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.
Entirely artificial
The single most useful thing to know about Central Park is that none of it is natural. The site chosen in 1857 was swamp, rocky outcrop and a settlement called Seneca Village, home to about 225 people, mostly Black landowners, which the city cleared by eminent domain. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux then spent sixteen years building a landscape: five million cubic yards of material moved, four to five million trees and shrubs planted, streams engineered, hills raised, and four transverse roads sunk below sight line so crosstown traffic would not interrupt the illusion.
Every view in the park was composed. That is why it works so well and why it does not feel designed.
A route that works
Enter at Grand Army Plaza, 59th and Fifth, and go north.
The Pond and the Gapstow Bridge give you the first postcard, with the Midtown towers above the trees.
The Mall is the only straight line in the park, a quarter-mile allée of American elms — one of the largest stands left anywhere, since Dutch elm disease took most of them elsewhere. The southern end is Literary Walk.
Bethesda Terrace and Fountain is the architectural centre. Go down the stairs and look at the ceiling of the arcade underneath: 15,000 Minton tiles, taken down in the 1980s and reinstalled twenty years later. The Angel of the Waters on the fountain was the first public art commission in New York given to a woman, Emma Stebbins, in 1873.
Bow Bridge crosses the Lake to the Ramble, thirty-six acres of deliberately confusing woodland paths that Olmsted designed to make you lose your bearings. It is the best birdwatching in the city — the park sits on the Atlantic Flyway and something like 280 species pass through.
Belvedere Castle is up the rock above the Ramble and holds the weather station whose readings are the official New York City temperature.
The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir has a 1.58-mile running track around it and the best skyline views in the park, north and south.
That route is about two hours at a walk.
Other bits
Strawberry Fields, opposite the Dakota at 72nd and Central Park West, is the John Lennon memorial with the Imagine mosaic.
Conservatory Garden at 105th Street is a formal garden, quiet, and almost nobody goes.
The North Woods above 100th Street is the wildest part and the least visited.
The Zoo, the Carousel, Wollman Rink in winter and the rowing boats at Loeb Boathouse are all ticketed. Everything else is free.
Practical
Open 6am to 1am. It is safe in daylight and busy well into the evening in the southern half; the far north end after dark is a different proposition and there is no reason to be up there at midnight.
Bike hire is available at most entrances and the loop road is closed to cars entirely, which makes cycling genuinely pleasant.
More Parks & Green Space
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.