NEW YORK (AP) – An era of huge public happenings on Central Park’s grandest open space, the Great Lawn, came to a quiet end Friday with the formalization of a new rule limiting the size of gatherings there.

Starting in 2006, the parks department will allow no more than 50,000 people at a time on the 13-acre green oval, which has been the site of some of the park’s most memorable events.

Paul Simon played the lawn in 1991, drawing half a million people. Luciano Pavarotti sang opera to a throng almost as large. Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass on the lawn in 1995 before 125,000 faithful. In 1982, hundreds of thousands attended an anti-nuclear demonstration.

But as memorable as those events were, they did awful things to the park’s grass, city officials said. The city began limiting the size of events there in 1997, after spending $18.2 million to restore a lawn that, in those days, had largely become a dust bowl.

A move to formalize the limit, however, didn’t take place until 2004, when the parks department turned down an anti-war group’s request to hold a 250,000-person demonstration on the Great Lawn during the Republican National Convention.

The new rule may be welcomed by routine park-goers, who use the wide open space with spectacular views of Manhattan’s skyline for sunbathing and ball playing in the summer.

Concerts won’t go away entirely. Future events that will squeak under the 50,000-person limit include shows by the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.