Central Park

Central Park is the most visited city park in the US, an 843 acre oasis of green and blue in the middle of Manhattan.  In the 1800s, many wealthy New Yorkers advocated for the creation of a public park in their city to provide a healthy and fashionable venue that would rival the grand parks of Europe.  In the 1850s the City of New York acquired the swampy, rock-covered land between 5th Avenue and 8th Avenue from 59th Street to 110th Street and began work on the long task of turning the low-quality site into a world-class urban park.  Central Park was completed in 1873 to the design of landscape architects Frederic Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux.  Though the landscape of the park looks very natural, its design is almost entirely artificial.

• The park forms a rectangle 2.5 miles long and 0.5 miles wide
• Central Park was evaluated to be worth $528,783,552,000 in 2005
• The ever-popular 57-horse carousel was built in 1908 and is one of the largest in the US
• The Conservatory Water pond has been used to race model yachts for over a century