Introduction to Central Park

In 1937 Walter Benjamin separated his work on from the seemingly infinite, and therefore interminable, labor of theArcades Project, on which he had been working since 1927. He hoped that the work on might amount to a miniature model4 of the Arcades, but in the course of writing The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire in Summer and Fall 1938, it became clear that the project would stand on its own. Like the Arcades, it took on an elaborate and expansive architecture of its own. According to Tiedemann, The three sections of the 1938 work ('The Boheme,' 'the Flaneur,' and 'the Modern') should together make up the second part of the projected tripartite book... In the book's overall construction as Benjamin represented it to himself ... a first part was projected under the title

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