Great City Great Lawn
The park's central gathering place for concerts, pickup sports, picnics, and sunny afternoons.
Open: Mid-April to Mid-November Location: MAP | Mid-park, 79th to 85th Streets
The Great Lawn is 55 acres of open green space at the center of the park, running mid-park from 79th to 85th Streets. It's one of the most visited spots in Central Park and a natural gathering place for picnics, sunbathing, pickup sports, and summer concerts.
Things to Do
The lawn has eight ballfields, and on any given weekend you'll find pickup games, sunbathers, frisbee, and people staking out blanket space early.
Turtle Pond runs along the lawn's southern edge and is worth a stop if you have kids or just want a quieter spot to sit.
If you're planning a picnic, this is one of the most popular spots in the park to do it. Browse picnic options if you want something set up when you arrive.
Belvedere Castle sits just to the west and is worth a visit before or after.
History
The Great Lawn wasn't part of the original plan for Central Park. The space was occupied by the Croton Reservoir, a rectangular holding tank constructed in 1842.
When a new water tunnel made it obsolete in 1917, the reservoir was drained in 1931, and during the Great Depression the emptied space became temporary shelter for displaced residents, along with surplus materials left over from the construction of Rockefeller Center. What to do with the space became a prolonged civic debate, with proposals ranging from a war memorial to an opera house to underground parking. Ultimately, the Great Lawn was completed in 1937.
Concerts
The New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera have held free annual concerts here since the late 1960s, and the lawn has hosted some of the largest crowds in the city's history: Simon and Garfunkel's 1981 reunion concert drew an estimated 500,000 people, a 1982 No Nukes rally featured James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, and Linda Ronstadt, and a 1986 Philharmonic concert conducted by Zubin Mehta drew an estimated 800,000. Since 2012, the annual Global Citizen Festival has brought around 60,000 people here each September to raise funds for global poverty initiatives.
Restoration and Stewardship
That kind of sustained, intensive use takes a toll. By the 1980s the lawn had deteriorated so badly it was known as the Great Dust Bowl, and the Central Park Conservancy completed a full restoration in 1997. The challenge is ongoing: heavy rain during the September 2023 Global Citizen Festival, combined with heavy equipment and intense foot traffic on saturated ground, fully destroyed a third of the lawn and forced a closure through the following April. Global Citizen covered the full cost of repairs, and the lawn reopened on schedule in spring 2024.
Today the Great Lawn remains one of the most intensively managed lawns in the city, and one of the few places where 55 acres of open grass and the Manhattan skyline exist in the same view.