Tomorrow, M&M's World Store in Times Square will start selling a special new color, Central Park Green, and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the Central Park Conservancy. These M&M's have a mottled......

While 30 Rock writers are on the picket line, Alec Baldwin is worried about his neighborhood.. And listening to the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. This morning, during a segment where Brian was discussing the future of NYC's streetscape with Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and the Open Planning Project's Mark Gorton, the acclaimed actor and gossip target made his debut as a caller. After joking that he needed a job, here's a transcription......

New York City is in the middle of Fashion Week, and last night was Ralph Lauren's 40th anniversary as a designer. And, as Style.com reports, he "staged an extraordinarily lavish runway show and black-tie after-party in the Central Park Conservancy" last night. It was such a big deal that Mayor Bloomberg and his lady friend Diana Taylor stepped out! New York magazine's Show & Talk blog wrote this:Ralph himself seemed blasé. Standing by an......

Dipping your toes into a city fountain could mean a $50 fine, the Parks Department wants to remind us. Although cascading waters are tempting, the city says that the fountains' water is recirculated and not treated with chlorine, which can make it a breeding ground for bacteria. Mmm, bacteria. Plus, there may be broken glass or other objects that you can't see. There are 49 fountains under the jurisdiction of the Parks Department. A......

When the Parks Dept. started to dredge The Lake in Central Park, they found huge fish specimens that have flourished unnoticed in the waters for years. Like the apocryphall tales of unseen alligators growing to enormous lengths in the sewers, dredgers found koi that were three feet long and weighing up to 30 pounds in the lake. Dredgers also dug up 50 lb. turtles and freshwater clams. Who knew? The lake is the last......

As we mentioned last month, The Central Park Conservancy was fed up dealing with park vagrants given to scaring away visitors and dropping prodigious amounts of feces all over Olmstead & Vaux's urban jewel, so it hired a pack of dogs to chase the interlopers off. This is not as horrifying as it sounds, unless you are a huge fan of the Canada geese that have made Central Park their year-round home. The large honking......

Earlier today, the city's Parks & Recreation department and the Central Park Conservancy cut the ribbon on the restoration of Central Park's Bethesda Terrace Arcade. As we mentioned yesterday, the tiles were removed from the Arcade's ceiling more than 20 years ago due to severe damage. While two panels were restored in 1998 and 2002, it wasn't until the Central Park Conservancy was given $3.5 million by Evelyn West that the rest of the......

The Parks Department is opening up the arcade at Bethesda Fountain Terrace tomorrow. The Terrace Arcade had a Minton tile ceiling and the the tiles were removed for cleaning in 1984. Now, after a $7 million effort funded by the Central Park Conservancy, the 16,000 tiles are ready to be seen by New Yorkers again. The ribbon-cutting is tomorrow at 10:30AM at the Bethesda Terrace Arcade (in the middle of Central Park at 72nd......

The front page of the NY Times' Metro Section has a big graphic showing how the Central Park Conservancy is restoring Bethesda Terrace that's very nice, but the interactive graphic from NYTimes.com is very cool as it breaks apart the terrace. It explains the different parts of the project, from the the new waterproof membrane on the upper terrace to reinstalling tile patterns. Back in 1984, over 16,000 tiles that were on the ceiling......

The Central Park Conservancy, the private, non-profit organization that manages the park, let us know about some new signs that will be appearing soon. It's a call to action for park goers to help out: Fifteen signs are being installed with "before" photographs showing how far the park has come since the 1970s and 1980s, with the words "What would we do without your donations?" on them. This is a rendering of the sign......

+ Delays are plaguing Philip Johnson’s Urban Glass House. + The Central Park Conservancy is going global. + Paris’ Phare Tower recalls Grand Central Terminal’s machine-age fascination, reports New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. + A map that's “one of the most beautiful, important and accurate plans of New York,” according to IN Phelps Stokes, who designed the University Settlement House at Eldridge and Rivington and Columbia’s St. Paul's Chapel. + An architect who......

There are lunatics out there. Some jerk left a 2 pound ham in Central Park that a dog found and, being a 6 year old Labrador retriever, he ate the meat. Only for the dog's owner, Martha Redding, to throw away the meat and discover it was full of 3-inch pins. Milo the dog ate 31 pins, and his vet fed him three cans of dog food and induced vomiting to get rid of them.......

