Post by Agency on Nov 6, 2007 3:25:37 GMT -5
Central Park is a large public, urban park in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. With about twenty-five million visitors annually, Central Park is the most visited city park in the United States, and its appearance in many movies and television shows has made it among the most famous city parks in the world.
The park was designed by landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux, who went on to collaborate on Brooklyn's Prospect Park. It has been a National Historic Landmark since 1963. While much of the park looks natural, it is in fact almost entirely landscaped. It contains several natural-seeming lakes and ponds, extensive walking tracks, two ice-skating rinks, the Central Park Zoo, the Central Park Conservatory Garden, a wildlife sanctuary, a large area of natural woods, a 106 acre billion gallon reservoir, an outdoor amphitheater which hosts the Shakespeare in the Park summer festival, and grassy areas used for informal or team sports or set aside as quiet areas, as well as playground enclosures for children. The park is an oasis for migrating birds, and thus is popular with bird watchers. The 6-miles (10 km) of drives circling the park are popular with joggers, bicyclists and inline skaters, especially on weekends and in the evenings after 7:00 p.m., when automobile traffic is banned.
Although often regarded as a kind of oasis of tranquility inside a "city that never sleeps," Central Park was once a very dangerous place — especially after dark — as measured by crime statistics. The park, like most of New York City, is considerably safer today, 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 Manhattan's most scenic areas.
As crime has declined in the Park and in the rest of New York City, many negative perceptions have waned, and the use of common sense is enough to reasonably protect visitors from harm. The park has its own New York City Police Department precinct (Central Park Precinct), which employs both regular police and volunteer citizens. In 2005, such safety measures held the number of crimes in the park — which has more than 25 million visitors annually — to fewer than one hundred per year (down from approximately 1,000 in the early 1980s); this very low crime rate has made Central Park one of the safest urban parks in the world.