Central Park Trivia
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49 free Central Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Central Park trivia quiz covers the 843 acres between the Upper East and Upper West Sides that make up the most visited urban park in the United States. It starts with how the park came to be: the 1853 act, the villages cleared by eminent domain including Seneca Village, the design contest won by Olmsted and Vaux's Greensward Plan, the English park that inspired it, the sunken transverse roads, and the land bill that cost more than Alaska. From there it tours the landmarks and their stories: the Angel of the Waters at Bethesda Fountain, the obelisk older than anything else in the park, the Imagine mosaic that Italy donated, the sled dog statue, the sheepfold that became Tavern on the Green, the elms of the Mall, the castle on Vista Rock, the reservoir renamed for Jackie Onassis, the Ramble's 250 bird species, the Blockhouse from the War of 1812, and the Christo Gates of 2005. It also asks about Robert Moses, the Conservancy, the concerts, the marathon finish line, the police precinct, the census tract with a population of four, and why the park has been in 231 movies. Questions range from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia article on Central Park.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Central Park is larger than which of these European countries?
Monaco
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.
Q 02Which of these parks was also designed by Central Park's creators, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux?
Prospect Park
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.
Q 03What was the name of the winning design in Central Park's 1858 competition?
The Greensward Plan
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.
Q 04A visit to a public park in which country inspired Frederick Law Olmsted's design for Central Park?
England
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'.
Q 05What was the name of the majority-Black settlement razed to make way for Central Park?
Seneca Village
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.
Q 06Central Park's land cost $7.39 million, more than the United States paid for what?
Alaska
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.
Q 07Which author, then in his seventies, headed the 1856 'consulting board' appointed to advise on Central Park?
Washington Irving
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.
Q 08What was the first feature of Central Park to open to the public, in December 1858?
The Lake
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.
Q 09Which Manhattan neighborhood lies directly north of Central Park, across 110th Street?
Harlem
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.
Q 10A 2011 report found that most visits to Central Park are made by which group?
New York City residents
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.
Q 11Which museum stands inside Central Park's boundaries, on its Fifth Avenue side?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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.
Q 12Central Park belongs to New York City, but who has managed it day to day since 1998?
A private non-profit
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.
Q 13Which parks commissioner rebuilt Central Park's run-down menagerie as a modern zoo within a year of taking office in 1934?
Q 21Which third figure stands with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Central Park's 2020 women's rights monument?
Sojourner Truth
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.
Q 22After whom was Central Park's largest body of water renamed in 1994?
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
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.
Q 23The long grooves scored across Central Park's bare rock outcrops were cut by what?
Robert Moses
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.
Q 14About 100 birds released in Central Park in 1890 and 1891 helped found North America's population of which species?
Starling
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.
Q 15A restaurant on Central Park's west side occupies a building put up in 1870 as what?
A sheepfold
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.
Q 16What is the name of the statue at the centre of Bethesda Fountain?
Angel of the Waters
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.
Q 17Cleopatra's Needle, the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park, is one of a pair: in which city does its twin stand?
London
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.
Q 18Which later pharaoh had his own victories carved onto Central Park's Egyptian obelisk beside its original inscriptions?
Rameses II
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.
Q 19The mosaic at the heart of Central Park's Strawberry Fields memorial spells out which song title?
Imagine
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.
Q 20A 1925 bronze statue in Central Park, near the Zoo, honours which sled dog?
Balto
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.
A glacier
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.
Q 24Which Central Park building is a relic of the War of 1812, older than the park itself?
Blockhouse No. 1
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.
Q 25Which wooded part of Central Park, visited by more than 200 bird species a year, is its birdwatching hotspot?
The Ramble
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.
Q 26Central Park holds one of the largest surviving collections of which tree, devastated across North America by a fungal disease?
American elm
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.
Q 27Which storybook heroine has a bronze statue in Central Park that children are welcome to climb on?
Alice
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.
Q 28Outside which Central Park restaurant does the New York City Marathon finish?
Tavern on the Green
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.
Q 29What did New York City ban for good from Central Park's loop drives in June 2018?
Cars
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.
Q 30Which duo reunited for a free concert in Central Park in September 1981?
Simon & Garfunkel
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.