All Quiet On The West Side Front

Nathan Ward’s “Gym Crow Must Go” of “The Time Machine” in the April issue is a vivid account of the crisis that engulfed Columbia University and the Parks Department twenty-five years ago, yet the story has a coda too, a happy ending of sorts. The excavation site for the gym languished for more than two decades, but in 1990-91 the scars to the land were finally healed. Through a city-funded capital renovation the hillside was re-landscaped, and the gaping hole left over from the debacle of 1968 was converted to a lily pond. Nature, with a push from humanity, has a way of reclaiming itself.