Central Park's hidden history: Seneca Village, the Greensward Plan and the park's secret corners

The Greensward Plan: a landscape built to look accidental

In 1858, the park's commissioners held a public design competition. The winning entry, called the Greensward Plan, came from Frederick Law Olmsted, a writer and farmer with no formal design training, and Calvert Vaux, an English-born architect. Their idea was radical in its simplicity: give ordinary New Yorkers, most of whom couldn't afford a trip to the countryside, a sequence of pastoral scenes that felt entirely natural.

None of it was natural. The site was rocky, swampy and cut up by ridges of bedrock. Crews blasted rock, drained wetlands, moved enormous quantities of soil and planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs. Lakes that look as if they've always been there were dug by hand. Meadows that seem to roll on forever were graded to hide the buildings at their edges. It took well over a decade of work, and the park reached its current northern boundary at 110th Street after an extension in the 1860s.

The trick you walk over without noticing

Olmsted and Vaux's smartest idea is one most visitors never spot. The competition required roads to carry crosstown traffic through the park, which would have sliced it into pieces. Instead of running those roads across the surface, the designers sank four transverse roads below ground level, hidden in cuttings and screened by planting. Buses and taxis cross the park all day, and from the paths above you barely know they're there.

They applied the same thinking inside the park, separating carriage drives, bridle paths and footpaths so that each could flow without crossing the others. Where paths meet, one passes over or under the other on a bridge or arch, and Vaux designed dozens of them, each one different. Look out for cast-iron Bow Bridge over the Lake, one of the most photographed spots in the city.

The park's secret corners

Central Park covers more than 800 acres, and most visitors stick to the southern end. Head north or off the main paths and you'll find places that feel a world away.

• The Blockhouse. Hidden on a rocky bluff in the North Woods, near West 109th Street, this small stone fort was built in 1814, during the War of 1812, to defend the city from a British attack that never came. It's the oldest surviving building in the park.
• The Ravine and the Loch. Also in the North Woods, a stream tumbles over small waterfalls through a wooded valley. Olmsted and Vaux wanted it to feel like the Adirondacks, and on a quiet weekday morning it genuinely does.
• Hallett Nature Sanctuary. This four-acre woodland peninsula near the Pond at the park's southeast corner was fenced off for decades and left to grow wild, before opening to the public on a limited schedule in 2016. Check current opening times before you go.
• Belvedere Castle. Vaux's miniature castle on Vista Rock was designed as a viewpoint and folly. Since 1919 it has also been home to weather instruments, which is why you'll hear forecasters quote readings "in Central Park."
• Cleopatra's Needle. Behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art stands an Egyptian obelisk around 3,500 years old, the oldest human-made object in the park. It arrived in New York in 1880 after an epic journey by sea.
• The Conservatory Garden. Enter at Fifth Avenue and 105th Street through the ornate Vanderbilt Gate, which once stood outside a Vanderbilt family mansion in Midtown. Inside is the park's only formal garden, laid out in Italian, French and English styles.

Statues, stories and a long-overdue first

The tree-lined Mall, with its Literary Walk of writers' statues, is the park's grand promenade. For most of the park's history, the only women depicted in its statues were fictional characters, such as Alice in Wonderland and Shakespeare's Juliet. That changed in August 2020, when the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument was unveiled on the Mall, showing Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in conversation. It was the park's first statue of real women.

On the West Side near 72nd Street, Strawberry Fields is a quiet memorial to John Lennon, who lived across the street at the Dakota. Its black-and-white Imagine mosaic was a gift from the city of Naples, Italy, and it's rarely without flowers, candles or someone quietly playing a guitar.