America's first landscaped park erased a Black village to exist
Central Park's pastoral meadows were engineered, not found. Olmsted and Vaux's 1858 Greensward Plan won the contest after a 1853 land approval—then eminent domain flattened settlements including majority-Black Seneca Village before the public entered late 1858.
Wedged between Manhattan's Upper West and Upper East Sides, Central Park spans 843 acres and ranks as the United States' most visited urban park, with about 42 million visits estimated for 2016. It is the city's sixth-largest park, owned by NYC Parks yet run since 1998 under contract by the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy. Borders run from 110th Street to 59th Street and from Eighth Avenue to Fifth Avenue—2.5 miles north–south and half a mile across—touching Harlem, Midtown, and both uptown flanks.
A big Manhattan park was urged in the 1840s; 778 acres won approval in 1853. Construction started in 1857. Northern acres were added in 1859, and the whole finished in 1876. After early-twentieth-century decline, later commissioners and the Conservancy (founded 1980) rebuilt maintenance capacity. Almost every landform was landscaped in the 1850s–60s: eight artificial lakes and ponds from dammed seeps, wooded tracts, meadows, 21 playgrounds, and 6.1 miles of drives. North End, Mid-Park, and South End divide around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir and the Lake.
Attractions range from Bethesda Terrace and the Mall to the Zoo, Carousel, Delacorte Theater, and Shakespeare in the Park. A 2011 Conservancy study found eight to nine million unique visitors making 37–38 million visits, mostly New Yorkers using the park passively and often weekly; first-timers were only about 14 percent of visits. Film crews treat the greensward as a global set piece, and its design seeded later urban parks. The census tract oddity—officials rejecting claims of permanent residents—underscores how thoroughly the landscape was remade into public fiction of untouched nature.
Source: Central Park
