The heart of Central Park is Bethesda Fountain, which was built to commemorate the healing power of Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda in Israel. Frederic Law Olmsted, the park’s designer, hoped that the park would provide spiritual refreshment to urban masses from their travails. Now, a Christian ministry is realizing the symbolism in the 21st Century by erecting a critical care hospital at the park’s 97th Street Transverse and Fifth Avenue.

The field hospital is being built by a partnership between the Jewish Mt. Sinai Hospital, the NYC government and Franklin Graham’s evangelical Christian group Samaritan’s Purse. The facility will take in patients from the Mount Sinai Health System. Graham is the son of famous late preacher Billy Graham. Perhaps, this effort will create a healing effect on the public square so that people of different faiths, private enterprise, and the government can come together, respecting each other’s differences, while working for the public good.

Mt. Sinai’s Center of Spirituality and Health is run by psychiatrist Deborah Marin. She observes that “patients do use their faith to combat illness. … Those who have faith tend to be more resilient.”

Still, some people didn’t get the message of joining all of our forces, secular and religious, for the democratic public good. Instead, some cranks, both secular and religious, pour out calumny against their pet peeves. . Jimmy Kimmel spent a great deal of his time last night mocking the mad ramblings of Tampa, Florida pastor Rodney Howard Browne. He didn’t mention the real, practical efforts of Graham and his helpers from among NYC pastor in Central Park. Is Kimmel helping our city or just using snark to sow further division in this desperate hour? Come on, Jimmy! Help us out here!

The good Samaritan hospital in the park will consist of 14 tents, 68 patient beds and 10 ventilators, as well as X-ray equipment and a pharmacy, staffers said. In fact fortunate for us, the group specializes in treating victims of coronavirus plagues. They have a hospital in Italy and worked heroically during the Ebola epidemic in Africa. In that battle, one of their doctors was stricken with the disease but recovered at the medical school hospital of Emory University.

The field hospital was still being set up Monday, with an opening today. David Beidel of New Hope Community Church of Staten Island expressed relief that he and other church groups could find a way to help in this crisis. ” It’s been frustrating seeing our city in crisis and not knowing what to do. The medical professionals are exhibiting a level of heroism that is awe inspiring. We were honored to help them and those suffering with COVID-19 in this small way. “

Samaritan’s Purse medical personnel use the twenty seconds while they wash their hands to pray for each of their patients by name. It is fitting that they do that at their present location.

Central Park is “a specimen of God’s handiwork,” said its designer Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903). He hoped that it would heal “the hundreds of thousands of tired workers” of their “vital exhaustion,” “nervous irritation” and “constitutional depressions.” Olmsted believed that he had a calling to help religious leaders to bring spiritual relief to New Yorkers. As Vice President of the New York State Charities Aid Association, he circulated appeals to ministers asking that they send to the park their congregants who needed recuperation from stress and illness.

His and partner the Jewish landscape architect Calvert Vaux’s design of Central Park artfully and systematically provided vistas and paths that would make one feel like the special object of a loving God and a beautiful city. Olmsted said every path, rock, flower and tree had a functional purpose in the creation of healing scenes. He described the design in terms that Christian social reformers used to promote their civic rejuvenation efforts. The park would revive “the poetic element of human nature” and exercise a “harmonizing and refining influence…favorable to courtesy, self-control and temperance.”

In such a manner the New York City faithful were etching their belief in God and compassion for the poor into the granite-like harshness of 19thCentury life. Olmsted constructed Central Park; Archbishop John Joseph Hughes erected St. Patrick’s Cathedral; Louis Klopsch vastly enlarged The Bowery Mission; Jacob Riis pioneered a new faith-inspired documentary journalism; and Russian Jews established the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

The recollection of the tremendous impact that the work of 19th Century religious New Yorkers still has on city life sets a high mark of accomplishment for believers today to try to surpass. Now in the religious context of contemporary New York City, Jews, Christians and seculars are providing a similar effort in Central Park. The city has come full circle to a new democratic public square that has room for everybody’s efforts, the religious and non-religious.