Central Park is credited in 532 movies. Movies are filmed in Central Park way more than any other place on earth. For example, the second most filmed location in the world is Trafalgar Square in London, with 131 movie credits!
Here’s a fun fact about Central Park that most folks don’t know. The 843-acres of land for Central Park cost New York State legislature approximately 7.4 million dollars. For reference, the U.S. paid Russia 7.2 million for Alaska around the same time.
Monaco is study in opulence, without a doubt, but the country only spans 500 acres, compared to Central Park’s 843 acres. To truly understand the impressive size of Central Park you’d need to see if from the air, which is why the window seat on the airplane is prime.
There’s more than 10,000 benches in Central Park and 7,000 don personalized plaques. The Adopt-A-Bench program was started in 1986 as a way to increase maintenance funding for the park.That’s right, you can adopt a bench in Central Park but it won’t come cheap
Central Park was the first landscaped park in the country. Modeled after the handsome parks in European cities like Paris and London, New Yorkers wanted to keep up. The park was designed from scratch and dynamite was used to level the land.
The park is defined by meandering paths that curve from one point to the next and they’re intentionally built that way. The vision for the park was that it would represent the natural flow of nature. Some argue that the park was intentional designed without straight lines to deter horse carriage races, but that hasn’t been confirmed.
The title for the largest park in NYC goes to Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. Spanning an impressive 2,765 acres, Pelham Bay Park dwarfs Central Park. But let’s take this a step further, yet another interesting fact about Central Park is that it’s not even the second largest park in the city, nor the third or fourth.
The park gets an average of 42 million visitors per year, officially making this one of the most heavily visited places in the world. The best part? Most of these visits are return visitors and an estimated 70% of the park’s visitors are locals.
Central Park is completely man-made. The area was completely demolished using dynamite so that the architects could start from scratch. Everything you see in the park is man-made and that includes the lakes, woodlands and hills.
One of the coolest facts about Central Park, the 20,000 trees in Central Park absorb an estimated one million pounds of carbon dioxide every year. In other words, we need Central Park more than we know.