Central Park is a great place to escape from the tall buildings and chaos (混乱) of New York City streets. The Central Park Conservancy offers many different free walking tours year­round that are a great way to get acquainted with Central Park.

　　Central Park was the first landscaped public park in the United States. Advocates (支持者，提倡者) of creating the park - primarily wealthy merchants and landowners - admired the public grounds of London and Paris and urged that New York needed a comparable (类似的) facility to establish its international reputation (名誉). A public park, they argued, would offer their own families an attractive setting for carriage rides and provide working­class New Yorkers with a healthy alternative to the saloon. After three years of debate over the park site and cost, in 1853 the state legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan.

　　The design for Central Park was conceived (想出，设想) by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, who submitted (提交) their "Greenswald Plan" for Central Park during a contest organized by the Central Park Commission.

When Central Park first opened in the winter of 1859 it was the first artificially landscaped park in the United States. Olmstead and Vaux's design integrated (综合的) formal and pastoral elements throughout the park, offering visitors everything from formal walkways like The Mall and Literary Walk to the wild, woodsy area of the Ramble.