The reopening of New York is getting a soundtrack. Mayor de Blasio has asked Clive Davis, the nearly nonagenarian record-business legend, to pull together a Central Park concert for the ages. It’s tentatively scheduled for August 21. No word yet on who’ll be onstage, but it’s hard to imagine a New York artist who’d reject the call if it came. It’s a great idea, as has been borne out by experience. Especially when New York has been going through a tough moment, a Central Park concert has been a largely unifying, joyous experience.
The most thoroughly remembered, of course, is Simon & Garfunkel in 1981. Half a million people showed up. (The two men live on Central Park West and Fifth Avenue, respectively, which meant that they were playing their own shared front yard.) It was a reunion, because the duo had split up extremely rancorously in 1970, and to a lot of baby boomers who’d come of age with them, it felt like a dissonance had finally resolved itself. That was perhaps true for Simon and Garfunkel themselves: You can hear Artie’s voice open up with emotion on the later verses of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.â€Â (Ten years after that, in August 1991, Paul Simon performed again in the park, this time solo. I had moved to Manhattan two weeks earlier, and that night was the first step in my becoming a proper New Yorker: I had put on the live broadcast of the concert in my tiny apartment, and then said to myself, Wait a minute, dummy, you live here now — you can just walk up there and hear it. So I did.)
The Philharmonic, too, has regularly brought people together on the Great Lawn, as does Shakespeare in the Park over at the Delacorte. SummerStage turned the one-offs into a series, on a smaller and wonderful scale. On a more solemn night a year after 9/11, a park concert featured an array of artists from the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to Billy Joel. Even a pair of Diana Ross shows that went awry in 1983 were, let’s say, learning experiences: Mostly what everyone learned was “don’t try to power through and ignore a colossal thunderstorm.â€Â Good for drama, though, and the video is a keeper.
Clive Davis, for his part, has a big question before him: Who could possibly be the epic closing act on such a program? Is it an enormous star of recent years, like Lady Gaga or Cardi B? (Or will Taylor Swift kick off the night with “Welcome to New York�) Is it instead a classic-rock oldster hugely identified with the city? Billy Joel doing “New York State of Mind,†Deborah Harry doing any damn thing she wants to? Or — and this would be the choice of at least one of us here at Curbed dot com — how about Jay Z and Alicia Keys doing “Empire State of Mind� There’s nothin’ you can’t do / these streets will make you feel brand new.