Central Park Free Tour

Central Park was the first landscaped public park in the United States — 340 hectares of lakes, meadows and wooded rambles engineered entirely by hand in the 1860s to give a crowded city room to breathe. This walk covers the icons and the quiet corners: the grand Bethesda Terrace and its fountain, the cast-iron Bow Bridge, the Mall's cathedral of elms, and the Strawberry Fields mosaic that remembers John Lennon.

Your guide reads the park like a designed landscape, not an accident of nature — every rock outcrop, sightline and hidden bridge was placed on purpose. Along the way you'll get the stories of the neighborhood that was cleared to build it and the movie scenes shot at every turn.