Magnificent Central Park Real Estate

New York is a city of everything and everywhere.

Its streets are unique, yet echo the voices of the world, and what better place to bring all these voices together than living in an exquisite Central Park apartment.

In the middle of this country's most populated city glistens a jewel known as Central Park.

Central Park is the best known urban park in North America and largest green space on Manhattan Island.

In 1853, the New York State Legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan, an irregular terrain punctuated by rocky outcroppings between Fifth and Eighth avenues and 59th and 106th streets.

And to New Yorkers today this fabulous 800-acre park is a leafy oasis of ball fields, streams and gardens.

"It's the only saving grace living in an urban center like New York," said luxury Central Park real estate broker, Gene O'Donnell, while enjoying a sunny day in the park, watching New Yorkers stroll and ride in colorful horse-drawn carriages.

"These magnificent luxury Central Park apartments have provided New Yorkers a haven from the busy city below...

Central Park is a living, breathing phenomenon in a very hectic urban setting.

It was estimated that 25 million people visit Central Park each year.

And it's sad to have to leave after such a wonderful day of people-watching and admiring the work of Vaux and Olmsted.

It's a melancholy dejavu of Sunday In The Park...That's why the few Central Park real estate owners with fabulous views are so lucky."

Just to peer out your window overlooking the park at any hour of the day is breathtaking...

I wish I could show you some of the phenomenol Central Park apartments that I have seen.

They offer spectacular views of the park and its environs. It's jaw dropping!"

To millions of New York City residents it is an irreplaceable emerald of green--an oasis in the middle of a concrete city.

That's no accident.

Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted envisioned Central Park as a means of bringing the forests, meadows, and lakes of the Adirondacks to urban dwellers.

This city asset is a handcrafted monument to landscape design and engineering.

It is also not the natural ecosystem it was designed to mimic.

In fact, most of the visitors who meander through the park's 843 acres probably don't realize what an engineering marvel it really is.

Out of sight beneath its trees, grass, and water is a labyrinth of pipes and pumps.

Even its soil had to be trucked in from New Jersey and Long Island.

The story of Central Park provides a powerful anecdote to one of the more perplexing issues of our time.

NYC is the most romantic place in the world -- especially when you're falling
in love for the first time.

TWO men, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, sincerely hoped that the great park they proposed for New York city in 1858 would provide solace for the tired workers of the metropolis.

They waxed lyrical about "a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances."

In the midst of a trek through the oppressive canyons of the city, New York's Central Park does sometimes seem a divinely-inspired piece of city planning.

Yet the history of the 843-acre greenish space carved out of what is now one of the world's most densely populated islands is-like most aspects of this city-at once more prosaic, and more morally opaque, than that.

Although 150 years ago the vast bulk of Manhattan's half-million-odd souls still lived in the southernmost tip of the long vertical island, sizeable communities were emerging up-town.

One of these was called Seneca Village, settled around 1825.

At that time, a community of mostly African American citizens lived in 'Seneca Village' between present day 81 St and 86th Streets.

Businesses, including leather tanning works and slaughterhouses, also operated in the park.

Up until 1858, it is likely that anthropogenic activities such as cutting wood for fuel, fire, and shelter maintained a diversity of habitats in the area of Central Park including open fields, swamps, meadows, and early successional woodlands

Documents record that when the land was put up for sale that year, the first takers were Andrew Williams, a black shoe-shine who bought three lots for $125, and Epiphany Davis, a labourer and trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, who purchased twelve lots for $578.

By the start of the next decade some two dozen black families owned lots in the area.

Over the next 20 years, Seneca Village developed into the largest of the many settlements on the land that later would become Central Park.

By 1856 it held dozens of houses and barns, as well as schools, churches and graveyards.

The next year, it was gone.

A vivid picture of antebellum Manhattan-a place of wealth and power, of struggle and ingenuity, of financial intrigue and political contretemps. In short, New York through and through.

