49 Fun Facts About Central Park

Central Park is larger than which of these European countries?

Monaco would fit inside the park's 843 acres with room to spare, yet Central Park is far from New York City's biggest: Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx is more than three times its size.

Which of these parks was also designed by Central Park's creators, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux?

Prospect Park in Brooklyn began with a plan Vaux drew in 1865 while Olmsted was away managing a California gold mine; Vaux then persuaded his old partner to come home and build it with him.

What was the name of the winning design in Central Park's 1858 competition?

The Greensward Plan beat 32 rivals, and it was the only entry to hide all four crosstown roads below ground level, so city traffic could cross the park without breaking up the scenery.

A visit to a public park in which country inspired Frederick Law Olmsted's design for Central Park?

England: after landing at Liverpool in 1850, Olmsted visited nearby Birkenhead Park and wrote that democratic America had nothing to compare with this 'People's Garden'.

What was the name of the majority-Black settlement razed to make way for Central Park?

Seneca Village gave its landowners a rare right: Black men needed $250 in property to vote in New York, and in 1845 about a tenth of the city's eligible Black voters lived there.

Central Park's land cost $7.39 million, more than the United States paid for what?

Alaska changed hands in 1867 for $7.2 million, about two cents an acre, while the rocky, swampy ground for a single Manhattan park had cost New York slightly more.

Which author, then in his seventies, headed the 1856 'consulting board' appointed to advise on Central Park?

Washington Irving, aged 73, lent the board his name. William Cullen Bryant, the editor who had campaigned for a great park since 1844, had wanted it somewhere else: at Jones's Wood on the Upper East Side.

What was the first feature of Central Park to open to the public, in December 1858?

The Lake opened that winter as a skating ground, and New Yorkers with few other places to skate came by the thousand while the rest of the park was still a building site.

Which Manhattan neighborhood lies directly north of Central Park, across 110th Street?

Harlem: a tidal marsh once lay at this end of the park, on the edge of the old Dutch village, and the park's builders turned it into Harlem Meer, which now fills the north-east corner.

A 2011 report found that most visits to Central Park are made by which group?

New York City residents made nearly 70 percent of the visits counted, and almost two-thirds of visitors came alone: the world-famous sight is used mostly as a local park.

Which museum stands inside Central Park's boundaries, on its Fifth Avenue side?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in the park in 1880 in a red-brick hall by Calvert Vaux, the park's own co-designer; later wings have swallowed that first building almost entirely.

Central Park belongs to New York City, but who has managed it day to day since 1998?

A private non-profit, the Central Park Conservancy, runs the park under contract: founded in 1980 to rescue it from decades of neglect, it now raises most of the park's budget from donors.

Which parks commissioner rebuilt Central Park's run-down menagerie as a modern zoo within a year of taking office in 1934?

Robert Moses sacked much of the old Tammany-era parks staff and put federal relief workers on the job, so the new zoo opened that December and a string of new playgrounds followed.

About 100 birds released in Central Park in 1890 and 1891 helped found North America's population of which species?

Starling: Eugene Schieffelin is said to have freed 60 in the park in 1890 and 40 more a year later, and starlings now range across the continent, competing with native birds for nest holes.

A restaurant on Central Park's west side occupies a building put up in 1870 as what?

A sheepfold: it housed a flock, and their shepherd, whose job was to keep the grass of the meadow opposite cropped, until the sheep were sent away in 1934 and diners moved in.

What is the name of the statue at the centre of Bethesda Fountain?

Angel of the Waters honours the Croton Aqueduct, which brought New York its first clean water in 1842; sculptor Emma Stebbins borrowed the angel from the Gospel story of a healing pool at Bethesda.

Cleopatra's Needle, the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park, is one of a pair: in which city does its twin stand?

London: the two obelisks were together in Egypt for more than three thousand years, first at Heliopolis and then at Alexandria, before one was shipped to the Thames and the other to New York.

Which later pharaoh had his own victories carved onto Central Park's Egyptian obelisk beside its original inscriptions?

Rameses II added columns of text boasting of his campaigns. Long afterwards the Romans propped the obelisk's worn corners on bronze crabs, and replicas of those crabs sit under it today.

The mosaic at the heart of Central Park's Strawberry Fields memorial spells out which song title?

Imagine, the John Lennon song, is set in a mosaic given by the Italian city of Naples. Yoko Ono wanted a living memorial rather than a statue, so countries around the world sent plants for the garden around it.

A 1925 bronze statue in Central Park, near the Zoo, honours which sled dog?

Balto led the last leg of the 1925 relay that rushed diphtheria serum to Nome, and ten months later he is said to have stood by while his own statue was unveiled.

Which third figure stands with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Central Park's 2020 women's rights monument?

Sojourner Truth was added after critics objected that the first design showed only two white suffragists. The finished bronze is the park's first statue of real women rather than fictional ones.

After whom was Central Park's largest body of water renamed in 1994?

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis jogged around the reservoir, which her Fifth Avenue apartment overlooked, and the city gave it her name for her years of work defending New York landmarks such as Grand Central Terminal.

The long grooves scored across Central Park's bare rock outcrops were cut by what?

A glacier that once covered Manhattan dragged stones across the island's schist bedrock and, as it melted, dropped the huge boulders that lie scattered about the park.

Which Central Park building is a relic of the War of 1812, older than the park itself?

Blockhouse No. 1 was thrown up in 1814 when New Yorkers feared a British attack from the north. The attack never came, and the park's designers kept the little fort as a romantic ruin.

Which wooded part of Central Park, visited by more than 200 bird species a year, is its birdwatching hotspot?

The Ramble lies on the Atlantic Flyway, the route migrating birds follow along the coast, so flocks crossing miles of built-up city are drawn down to its 36 acres of woods.

