Location: 59th to 110th Street between 5th and 8th Avenues

Ask five New Yorkers to describe Central Park and you’ll get five completely different answers; the genius of its design is that, within its seven–and–a–half square miles, the park is so varied that it offers the visitor an unlimited range of experiences. From the Alice in Wonderland sculpture to the winding paths of the Ramble to the broad esplanade of Literary Walk, it’s a world waiting to be explored.

Although the park appears to be completely natural, it took a great deal of work to make it seem that way. When the city acquired the land in 1856, large communities of squatters and subsistence farmers occupied the few habitable sections of rocky, marshy land. Turning this expanse of 843 acres into a park was a monumental task, and the city sponsored a contest to design the park, which was won by landscape designers Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. Their intention, based on the tradition of the grand parks of Great Britain, was to provide a pastoral retreat from the woes and worries of urban life. They felt that a well–designed park could exert an ennobling influence on its visitors. To this end, they designed the park so that roads and carriages crossed below grade, so as not to interfere with the landscape of the park itself. More than forty bridges were built, and are still in use today, carrying pedestrians safely over the traffic of the five transverse roads at 97th, 86th, 79th, 72nd, and 66th streets.

The actual building of the park required massive earthmoving efforts. Boulders were blasted apart, lakes were dug, and cobblestone paths were laid by hand; at the height of construction, nearly 4,000 people were employed in the project. Before the park was opened in 1859, workers had planted nearly 300,000 trees and had moved 80 million cubic feet of dirt.

The result of all that work was, of course, a magnificent success. The park has been imitated but never equaled in cities around the globe, and as the name implies it is truly central to New York. For New Yorkers, the park is not just a way to escape the city; it’s a place where the virtues of the city—the energy, the sociability, the dynamic movement and serene moments, the magnificent skyline itself—can all be felt and appreciated.

Qote From Frederick Law Olmsted, speaking about Central Park, 1870:

“...As to the effect on public health, there is no question that it is already great.
The testimony of the older physicians of the city will be found unanimous on this point…The lives of women and children too poor to be sent to the country, can now be saved in thousands of instances, by making them go to the Park.
The Park, moreover, has had a very marked effect in making the city attractive to visitors, and in thus increasing its trade, and causing many who have made fortunes elsewhere to take up their residence and become taxpayers in it—a much greater effect in this way... than all the colleges, schools, libraries, museums and art–galleries which the city possesses.”