Clearing began in 1857, and the Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the design competition the following April; the park's 843 acres make it larger than the country of Monaco.
The park is enormous enough that crowds cluster near the southern entrances and the Mall, leaving the North Woods and the Ramble far quieter.
The Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the design competition in April 1858, months after clearing work on the site had begun in 1857. What set the entry apart was infrastructure rather than scenery: four transverse roads, at 65th, 79th, 86th and 97th Streets, sunk below the park's grade and screened with planting so crosstown traffic could pass without cutting the ground into five pieces. Every rival scheme ran those roads at park level. A walk from the south end to the north crosses four working streets and registers almost none of them.
Vaux, in several cases with the architect Jacob Wrey Mould, designed the park's arches and bridges — built through the 1860s, no two alike. Bow Bridge, finished in 1862, was cast in iron by the Bronx foundry Janes, Kirtland & Co. rather than cut from stone. Mould's carving runs through Bethesda Terrace, where the balustrades take up the seasons and the arcade ceiling carries some 14,000 Minton tiles, removed during 1980s repairs and reinstalled in 2007. The fountain's Angel of the Waters is by Emma Stebbins, unveiled in 1873 and the first major public art commission awarded to a woman in New York City.
The ground is not innocent. Seneca Village, a settlement of largely Black property owners, stood near the west side until evictions after October 1855 removed roughly 1,600 residents from the park site. The Great Lawn was the Croton system's Yorkville Reservoir, filled in 1842, drained from January 1930, occupied by a Depression shantytown until 1933 and finished as lawn in 1937.
On foot the place is two parks. The formal spine — the Mall, the Terrace, the Lake, which opened first in December 1858 — reads as architecture. The Ramble, opened in June 1859, and the North Woods above 100th Street were built to read as country, and that illusion holds best in winter, when the bare canopy exposes the Manhattan schist outcrops and the graded slopes doing the work. A 1973 report on erosion and decay led to the founding of the Central Park Conservancy in 1980; much of what looks original was rebuilt after that.
New York, NY 10024 · Official site ↗
Central Park is an urban park between the Upper West Side and Upper East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City, and the first landscaped park in the United States. It is the sixth-largest park in the city, containing 843 acres (341 ha), and the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated 42 million visitors annually as of 2016. Central Park is owned by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation but has been managed by the Central Park Conservancy since 1998 under a contract with the government of New York City in a public–private partnership. The conservancy, a non-profit organization, sets Central Park's annual operating budget and is responsible for care of the park.
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