Parks & Green Space
Central Park and Prospect Park, the High Line on its old freight viaduct, and the squares that each neighborhood organises itself around.
7 placesCentral Park
Not a surviving piece of wilderness but a landscape built from nothing over sixteen years, including the streams, the hills and the woods. Free, and larger than you think.
The High Line
A freight viaduct that was going to be demolished, replanted as a mile-and-a-half elevated park thirty feet above the West Side. Free, and busier than you expect.
Bryant Park
Nine acres of lawn behind the Public Library that were a no-go area in the 1980s and are now the most heavily used park per square foot in the city. Free chairs, free events, free wifi.
Washington Square Park
A marble arch, a fountain full of children and buskers, chess hustlers on the south-west corner, and about 20,000 bodies buried underneath it.
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Eighty-five acres of derelict shipping piers turned into the best skyline view in New York, with a restored 1922 carousel in a glass box.
Prospect Park
Olmsted and Vaux's second park, built after Central Park with everything they had learned. Most New Yorkers who have been to both prefer this one.
Madison Square Park
Six acres opposite the Flatiron, with rotating public sculpture, the original Shake Shack, and the arm of the Statue of Liberty once parked on the lawn for six years.