Central Park from the 70th Street Entrance

Central Park has eighteen named entrances on its perimeter. The ones at 59th Street get the tourists. The ones above 96th get the joggers. The ones in between, the entrances at 67th and 72nd and 79th and 81st, are mostly used by the people who live a block or two off the park and treat it as a continuation of their living room.

The 72nd Street entrance, just north of our block, is one of those quieter ones. It opens onto a stretch of park that is denser with trees, lighter on attractions, and far less crowded than the southern entrances. Walking in from West 70th Street, here is what you actually find.

Strawberry Fields, immediately

The first thing you reach, less than a hundred steps inside the gate, is Strawberry Fields. The mosaic with the word Imagine, the small cluster of benches around it, and a slow rotation of musicians playing acoustic guitars. On any given afternoon there is someone covering a Beatles song, sometimes well, sometimes very well. There is a small lawn behind the mosaic where local residents read. In April and October it is one of the prettier corners of Manhattan; in January it is a black-and-white photograph.

The Lake and the Boathouse, five minutes east

Continuing east through the woods past Strawberry Fields, the path opens onto the western edge of the Lake. You can walk along the shore to the Boathouse, which serves brunch and is one of the few places inside the park where you can sit down with a real meal. In summer the rowboats come out; you can rent one for about forty minutes for the price of a movie ticket.

If you walk south from the Boathouse, you cross Bow Bridge and emerge near the Bethesda Terrace, the photograph everyone has seen, with the angel fountain and the arcaded staircase. From our front door this is a fifteen-minute walk.

The Ramble

North of the Lake is the Ramble, the wildest section of the park. It is a network of small paths through dense plantings, designed in the 1850s to feel like an upstate woodland inside Manhattan. The birding community uses it as one of the premier spring migration spots on the East Coast. In May you can stand on a bench in the Ramble at 7 AM and see thirty species of warblers without moving.

The Ramble is also where most residents who live near our block go to disappear. Cell service is bad on purpose, the paths do not appear on most maps, and you can lose yourself in it for an hour without trying.

The Reservoir, longer walk

If you keep walking north from the Ramble you reach the Reservoir, the 1.58-mile loop of dirt path that is the city's most famous run. It is a twenty-minute walk from our front door to the southwestern entry to the Reservoir, which is the appropriate warm-up if you plan to run the loop. The Reservoir is more atmospheric at sunrise than at sunset, in part because the morning light hits the east side of the path first and lights up the West Side skyline behind you.

The Sheep Meadow, south

If you walk southeast instead of east from the entrance, you arrive at the Sheep Meadow, the fifteen-acre open lawn that is the park's de facto picnic ground. In summer the meadow is full from noon to dusk on any weekend with weather. The grass closes some weeks in spring for restoration; check the Conservancy schedule before you bring lunch.

South of the Sheep Meadow is the Mall, the only formal allée in the park, lined with American elms and ending at the Bethesda Terrace.

What to do with this

Most residents who stay with us for a summer fall into a routine of taking the park for half an hour in the morning, before work, and walking through it in the evening on the way home. The 70th Street entrance is the closest to our building, and it is the gentlest. You can be inside the park, off the asphalt, and on a tree-lined path within four minutes of leaving the lobby.

If you have not lived a block from a park before, the surprising part is the seasonality of it. The 70th Street entrance is its own animal in May, in August, in late October, and in January. In a three-month summer stay you will see one version of it; in a six-month stay through a winter you will see the version that the long-term residents prefer.