Central Park

Central Park looks natural, but almost none of it is. Every hill, boulder outcrop, lake and winding path was engineered by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who won a design competition in 1858 with a plan called "Greensward" that treated 843 acres of swampy, rocky Manhattan bedrock as a blank canvas for staged wilderness. Olmsted came to landscape design almost by accident — he'd already tried newspaper journalism, farming and social commentary — after a trip to Birkenhead Park in England convinced him that a park could be a genuinely democratic public space rather than a private amenity for the wealthy. The stone used to build the park's bridges and walls was largely quarried on-site; the famous Sheep Meadow really did graze sheep until 1934, when they were removed partly out of fear that hungry New Yorkers during the Depression might eat them.

What the tidy Greensward plan doesn't advertise is what stood there before construction started. A settlement called Seneca Village occupied the land between what's now West 82nd and West 89th Streets — roughly 225 residents, two-thirds of them African American landowners, along with Irish immigrant families, with their own church and school, thirty-two years into a stable community. The city used eminent domain to seize the land in 1853 and cleared the last residents out by the end of 1857; landowners received compensation they widely considered far below market value. Seneca Village then disappeared from public memory for over a century, rediscovered only through an archaeological and historical research project launched in 1998.

The park now draws around 40 million visits a year, making the built-from-scratch "countryside" Olmsted and Vaux designed one of the most heavily used outdoor spaces on the planet — a piece of stagecraft so convincing that most of its visitors have no idea it's stagecraft at all.

Getting there

Located in Manhattan. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is about 8 km away.