Description
Central Park is the huge green rectangle in the middle of Manhattan, 843 acres of meadows, lakes, rocks and woods stretching 2.5 miles from 59th Street to 110th Street. It was the first landscaped park in the United States, and one of the most visited in the world.
Start at Bethesda Terrace, an arcade above the Lake with a fountain crowned by the Angel of the Waters. Nearby, the Ramble is a wooded maze where at least 250 bird species have been seen.
Other corners are worth a detour. Strawberry Fields is John Lennon's memorial, with the "Imagine" mosaic given by Italy. Behind the Met stands Cleopatra's Needle, an Egyptian obelisk raised around 1450 BC. Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn are where New Yorkers sprawl in summer, and the Reservoir has a running track around it.
Families head for the Central Park Zoo, the carousel and, in winter, the Wollman Rink, and in summer the Delacorte Theater stages Shakespeare in the Park.
More gunpowder went into building the park than was fired at the Battle of Gettysburg. Its landscape looks as if nature had simply left it there, but almost every inch was blasted, drained, dug out or brought in.
And the land was not empty. In 1855 about 1,600 people were evicted, many from Seneca Village, a community of free Black property owners. What the city got was mostly rock and swamp.
In 1858 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the design contest with their Greensward Plan: no symmetry, winding paths, and cross-town roads sunk into trenches so they would not spoil the view.
Over 20,000 people worked on it, and topsoil came from Long Island and New Jersey, since the local one could not feed the plants. Olmsted called it a "democratic development of the highest significance."
Then came the hard times. In the 1930s Robert Moses cleaned it up and turned a Depression shantytown into the Great Lawn. By the 1970s it was eroded and vandalized again, until the Central Park Conservancy, founded in 1980, brought it back one lawn and one bridge at a time.
Don't miss
• Bethesda Terrace.
• The Ramble.
• Strawberry Fields.
• Cleopatra's Needle.
• Sheep Meadow.
Did you know?
• The Angel of the Waters, by Emma Stebbins, was the first large public sculpture commissioned from an American woman.
• The park's ornamental bridges are each of a different design.
• Its gates are named after the trades that made New York: miners, scholars, artists, hunters.
Start at Bethesda Terrace, an arcade above the Lake with a fountain crowned by the Angel of the Waters. Nearby, the Ramble is a wooded maze where at least 250 bird species have been seen.
Other corners are worth a detour. Strawberry Fields is John Lennon's memorial, with the "Imagine" mosaic given by Italy. Behind the Met stands Cleopatra's Needle, an Egyptian obelisk raised around 1450 BC. Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn are where New Yorkers sprawl in summer, and the Reservoir has a running track around it.
Families head for the Central Park Zoo, the carousel and, in winter, the Wollman Rink, and in summer the Delacorte Theater stages Shakespeare in the Park.
More gunpowder went into building the park than was fired at the Battle of Gettysburg. Its landscape looks as if nature had simply left it there, but almost every inch was blasted, drained, dug out or brought in.
And the land was not empty. In 1855 about 1,600 people were evicted, many from Seneca Village, a community of free Black property owners. What the city got was mostly rock and swamp.
In 1858 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the design contest with their Greensward Plan: no symmetry, winding paths, and cross-town roads sunk into trenches so they would not spoil the view.
Over 20,000 people worked on it, and topsoil came from Long Island and New Jersey, since the local one could not feed the plants. Olmsted called it a "democratic development of the highest significance."
Then came the hard times. In the 1930s Robert Moses cleaned it up and turned a Depression shantytown into the Great Lawn. By the 1970s it was eroded and vandalized again, until the Central Park Conservancy, founded in 1980, brought it back one lawn and one bridge at a time.
Don't miss
• Bethesda Terrace.
• The Ramble.
• Strawberry Fields.
• Cleopatra's Needle.
• Sheep Meadow.
Did you know?
• The Angel of the Waters, by Emma Stebbins, was the first large public sculpture commissioned from an American woman.
• The park's ornamental bridges are each of a different design.
• Its gates are named after the trades that made New York: miners, scholars, artists, hunters.