Is this towering London Plane the oldest tree in Central Park?

It’s an immense beauty rooted under grass and gravel that spreads its canopy of leaves across the northeastern end of the Central Park reservoir. And this London Plane tree, mostly minding its business in this popular neck of the park, just might be the oldest tree in Central Park. That’s according to NYC Parks, which notes the tree’s massive measurements: the diameter of its trunk is 65 inches, and it soars 95.94 inches into the sky. So what makes this towering tree the oldest in the park? First, it helps to understand that as natural as Central Park seems, it’s almost entirely manmade. The lake and pond were dug out, and the water has always been fed through underground pipes. As for the land the park is on, it was originally too swampy and rocky to support groves of trees or forests. To transform the park according to co-designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Greensward plan, more than 500,000 trees, shrubs, and vines had to be planted during construction from 1858 to…