A posting today from The New York Times‘ City Room blog tells the story of how a devastating storm that brought down hundreds of trees in Central Park last year has actually become a blessing in disguise. Parkgoers and park employees alike were horror struck at the initial devastation. But now, with cleanup efforts complete and plans to replant in the works, New York’s park commission and the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit agency that runs the park, are seeing the opportunity they now have to restore an overgrown park to the original vision of its creators, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

The de facto thinning out of densely wooded areas is closer to what the park’s original designers intended, said Douglas Blonsky, the Conservancy’s president and the administrator of Central Park. “The concept was of drawing you into the park and having these visual experiences,” he said. “You would see something in the distance that would cause you to say, ‘Hey, I want to go see what that is.’ ”

Mr. [Adrian] Benepe [parks commissioner] said: “They were painting a portrait in the land. And this is like when you find a painting and it’s been overpainted somehow over the years, and you have the opportunity to take all that overpainting off and see the landscape as Olmsted and Vaux intended it.”

I like this metaphor of park as painting.

Here in Boston, we’ve been engaging in some “painting” restoration of our own. For the past couple of years I’ve done some volunteer work for the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, which is devoted to restoring and preserving Boston’s own Frederick Law Olmsted masterpiece. After the completion of the Big Dig – that infamous multi-year infrastructure project that put the freeways cutting through Boston underground – it was possible to restore portions of the Emerald Necklace that had been destroyed by overpasses and other roads. For the first time in many decades, the Emerald Necklace is once again the connected chain of parks that Olmsted envisioned, and the work of the Conservancy is returning the parks that comprise the Necklace to their original designs, removing non-native plantings and other elements to return woodlands to their rightful states and restoring the Muddy River to once again be the point of access and landscape amenity that Olmsted intended for many potential users of his park.

It’s heartening to see that people revere both history and our public green spaces and, even in today’s fast-paced, high-tech world, recognize the value in preserving both. Because now more than ever before we need spaces like these, of which Frederick Law Olmsted said:

We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day’s work is done, where they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets.

In this article from The Boston Globe last year, we learn how the city hurts our brain.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

Apparently, living in the city, despite all its good qualities that made us want to live here in the first place, can make us stupid, tired, aggressive and depressed. What we can do about it? Get thee to a park.

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

It seems that Olmsted already knew what scientists over a hundred years later are “discovering” – that occasional immersion into the tranquility of a green space is good for us urban dwellers.