Central Park

Central Park is an urban park in middle-upper Manhattan, within New York City. Central Park is the most visited urban park in the United States as well as one of the most filmed locations in the world, with 40 million visitors in 2013.

The Park was established in 1857 on 778 acres (315 ha) of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, two soon-to-be famed national landscapers and architects, won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they titled the "Greensward Plan". Construction began the same year and the park's first area was opened to the public in the winter of 1858. Construction continued during the American Civil War farther south, and was expanded to its current size of 843 acres (341 ha) in 1873.