Central Park
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated 42 million visitors annually, and is the most filmed location in the world.
After proposals for a large park in Manhattan during the 1840s, it was approved in 1853. In 1857, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition for the park with their "Greensward Plan". Construction began the same year; existing structures, including a majority-Black settlement named Seneca Village, were seized through eminent domain and razed. The park's first areas were opened to the public in late 1858. Additional land at the northern end of Central Park was purchased in 1859, and the park was completed in 1876. After a period of decline in the early 20th century, New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses started a program to clean up Central Park in the 1930s. The Central Park Conservancy, created in 1980 to combat further deterioration in the late 20th century, refurbished many parts of the park starting in the 1980s.
