Central Park

Central Park was the first landscaped public park in America and remains the most audacious: in 1858, when the city barely reached 38th Street, New York reserved 341 hectares of the island's heart and hired Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to build a democratic countryside — meadows, woods and lakes open to everyone, with the crosstown traffic sunk into transverse roads so the illusion never breaks. A century and a half later, 42 million annual visits prove the bet: the park is the city's shared backyard, therapist and lung.

First-timers should walk the spine: enter at Grand Army Plaza (59th/5th), drift past the Pond and the Mall's elm cathedral — the finest stand of American elms left anywhere — to Bethesda Terrace, the park's architectural heart, where the Angel of the Waters fountain and the Minton-tiled arcade have anchored every New York film ever made. Continue over Bow Bridge to the Ramble's deliberately-lost woodland paths, and surface at Belvedere Castle for the skyline-over-treetops view. That's two unhurried hours and the essential park.

The Central Park Zoo, tucked inside the park's southeast corner, is the compact, excellent counterpoint to the Bronx's sprawl: sea lions cruising their pool at eye level (feedings thrice daily are the rally point), snow leopards, a penguin house, and the Tisch Children's Zoo for the under-sixes — all doable in ninety minutes, which is exactly the dose young kids want. Booking the zoo ticket online skips a queue that materialises on every nice weekend.

Rowboats at the Loeb Boathouse, Shakespeare in the Park in summer, skating at Wollman in winter — the park has seasons the way museums have wings. Mornings before 9 belong to runners and dog hours; weekday afternoons are calmest; and the light through the elms in late October is, by broad consensus, the city's best free show.