The spectator in chapter sixteen looks south from the north-east corner of the designated intersection. If s/he were to stand in this spot and look in almost any other direction Central Park would be in view. Instead the chapter shows the section of Fifth Avenue which runs through the Fifties – calling attention to the upper class lives which used to be lived there and the great dangers which now face anyone wishing to stroll along its sidewalks. The chapter once again compares the sublimity and danger of this machine wilderness to the wilderness of the American West, but it is not the West’s great Canons (the lowest points in the West) but rather the Continental Divide (among the highest and most mountainous). Just as the Divide separates the eastern and western flow of water, Fifth Avenue "separates East from West in the city."

That this chapter situates the reader so close to the Park, and yet refuses to mention the Park at all, suggests that the chapter seeks to call upon the Park as if under erasure. By going to the Park and looking away from it, Marcus is able to signify its presence with its absence, in effect reminding readers that it exists while refusing to acknowledge its existence. No one of the book’s twenty-five chapters, in fact, is dedicated to a park, though many of the drawings depict the park spaces close to the buildings on which they focus (chapter thirteen, for instance, positions Madison Square Park between the spectator and the Metropolitan Life Tower). But Marcus’ neglect for Central Park is especially perplexing for two reason. Most primarily is the Park’s privileged possition among all New York’s parks. It was the first landscaped park in America, and remains one of the most widely known city parks in the world. Of only slightly less significance is the fact that Marcus must have been quite familiar with this area of the Park. Chapter sixteen is comes closer in the book to Marcus’ apartment at 30 East Seventy-Forth Street, just fifteen blocks to the north of this chapter’s point of view and mere feet from the Park that it ignores. The Park must necessarily have been part of Marcus’ daily life in 1921, and his refusal to account for it appears to be a deliberate act of exclusion rather than a careless oversight.

Central Park was designed and built (built indeed – the Park is no more natural than the skyscrapers which now surround it) between 1857 and 1863. While it was planned long before the rise of the skyscraper, the Park seems almost to anticipate that rise in its suspicion of built environments. Its principle landscaper, Fredrick Law Olmstead, worked within an understanding of Manhattan which would seem to share much with the one Marcus puts forward in this book. By reserving for recreation what would become a central portion of the city, the Park was intended to preempt architecture’s total occupation of Manhattan. It seeks to interrupt the monotonous sequence of building with a seemingly unbuilt space– and in doing so seeks to rebuild the individuals crushed by the overwhelming size and oppressive angularity of city architecture. Central Park is an articulation of the widely shared sense in the nineteenth century that Manhattan was about to become unlivable for the people who tried to live and work there, and that by constructing something "natural" the people could be rebuilt – re-created through their recreation – and that the city would once again become inhabitable for those who could not afford to leave whenever they wanted.

Marcus does not seem to entertain this hope. He is perhaps skeptical of the park’s assertion that it presents a real alternative to the city. This is not simply because the park is as contrived as any skyscraper, but also because New Yorkers have acquired their modes of perception and experience from the fallen world of the skyscraper. Even in looking at the "nature" of the park they can see only the city. They view the park’s rolling hills with the same lens through which they view the Metropolitan Life Tower. The people of the twentieth century can see the Park only as they see St. Patrick’s Cathedral – as a thing which arouses the desire to escape the modern world, but which evidences as well the impossibility of that escape.