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. It is also one of the most filmed locations in the world.

The park was established in 1857 on 778 acres (315 ha) of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, a landscape architect and an architect respectively, won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they tittled 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 American Civil War farther north, and was expanded to its current size of 843 acres in 1873.

Central Park was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962. The Park was managed for decades by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and is currently managed by the Central Park Conservancy under contract with the municipal government in a public-private partnership. The Conservancy is a non-profit organization that contributes 75 percent of Central Park’s $65 million anual Budget and is responsible for all basic care of the 843-acre park.

Central Park was once a very dangerous place, especially after dark, as measured by crime statistics. The park is considerably safer in the 21st century, though during prior periods it was the site of numerous muggings and rapes. Well-publicized incidents of sexual and confiscatory violence, such as the notorious 1989 “Central Park jogger case", dissuaded many from visiting one of Manthattan’s most scenic areas. As crime has declined in the park and in the rest of New York City, many of the negative perceptions have begun to wane. Safety measures hold the number of crimes in the park to fewer than one hundred per year, down from approximately 1,000 in the early 1980s. However, in 2013, the number of crimes temporarily spiked again with six rapes and six burglaries, compared to no rapes and one burglary in 2012.

Permission to hold issue-centered rallies in Central Park, similar to the beginings of the 1960s, has been met with increasingly stiff resistance from the city. During the 2000s and early 2010s, new towers have been constructed or planned for the southern end of Central Park. According to a Municipal Art Society report, such building will cast shadows over the southern end of the park. There has been a little controversy over this.