A Tour Through Central Park’s Cruising Grounds

Tress’s new book, “The Ramble, NYC 1969” (Stanley/Barker), and a related exhibition currently at the Clamp gallery, in Chelsea, makes me rethink all this. The work was made concurrently with another series, “Open Space in the Inner City: Ecology and the Urban Environment.” The Ramble, a wooded area on the center-west side of Central Park, was its own “urban environment.” But Tress’s prime interest was in the people he found there: mostly good-looking but otherwise unremarkable young men who were passing through, standing around, and waiting. Long before Tress arrived, the Ramble was known as a place where gay men hooked up and had sex in the bushes. In 1968, when he was in his late twenties, the photographer lived at Riverside Drive and Seventy-second Street, a short walk from the Park, and, as he told the playwright Jordan Tannahill in Interview, the rocky, overgrown Ramble was “my own private cruising grounds.”