By the mid-19th century, New York city had emerged as the seat of commercial power for the still-young country.

New Yorkers looked across the Atlantic for lessons in how to become a world capital.

When Robert Minturn, a wealthy merchant, returned from a European grand tour, he brought with him an idea for a monumental park to compete with the green spaces of the European capitals.

Backed by influential supporters from state senators to the powerful editor of the New York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant, the idea began to take shape.

By 1853 a site smack in the middle of Manhattan was chosen.

The state granted the city power to acquire the stretch of land-a varying landscape of swamps and stone outcrops-and turn it into a world-class park.

A project competition was won by Vaux, an experienced English architect, and Olmsted, the park's superintendent and a man who, prior to serving as Central Park's architect-in-chief, had never designed so much as an allotment patch.

Shepherded by a collection of civic leaders and rich landowners (who were frequently one and the same), the massive public works project-which would eventually employ some 20,000 workers-began.

In all, about 1,600 people would be affected by the development of the huge park.

Among them were the residents of Seneca Village, who by then included a substantial Irish minority.

The cholera epidemic of 1849 filled its cemeteries; and there was great consternation from Seneca Village citizens about the low prices they were offered under the city's plan for purchasing their land.

Newspapers of the day, dismissed them as "squatters", "nuisances" and "insects".

Their dispersal and the destruction of their village was seen as justified by the noble enterprise of finally transforming the "dreary" land on which they had built their lives into "surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds . . . for the refreshment and recreation" of all.

If the project also enriched some of those involved-including the mayor, Fernando Wood, who saw lots which he bought in the 1850s for a few hundred dollars increase 50 times in value by the 1860s when they offered a park view-who was to argue?

In 1857, the Central Park Commission held the country's first landscape design contest and selected the "Greensward Plan" submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted--the park's superintendent at the time--and Calvert Vaux, an English-born architect.

The designers sought to create a pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition.

Open, rolling meadows contrasted with the picturesque effects of the Ramble and the more formal dress grounds of the Mall (Promenade) and Bethesda Terrace.
 
Approximately 20,000 workers moved nearly three million cubic yards of soil and planted more than 270,000 trees and shrubs.

In order to maintain a feeling of uninterrupted expanse, Olmsted and Vaux sank four Transverse Roads eight feet below the park's surface to carry cross-town traffic.

During the construction phase beginning in 1858, almost 1000 workers were hired for landscaping projects.

By 1873, at least 10 million cartloads of material had been hauled through the park.

Approximately four million trees, shrubs, and plants, representing more than 1000 species were planted.

Today, there are about 200 workers employed by the Central Park Conservancy as gardeners and others, working directly with the park's plants and landscape.

Who would guess Central Park real estate would be so popular back then...

Central Park is an oasis...Let us show you some of these exquisite Central Park apartments.

877-855-7913

Buyers contemplating an exquisite Central Park apartment need to rely on someone who not only knows the market intimately, but can offer strong investment advice.

Having been investors in Central Park apartments, we can bring a broader perspective when advising you, not only on value and pricing, but also on where to buy, sell or rent, and when.

As selling prices of Central Park real estate have appreciated considerably during the past few years, many are poised to sell their units at a substantial profit.

Central Park co-ops are one of the most unusual features of New York City real estate, where they make up nearly 80 percent of individually owned apartments.

The creation of Central Park at the beginning of the 20^th century made this area very fashionable.

Many of the wonderful mansions from that era still stand today and are privately owned Fifth Avenue townhouses and museums.

New York has not ventured far from this locale, making the many pre and post war Fifth Avenue apartments their home.

Central Park Apartments

Central Park South apartments offer the best overall northern views; while Central Park West apartments are hipper and probably more affordable unless you are looking in The Dakota or San Remo.

We have access to every Central Park apartment which is electronically inputed into our computer in real time and updated on a continuous basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

We have detailed, insider knowledge of most Central Park real estate and work with many of the top Manhattan brokers in the city; so we know which ones specialize in specific Central Park apartments.

