Upper (Uptown) Manhattan.

Practically the whole of the Manhattan area is a sea of concrete. Luckily for New Yorkers, there is one exception: Central Park.

This huge park in the middle of the city was designed in the 1850s by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted wanted to build a large beautiful park where a lot of New Yorkers, “rich and poor, young and old”, could rest and enjoy nature.

You can take a ride through Central Park in a little carriage pulled by a horse, or rent a bicycle. There are many attractions in the park: a zoo, a skating-rink, an old-fashioned carousel, a lake with boats, and an outdoor theatre.

After Central park was opened in 1876, some wealthy New Yorkers soon built mansions along Fifth Avenue on Central Park’s eastern side. The family of Vanderbilts had as many as eleven mansions on Fifth Avenue along Central Park.

Now many of these mansions hold art collections. There are so many museums in this part of Fifth Avenue, that it is called “Museum Mile”. One of the museums is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with huge collection of art from all over the world. It is one of the most important museums in the United States.

The street on the western side of Central Park has large and unusual-looking apartment buildings. When the first of these buildings was being built, people were surprised. They were sure that people who had much money would not want to live in an apartment house, especially so far from the centre of the city (and people with little money could not afford living there because the apartments were very large and rich, so the rent was very high). Indeed, people said, the place was so far from the centre, that it was the same as building these apartment houses in the Dakotas. The builder liked the comparison, and called his building the Dakota. Surprisingly, when the building was finished, very soon every apartment was occupied. The apartments were very good, and the place with the view on Central Park attracted people. Some very famous people have lived in the Dakota, among them the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein and on of the famous Beatles musicians John Lennon, who was killed right outside the building on December 8, 1980.

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