Bryant Park is the former site of the legendary Crystal Palace, a fantasy of a building made almost entirely of glass. I suspect that the fine marble curb around the central lawn marks the former outline of the building, but that's probably just a fantasy of its own.

What is more obvious, or at least poetically just (the building burned down in minutes when the wooden floorboards caught fire one night), is that the city that has sprung up in its absence is a beautiful and wonderful thing, with most of the ugly bits quite hidden behind a screen of trees.