Way back when, Gothamist had a favorite playground. Well, we had many favorite playgrounds, but there was one that always made our heart jump: the Ancient Playground. Anytime that the family would head up to get some "culture" at the Metropolitan Museum we inisisted that a trip to the playground just to the north be a part of the package. And we know we weren't alone. What kid didn't love crawling through sandy tunnels......

Since the deal to have it manage Central Park for the Parks Department was first hammered out in 1998, we've been pretty big fans of the Central Park Conservancy. It is very hard to argue that the park is not in better shape now that in was then and that its future looks even better. Sure there have been some hiccups, but these things happen when you manage a public space of that scale........

Gothamist enjoys a good game of "Duck...Duck...Goose!" every now and then, but we only really like Canada geese when they are flying in the air - because that means they are not on the ground, producing that really gross greenish grey poop. Central Park has a huge goose poop headache, as its goose population has grown from 30 to 300 over the past couple of years - and each goose can produce 1 to 3......

As the Times points out in its article about Bette Midler's New York Restoration Project, the usual response to a celebrity dipping their influence and pocketbooks into other peoples issues and neighborhoods is often, shall we say, not a good one. Or as Midler puts it: "There's a distinct possibility that it's vanity, but even if it were, so what? The gardens stand as a testament to nature, and I love nature despite what......

Tupper Thomas, President of the Prospect Park Alliance...

Earlier this week, a Daily News article taught us that many city fountains are maintained by Joe McBain, an employee of the Central Park Conservancy. In addition to money (though homeless people usually take the quarters, dimes and nickels), he's fished out "MetroCards to cell phones to watches" - maybe the watches fly off the wrist when tossing in a coin? The money goes to the city's "general fund" or towards replacement parts for the......

After last summer's protracted success in barring a big protest rally in Central Park on the eve of the Republican National Convention, the Parks Department is proposing to put a cap on the number of big rallies the Park can have. Only six gatherings of 50,000 or more people would be allowed - and four of them are for Metropolitan Opera/NY Philharmonic performances! Now, Gothamist is sure that some groups will protest this, but the......

With next Monday's dismantling of The Gates fast approaching, Newsday looks at how the Gates will live on beyond the confines of Central Park and obssessive photobloggers. All the parts will be recycled, and here's a rundown:- The steel bases are to be melted and recast as rods for reinforcing concrete, steel plates or steel coils.- The aluminum corners and base sleeves are to be recycled into such products as gutters and aluminum sheeting.- The......

It's been pointed out (thanks, Joe) that some people have been scamming people (tourists, New York natives) into buying tickets to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates. The Gates is a free exhibit, as their website clearly spells out. However, this doesn't mean various other cottage industries haven't popped up to take advantage of this event. Newsday looked at how the city and businesses are hoping to profit. The city, which isn't paying for the......

It's a win for the Mayor, Commissioner Kelly, and the Central Park Conservancy: A judge agrees with the city and bars two protest groups from gathering in Central Park for a pre-Republican Convention protest. Two reasons stated: Groups had waited too long to file suit and security concerns. Manhattan Federal Court Judge William H. Pauley suggested other parks to protest in, like Van Cortlandt in the Bronx and Flushing-Corona in Queens, with Judge Pauley calling......

The big protest group, United for Peace and Justice, has agreed to protest and rally at along Seventh Avenue and the West Side Highway during the Republican National Convention. This site, proposed by the NYPD in an ultimatum of sorts, is less than ideal as it's far from the convention, but UPJ said, "The clock is ticking; we need to move on. So, we decided to take the high road here." Because UPJ has agreed......

On the heels of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly's announcement about stepped up security measures during the Republican National Convention this August (think security sweeps on trains coming into Penn Station and the NYPD monitoring protest websites for protestors posing as volunteers), Mayor Bloomberg made clear he was not supportive of the NYPD and FDNY rallying outside the convention and the city rejected a plan for an antiwar protest at the Great Lawn the day before......

Gothamist has many thoughts about the arrest of graffiti artist James De La Vega, or De La Vega (in chalk) as many know him. On one hand, his neighborhood loves his murals and doesn't consider them blights, which is contrary to what the Bronx District Attorney thinks. However, he was doing something illegal, and, besides, all great graf artists get arrested at least once, so he should take it like a man. And he was......

Another fundraising idea from the Central Park Conservancy: Celebrities, politicians, and designers design Central Park benches. The benches can be found around the park at the Dairy, Tavern on the Green, the Boathouse and the Dana Center at Harlem Meer. Then, in November, they will be on display in different Chelsea galleries, before being auctioned off on November 20. This is sort of like Cow Parade.......