I suppose there must have been a time when the Central Park Boathouse, a stately construction facing southwest across a spindle of the park’s serpentine lake, felt like a novel and forward-looking addition to the city’s attractions. But it has long been a place of nostalgia, a Big Apple archetype whose soft-focus mythology seems impossible to separate from its extant bones. It’s no accident, I suspect, that the boathouse is famous as one of the locations in “ ,” ’s 1989 masterpiece about self-protective emotional illusions and the cinematic perfection of New York.
(Maybe those are, in some sense, the exact same thing?) As a building and as a restaurant, it evokes both the Victorian era, when an original boathouse was built on the site, and the nineteen-eighties (itself a decade fascinated by Victorianism), when the restaurant first opened. When you’re lunching at a table at the edge of the terrace, gazing into a precise, -constructed vista—the dark viridescence of the lake, the wildness of the Ramble, the far-off stateliness of Bethesda Fountain—the city all but disappears, except for the tops of distant buildings poking up like lace around the periphery of the treeline. After more than a year of closure, the Boathouse restaurant reopened this spring, under Legends Hospitality, a massive operations company that also oversees concessions at the , the Circle Line, and —not to mention numerous facilities outside of New York, including the Indianapolis Motor S.