The word “escape” makes me think of an exit. Usually an exit from a small enclosure onto a wide open environment. But I wonder if the more common practice isn’t to enter something, like a secluded zone, in order to “escape” from large and chaotic spaces. Like when we escape from life into VR programs, movies, books, and fantasies in our head. Carl Schurz Park offers a little of both kinds of escape. With its sculpted gardens and wide sloping steps and mounds, it feels serene and intimate despite its proximity to public power (Gracie Mansion, where the mayor of New York lives, is adjacent to it) and it’s remarkably quiet, despite flanking the noisy whirlpool of a city of eight million people. A shaded sanctuary that’s also very much the Great Outdoors. A large park, where New Yorkers escape their tiny apartments. Children and dogs run free. A long promenade — the East River Greenway — runs along one side, beyond which stretches the East River, a tidal estuary of an expansive bay of the Atlantic Ocean.