The lakes were dug, the hills were shaped and a whole village was removed. The only thing nobody made is the rock. Here's what I found out in Central Park.
Central Park looks like a piece of countryside someone forgot to build on. It isn't. Almost all of it was planned and made by people.
## A contest to design a park
In the 1850s New York was crowded and dirty, and most working families had nowhere green to go. The city held a competition, and Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won with the Greensward Plan. Their cleverest trick was sunken roads, so traffic crosses the park underneath without you noticing.
## The village that disappeared
The land wasn't empty. About 225 people lived in Seneca Village, mostly African American families. Owning land there meant some of the men could vote. In 1857 the city took the land and made everyone leave. Archaeologists have since found their dishes, shoes and even a toothbrush.
## Made by hand
Workers spent about 15 years blasting rock, moving soil, digging lakes and planting trees. The paths curve on purpose so every bend shows you something new.
The only thing nobody made is the big grey rock. It's hundreds of millions of years old, and you can still see scratches left by glaciers in the last Ice Age.
## The angel and the water
The angel on Bethesda Fountain was made by Emma Stebbins, the first woman the city asked to make a big public artwork. She celebrates clean water, which stopped diseases like cholera.
## Saved by the people
By the 1970s the park was falling apart. In 1980 New Yorkers started the Central Park Conservancy to fix it, and it still looks after the park today.
So here's what I keep thinking about: a park for everyone is a wonderful idea. But who gets asked before it's built?