In 1853, the New York State Legislature enacted a law that set aside 775 acres of land in Manhattan—from 59th to 106th Streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues—to create the country’s first major landscaped public park.
Who’s idea was Central Park? Out of 33 entries, the commission selected the Greensward plan, submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted, a writer and farmer from Connecticut, and Calvert Vaux, a young English architect. The plan was naturalistic: large pastoral landscapes and wooded areas would provide New Yorkers with a rural repose from the City.