Tag: Central Park Walking Tour

Central Park for a “Healthier and Happier” City

May 17, 2024 Tags: , , ,
Best Central Park Tour

There were many motivations for creating Central Park in the 1850s to 1870s, from giving New York a great park like those in Europe to raising the value of real estate surrounding the park to providing a democratic space, but Frederick Law Olmsted knew, based on his own empirical insights, that a large park could improve the city’s citizens physical, mental, and spiritual health. Central Park has proven that theory since its inception. Read it in Olmsted’s own words:

[Central Park] is not simply to give the people of the city an opportunity for getting fresh air and exercise; if it were it could have been maintained by other means than those to be provided on the park at much less cost. It is not simply to make a place of amusement or for the gratification of curiosity or for gaining knowledge. The main object and justification is simply to produce a certain influence on the minds of people and through this to make life in the city healthier and happier. The character of this influence is a poetic one and it is to be produced by means of scenes through observation of which the mind may be more or less lifted out of moods and habits into which it is, under the ordinary conditions of life in the city, likely to fall.

Experience this health and happiness in some of the best walking tours in New York City, the “Secret Places of Central Park,” and the “Central Park Experience: A Historical and Scenic Walking Tour!

From rederick Law Olmsted’s “Instructions to Central Park Gardeners”

Central Park’s Vanderbilt Gate

March 27, 2018 Tags:
Best Central Park Walking Tours - Secrets Central Park

Best Central Park Walking Tours - Secrets Central ParkAt the Fifth Avenue entrance to Central Park’s Conservatory Gardens near the top of Central Park, is a magnificent gate.  The wrought iron gate was not built for the gardens but was a gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to New York City and originally stood in front of Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s mansion at Fifth Avenue and 58th Street–where Bergdorf-Goodman is today.  Designed by the great architect George B. Post, of New York Stock Exchange fame, along with Richard Morris Hunt, the house first opened in 1883.  The gate, designed by Post and produced in Paris in 1894, is a spectacular way to enter the center Italian Garden of the Conservatory Gardens.  See the gate on the Secret Places of Central Park walking tour.