The Essex Garden Club and the Essex Land Trust invite the general public to attend a program on Saving Central Park, with Lane Addonizio, an associate vice president for planning at the Central Park Conservancy, discussing the various scientific and technological practices to maintain and restore New York City's Central Park, a manmade landscape.

The free program is held Monday, March 5 at 2 p.m. at Essex Town Hall.

Some topics discussed will include the role of the Soil, Water, and Ecology Lab in maintaining the park's water bodies for its wildlife-mainly birds and fish-and its soil for the plantings and trees. Many technological innovations will be illustrated and discussed. Each has helped to restore the park's seemingly natural landscape. Addonizio will focus on such high-tech sites as the Great Lawn, the Lake, and the three woodlands.

The first public space of its kind, Central Park was conceived as a reprieve from the city for the benefit of all New Yorkers. The massive undertaking represented by its construction produced an idealized rural landscape replete with meadows, lakes, and woodlands, all carefully orchestrated to transport urban dwellers from the reality of their daily lives.

Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed the space, suggested that the park would be for "working people"-many of whom were destined to live their entire lives on the island of Manhattan-what a trip to the White Mountains or the Adirondacks was to those of "greater means." It would provide what Olmsted referred to as the "sense of enlarged freedom" that comes from contact with nature.

The park is not a naturally occurring landscape, however; it is a man-made construct, a product of 19th-century ingenuity designed to replicate the experience of nature at the heart of a great metropolis. As such, it has been subjected, throughout its history, to the pressures of encroachment and development as well as the forces of deterioration, impacts of intense use, and periodic cycles of resource deprivation and management neglect.

Today, after 30 years of restoration and stewardship by the Central Park Conservancy, the park is experiencing the longest period of sustained management in its 150-year history. The story of its creation, checkered past, and remarkable recovery supports the important idea that, as stewards, people can partner with nature's improvisational energy to shape the character and nurture the intrinsic value of ever-evolving places that hold meaning for us.

Addonizio oversees research and analysis for park-wide and project planning and collaborates with the vice president for planning, design, and construction on the development and management of the program of the park's ongoing restoration and reconstruction. Addonizio is the author of the Report on the Public Use of Central Park, the most comprehensive study of the park's use in its more than 150-year history, published by the conservancy in 2011.