It's not a welcome sight. Until two months ago, the spot where Blonsky is standing was in the densest woodland in the park. Thick with American elms, oaks and tulip trees, the Great Hill in the park's northern section seemed far removed from the hustle of New York City.

Then, in the space of half an hour on the night of Aug. 18, a freak blast of 80-mph wind knocked down more than 500 trees, including some of the park's oldest and grandest, and battered 1,000 others, causing devastation unknown in the park's 156-year history.

The windstorm "was brutal," says Blonsky, the park's administrator and president of the Central Park Conservancy, the non-profit organization that manages the park under a contract with the city. "It was unbelievable to see what could happen in 20 minutes."

After two months of cleanup, the sadness of the destruction is giving way to plans for replanting — and for restoring the damaged areas of the park in a way closer to the original vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the designers whose meticulous blend of woods, meadows, gardens, water and striking views make Central Park "synonymous" with a successful urban park, says Adrian Benepe, the city parks commissioner.

The conservancy held a weekend fundraiser to help bring in the estimated $3 million needed to repair the storm damage.

While the park serves as a backyard for city residents, it has grown as a tourist attraction, especially since the art project The Gates, consisting of thousands of orange fabric-draped arches, was installed in the park for two weeks in 2005. The park gets more than 25 million visitors a year from the U.S. and overseas.

"When I started here in 1985, tourists never came to the park. Now on the weekends. it's hard to hear English being spoken," Blonsky says.

The storm damage has required expensive work at a time when Central Park's budget already has been squeezed by a recession-related drop in contributions. The conservancy, which gets $5 million annually from the city and raises an additional $20 million in private donations, this year laid off 10% of its staff and cut its budget by 10%.

It took 70 workers eight days to clear the park roads and paths of fallen trees and to remove the most dangerous damaged branches. "For a while, the north end of Central Park was looking like an Adirondack logging camp," Benepe says. "It was a very frightening and dismaying sight for all the people who know the park and love it."

Now, crews are filling in holes caused by uprooted trees and, to avoid erosion on now-bare ground such as the slopes of the Great Hill, lining up hay bales and planting grass seed. The tree trunks downed by the storm lie in two massive log piles like the ruins of ancient temples.

Each loss is recorded in the park's GPS database, created last year when workers catalogued every tree in the park with a trunk bigger than 6 inches across — all 23,568 of them.

Many of the trees that were killed are virtually irreplaceable, particularly 26 American elms. Dutch elm disease has endangered the species for years, and new disease-resistant varieties don't grow as tall, Benepe says, or have the vase-like shape evocative of "a spray of water that's been buffeted by the wind."

Next month, large tub grinders will be used to turn the logs into woodchips. The threat of Asian longhorned beetles, whose larvae might spread if the wood is shipped elsewhere, means the trees can't be used as lumber.

The planting of new trees will begin in the spring, Blonsky says, but it will take two years to replant the damaged areas fully. The replanting is an opportunity to increase plant diversity that will encourage more wildlife, especially birds, and bring more variation to the terrain, Blonsky says. Olmsted and Vaux designed the park to have vistas from one area to another, some of which were lost when the woods grew up.

"A lot of the woodland developed not because of Olmstedian vision but because of neglect," Blonsky says.

Designing an apparently wild landscape is not new for the park, Benepe points out.

"Central Park is a 19th-century Disneyland," he says, entirely created by its designers. "Every tree was placed there deliberately, very specific species placed in very specific places and carefully tended."

		Doug Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy, stands among a pile of dead trees collected after a brief but destructive August windstorm. By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY