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.
From Needle Park to this
In the 1970s and early 80s Bryant Park had hedges high enough to hide behind, a raised lawn you could not see into from the street, and a drug trade so open the park had a nickname. The 1988–1992 redesign by Laurie Olin and the urbanist William Whyte fixed it with a set of unglamorous decisions: lower the hedges, cut new entrances so there were sightlines from every side, put in food kiosks that gave people a reason to be there, and scatter thousands of movable chairs.
Whyte’s argument was that people sit where they can choose where to sit, and that a park full of people polices itself. He was right. It is now one of the most intensively used pieces of open space in the country.
The lawn sits on top of the New York Public Library stacks — seven storeys of books are underneath the grass.
What is on
The park runs a programme almost every day and almost all of it is free:
Summer brings the Monday night film series on the lawn, which starts filling up in the late afternoon and is a proper New York evening; free yoga, tai chi and juggling classes; a piano in the park; and a carousel that runs most of the year.
Winter Village, from late October to early January, fills the lawn with a European-style market of about 170 huts and puts a free ice rink in the middle. Free means you can skate at no charge if you bring your own skates; hire costs. It is the only free rink in Manhattan and it is a genuinely nice thing.
There are also free ping-pong tables, pétanque courts, board games, and a reading room with actual books and newspapers you can borrow on the spot.
Practical
Free wifi across the whole park, which is fast and which a lot of people use as an office in good weather.
The public toilets on the east side are unusually good — fresh flowers, an attendant, a queue that moves — and are a minor New York landmark in their own right.
Food kiosks operate year-round and there are two proper restaurants at the eastern end.
It is a five-minute walk from Times Square and about the same from Grand Central, which makes it the obvious place to sit down in Midtown when you need twenty minutes off your feet.
More Parks & Green Space
Central 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.
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.