Central Park holds one of the largest surviving collections of which tree, devastated across North America by a fungal disease?

American elm: Dutch elm disease has killed tens of millions of them since the 1930s, and the park's arborists still check its elms for wilting branches all year to stop the fungus spreading.

Which storybook heroine has a bronze statue in Central Park that children are welcome to climb on?

Alice sits on a giant bronze mushroom among her Wonderland friends. A publisher gave the statue in 1959 in memory of his wife, and his eleven grandchildren climbed straight onto it at the unveiling.

Outside which Central Park restaurant does the New York City Marathon finish?

Tavern on the Green was also the start line in 1970, when 127 runners paid a dollar each to race laps of the park and only 55 finished; the course did not leave the park until 1976.

What did New York City ban for good from Central Park's loop drives in June 2018?

Cars: the drives were laid out for carriages, automobiles were let in from 1899, and the last one to drive the loop in 2018 was followed out by a parade of cyclists.

Which duo reunited for a free concert in Central Park in September 1981?

Simon & Garfunkel, who both grew up in Queens, drew about 500,000 people to what Paul Simon called a neighborhood concert, but hopes of a lasting reunion came to nothing.

Where in Central Park does the Public Theater stage its free Shakespeare in the Park?

The Delacorte is named for publisher George Delacorte, who paid to finish it in 1962 after the city's money ran out; until then the free plays had made do with a portable stage beside Turtle Pond.

Which artist couple filled Central Park's paths with thousands of saffron fabric gates in February 2005?

Christo and Jeanne-Claude waited about a quarter of a century for the city's permission, hung 7,503 gates over 23 miles of paths, and took every one of them down again after just 16 days.

In which film does a boy befriend a woman who feeds pigeons in Central Park?

Home Alone 2 lets her repay the friendship: when two burglars corner Kevin in the park, she throws birdseed over them and her pigeons do the rest.

Flaco, who escaped the Central Park Zoo in 2023 and lived free in Manhattan for a year, was what animal?

An owl: after vandals cut the netting of his enclosure, the Eurasian eagle-owl, caged for more than twelve years, was catching the city's rats for himself within a week.

Which Central Park landmark became the home of New York City's official weather station in 1919?

Belvedere Castle was built as a folly, a lookout with no doors or windows, so taking the city's temperature was the first real job the building had ever had.

Which open space in Central Park was laid out in the 1930s on the bed of a drained reservoir?

The Great Lawn replaced a stone-walled reservoir older than the park itself; New Yorkers had pressed for a war memorial, a sports arena and even an opera house on the site before plain grass won.

What is Central Park's only formal garden, entered through the Vanderbilt Gate?

The Conservatory Garden is named for a glass conservatory that stood on the spot until the 1930s, and its iron gate was salvaged from Cornelius Vanderbilt II's demolished mansion on Fifth Avenue.

Which Central Park building, the first restored when the park's revival began in 1979, became its first visitor center?

The Dairy was planned as a place where city children could get fresh milk, lost its porch in the 1950s and ended up as a maintenance shed before its rescue made it the park's front desk.

What does the ice rink at Central Park's Davis Center, like the Lasker Rink before it, become each summer?

A swimming pool: Lasker Rink, built in the 1960s, did the same double duty but forced a stream into a pipe beneath it, and its 2025 replacement brought that water back to the surface.

Pale Male, who nested for years on a Fifth Avenue apartment building overlooking Central Park, was what kind of bird?

A red-tailed hawk: when the building's board tore out his nest in 2004, the protests, joined by resident Mary Tyler Moore, were loud enough that a new perch was installed within weeks.

Which turtle, mostly descended from released pets, is by far the most common in Central Park's Turtle Pond?

Red-eared slider: owners who tire of the pet-shop favourite tip them into the pond, where they crowd out the other turtles, which is one reason releasing any animal in the park is illegal.

In 2017 the United States put Central Park forward for which designation?

UNESCO World Heritage status: the park joined the tentative list, the first step to nomination, in a filing that calls its co-designer Olmsted a journalist and agriculturalist, which is what he was before the 1858 contest.

What is the only formal, straight feature in the original design for Central Park?

The Mall was the plan's one grand promenade: its designers called it an open-air hall of reception, the place where carriage riders stepped down and mixed with everyone else on foot.

Who staffs the Central Park Medical Unit, the ambulance service that has covered the park since 1975?

Unpaid volunteers: park regulars set the unit up because city ambulance crews who did not know the park's roads were taking far too long to reach the injured, and it still charges patients nothing.

The arcade beneath Central Park's Bethesda Terrace is famous for a ceiling covered in what?

Ceramic tiles of a kind made for floors, hung overhead to a design by Jacob Wrey Mould: they were taken down in the 1980s, spent more than twenty years in storage and went back up in 2007.

The carousel installed in Central Park in 1951 was found abandoned in an old trolley terminal at which seaside resort?

Coney Island: fire had destroyed the park's previous carousel the year before, and the city's hunt for a replacement turned up this one, carved in 1908, standing idle in the old terminal.

Clearing the rocky site of Central Park took more gunpowder than was used in which Civil War battle?

Gettysburg: the site was so full of rock that crews had to blast it ledge by ledge, and the ground left behind was so poor that topsoil was shipped in from Long Island and New Jersey before anything could be planted.

Which children's author sits in bronze beside Central Park's model-boat pond, reading aloud to a duckling?

Hans Christian Andersen is reading The Ugly Duckling to its hero. Danish and American schoolchildren helped pay for the statue, and children still climb into the author's lap.

Which Central Park landscape was the first to be restored when the park's revival began, reopening in 1980?

Sheep Meadow got a send-off first: James Taylor played a free concert there in 1979 to draw attention to the repairs, and when the new turf opened, ball games were banned from it.