Central Park

Central Park occupies a rectangle of 843 acres in the middle of Manhattan, from 59th Street to 110th and from Fifth Avenue across to Central Park West. It receives something like forty million visits a year, which makes it one of the most used parks on earth, and it is large enough to absorb them.

The first thing to know about it is that none of it is natural. The ponds, the hills, the woodland, the rock outcrops left artfully exposed — all of it was designed, and most of it built, in the 1850s and 60s to a plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Swamp was drained, soil was brought in, millions of cubic metres of earth were moved and hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs planted. The park is a nineteenth-century landscape painting, constructed at enormous expense, that has had a century and a half to settle into looking inevitable.

The second thing is less comfortable and belongs in any honest account. The land was not empty. Seneca Village, a settled community of some two hundred people — most of them African American, many of them property owners and voters at a time when that was rare — stood near what is now the park's western edge around 85th Street, with churches and a school. It was cleared by compulsory purchase in 1857 and the residents were dispersed. There is now an interpretive site marking it, and the excavation work that established the detail is relatively recent.

The change that matters most

Older guidance to the park describes the loop road as carrying cars, and warns visitors about traffic cutting through.

Cars were banned from Central Park entirely in 2018. The six-mile loop road now belongs to pedestrians, cyclists, runners and the occasional authorised vehicle. There is no need to look out for taxis, and the park is a very much quieter and more pleasant place than any account written before that date suggests.

The four transverse roads that cross the park at 65th, 79th, 86th and 97th Streets do still carry traffic — but they were deliberately sunk below the level of the park in the original design, with bridges over them, so a walker barely registers them. That piece of foresight is a hundred and sixty years old.

Horse-drawn carriages still operate from the southern end. They are a long-running political argument in the city rather than a simple attraction, and are subject to restrictions on routes and in hot weather.

What to actually see

The park is too big to do in one go, and the southern third holds most of what people come for.

In the south — the Pond and Gapstow Bridge just inside the 59th Street corner; Wollman Rink, which is an ice rink in winter; the Central Park Zoo, which is small and reasonably good; the Mall, a straight avenue of American elms that is the one formal gesture in the whole design; and at the end of it Bethesda Terrace and Fountain, which is the architectural heart of the park and the most photographed spot in it. The tiled arcade beneath the terrace has remarkable acoustics and usually a musician using them.

Around the middle — Bow Bridge, the cast-iron bridge over the Lake, and the Ramble behind it, thirty-six acres of deliberately disorienting woodland paths that are the best birdwatching in the city and the easiest place in Manhattan to become genuinely lost. Belvedere Castle, a folly on a rock outcrop, was restored a few years ago and gives the best view over the park. Strawberry Fields, opposite the Dakota building on the west side, is the memorial to John Lennon. Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn are the big open grass, used for lying on and for concerts.

Further north, where far fewer visitors go — the Reservoir, with a running track around it and the skyline reflected in it; the Conservatory Garden at 105th Street, a formal walled garden and the quietest corner of the park; the Harlem Meer; and the North Woods, which feel like countryside.

Cleopatra's Needle, behind the Metropolitan Museum, deserves a note because it is routinely undersold. It is an Egyptian obelisk of around 3,500 years old — millennia rather than centuries — one of a pair, the other of which stands on the Thames Embankment in London. It was given to the United States in the 1870s and dragged into position from the Hudson over several months.

The museums on its edges

Two of the great ones sit on the park and both have articles of their own.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is on the Fifth Avenue side at 82nd Street, holding some five thousand years of material — not six thousand, as is often written. One point of practical importance: its pay-what-you-wish admission applies to residents of New York State and students from neighbouring states only. Overseas visitors pay the full price.

The American Museum of Natural History is on the west side at 79th Street, with a substantial new wing added in 2023.

Events, and what to check first

The park's summer programme is a genuine reason to plan around it, and every element of it is the sort of thing that changes year to year — so the park's own listings are the place to look rather than any guide.

The long-running free Shakespeare productions are staged at the open-air Delacorte Theater, which has just come through a major renovation. Free concerts by the city's orchestra and opera company happen on the lawns in summer, though less predictably than they once did. And the park hosts a continuous stream of smaller things — birdwatching walks, the model boat pond, free outdoor films, ice skating in the right months.

Tavern on the Green, which older writing describes as requiring reservations months ahead, closed in 2009 and reopened some years later under entirely different management. It is a pleasant enough place to eat beside the park and no longer the institution those accounts describe.

Practical notes

• Enter at a corner and walk north, rather than trying to cross it east to west. The park is half a mile wide and two and a half miles long, and the interesting things are strung along its length.
• The lamp posts give the location. Each cast-iron post carries a small number plate, and the first two or three digits are the nearest cross street. This is the standard way of working out one's position in the Ramble.
• Autumn is the best time, by some distance, and late October into early November is usually the colour.
• It closes overnight, officially between one and six in the morning.
• It is safe in daylight and busy until late, and the sensible caution is the ordinary one: the wooded northern end and the Ramble are not places to wander alone after dark, for the straightforward reason that nobody else is there to see.
• Hire a bicycle for the loop if the aim is to see the whole thing in an afternoon. Walking the full circuit takes a couple of hours without stopping.

The park is free, which given what surrounds it is remarkable, and a day spent in it costs nothing beyond lunch.