The most persistent misconception about Central Park is that it is a piece of Manhattan the city built around. It is the opposite. Almost nothing in it is natural, and the process of making it involved moving more material than the Panama Canal excavation of the same era, planting several million trees, and clearing the people who already lived there.
Why the city needed one
The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which laid the grid over Manhattan, made almost no provision for public open space. The reasoning was that Manhattan was an island with water on every side, so residents would always have air and a view. By the 1840s the city’s population had quadrupled and that argument had collapsed.
The pressure came from two directions. Wealthy New Yorkers who had travelled wanted something to compare with the Bois de Boulogne and Hyde Park. Reformers, led by the journalist William Cullen Bryant and the landscape writer Andrew Jackson Downing, argued that a crowded industrial city needed green space for public health, and pointed at how many working New Yorkers were spending their Sundays walking in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn for want of anywhere else.
The state authorised the purchase of the land in 1853.
Seneca Village
The site was not empty. Between 82nd and 89th Streets on the west side stood Seneca Village, founded in 1825 when a landowner subdivided and sold plots to Black buyers. By the 1850s it held around 225 people, roughly two-thirds African American and the rest Irish and German immigrants, with three churches, a school and a cemetery.
It mattered for a specific reason: New York State required Black men to own $250 of property to vote. Seneca Village was one of the very few places in the city where Black New Yorkers could buy land, and around half the eligible Black voters in the whole city lived there.
The land was taken by eminent domain. Residents contested the valuations and mostly lost; the village was cleared in 1857 and the community dispersed without record of where most of them went. The city’s official history described the site for over a century as a shantytown, which it was not.
Archaeological work since 2011 has recovered foundations and household objects, and there is now an interpretive site at the location.
The Greensward Plan
The park commission ran a design competition in 1857. The winning entry, Greensward, was submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted, the superintendent of the site, and Calvert Vaux, an English-born architect who had worked with Downing.
Its central ideas were radical and are the reason the park works:
The transverse roads are sunk below sight line. Four crosstown roads pass through the park in cuttings, so a carriage crossing town does not interrupt the landscape. Nowhere else in the world had done this.
Circulation is separated by type. Carriage drives, bridle paths and footpaths cross each other on more than thirty bridges and arches, no two alike, so that a person walking never has to negotiate traffic.
The landscape is composed, not preserved. The plan calls for pastoral meadow in the south, a picturesque woodland in the middle, and formal elements only where they are announced — the Mall, the only straight line in the park, deliberately leading to Bethesda Terrace as its single architectural set piece.
Building it
Sixteen years of work. Around five million cubic yards of soil and rock moved. Gunpowder used in quantities comparable to a battlefield to blast through Manhattan schist. Somewhere between four and five million trees, shrubs and plants put in.
The Lake, the Pond, the Ramble’s stream and its waterfalls are all engineered — the water is piped and the streams have valves. The Ramble’s confusing paths are deliberately confusing; Olmsted wanted visitors to lose their sense of direction in it.
Twenty thousand workers, many of them Irish and German immigrants, built it. The park opened in stages from 1858.
What happened to it afterwards
Olmsted resigned and returned repeatedly over the following decades as commissioners added things he had not wanted — the zoo, the Metropolitan Museum, statuary, playgrounds. The park’s history since has been a cycle of neglect and restoration.
The worst period was the 1960s and 70s, when the city’s fiscal collapse cut maintenance to nothing. The Great Lawn became a dust bowl, Bethesda Terrace’s Minton tile ceiling was taken down and stored in a warehouse, and the park’s reputation for crime became a national shorthand.
The Central Park Conservancy, a private non-profit founded in 1980, took over management under contract with the city and raised the money to rebuild it. It now provides the great majority of the park’s operating budget. The Minton tiles went back up in 2007 after twenty years in storage.
That model — a private conservancy running a public park — has been copied widely and is also criticised, on the grounds that parks in wealthy neighbourhoods can raise money and parks elsewhere cannot.
What to look at with this in mind
The Ramble, and the fact that its wildness is designed.
Bethesda Terrace, the only place the plan allows architecture to dominate, and the Minton tile ceiling under the arcade.
The transverse roads — stand on a bridge over the 79th Street transverse and watch the traffic pass beneath without appearing in the landscape.
The Seneca Village site, between 82nd and 89th near Central Park West, marked with interpretive signs.
The lampposts, each stamped with four digits: the first two give the nearest cross street, and the last tell you east or west.