Central Park

Central Park stretches across 341 hectares in the middle of Manhattan, between 59th and 110th Streets, and is probably the most famous urban park in the world. It was designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux under their Greensward Plan as a deliberately English-style landscape park - with lakes, meadows, winding paths and the Ramble, an intentionally wild stretch of woodland. Before it was built, the African American community of Seneca Village had to be displaced, a chapter of the parks history only recently brought into wider view. Central Park was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1963. Today it serves as the citys stage and living room: from Bethesda Terrace and Bow Bridge to Belvedere Castle and the Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon. On weekends hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and visitors jog, picnic, and skate here. The Central Park Zoo and the Loeb Boathouse with rowing boats are also inside the park.