 877-855-7913

                Gene O'Donnell   Elizabeth Warburg  Merry Rockefeller

Central Park Apartments Inc.

Homes@Central-Park-Apartments.com

Your Central Park Apartment Specialist

Prefer your outdoors indoors?

Buy yourself a Central Park apartment and bag a hawk's-eye view of autumn in New York.

City-philes, second honeymooners, dot-com millionaires and anyone else with a taste for extravagance and money to burn live around Central Park.

Watch the morning sun creep westward over the prettiest stretch of forest canopy in the world.

The ducks are on the old skate pond at the wood's edge and there's a telling crispness in the air.

It's a stirring sight.

This is autumn as it unfolds at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South.

It is best enjoyed this way: engulfed in the folds of a plush crest-enblazoned robe, deep in the embrace of a wingback armchair, all from a park-side, high-level Central Park apartment overlooking the unfolding wilderness below.
 
It's the ultimate self-indulgent view of the seasonal mosaic that blankets Central Park each September like a dusting of technicolor snow--Jack Frost meets Jackson Pollack.

If you're not usually like this...

A lifelong lover of nature's worst- -backpacking through heat and rain, sleeping on windy ridges and soggy marshlands, eating awful one-pot meals of beans and bugs.

Then maybe that's why you'll be so tickled by this five-star view of the season's wonder.

This charmed Central Park forest, surrounded by a stockade of the world's most expensive apartment buildings, really is beautiful.

The trees are as brilliantly patched in yellow and gold and red as any stretch of Skyline Drive in Virginia...only with shopping to die for.

So who knew how lovely it could be when the gold leaves outside are echoed by gold leaf inside?

Watch as the colors in the trees mute themselves beneath the spreading shadow of twilight awaiting a charmed light that lines the park's many walkways as they popped on, string by string, beneath the trees.

Hungry...head to the Boathouse...

Central Park designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux first designed the boathouse in 1874 as a place where visitors could purchase refreshments, relax and watch the boats on Central Park Lake.

The current structure replaced this original Victorian boathouse in the 1950s, and continues to offer boat and bicycle rentals.

Today The Central Park Boathouse, situated in the middle of the Park, boasts a number of different menus and dining settings.

With views of The Lake's boats, swans, and the New York skyline, the Central Park Boathouse is one of the most romantic spots in the City.

Are your fall camping trips ruined forever?

Will anyone ever put a chocolate on your sleeping bag in the evening?

You'll love the smell of wood smoke in the autumn, but a marble shower with gold fixtures is pretty nice, too.

And it would be lovely to have a newspaper dropped in front of your tent in the morning.

Still, sometimes you do have to rough it.

So open the window...and inhale the fumes of the Big Apple.

Thank you for visiting www.Central-Park-Apartments.com , Manhattan's best site for luxury Manhattan apartments.

Central Park Apartments Inc. is a full service licensed residential real estate brokerage firm in Manhattan that specializes in Central park apartments, rentals and investments properties.

Central Park Apartments Inc. specializes in Central Park apartments which include Central Park South apartments, Fifth Avenue apartments, Central Park West apartments and Central Park apartments for rent.

So if you are looking for a Central Park apartment with wonderful views of the park then call us...

877-855-7913

Central Park Apartments Inc.'s honest and efficient approach coupled with an extensive database of exclusive Central Park apartments on Central Park South, Fifth Avenue and Central Park West.

This extensive database of exclusive Central Park apartments grants our professional staff the ability to secure you a dream luxury Manhattan apartment.

Whether you are seeking Central Park apartments for rent or Central Park West apartments for sale, our staff of dedicated licensed New York-bred professionals is at your service seven days a week.

Our ambitious and knowledgeable team of licensed real estate professionals is waiting to unlock the door to your Central Park apartment.

So, please call us 877-855-7913.

We'll treat you with the highest standards in customer service.

Disclaimer: Central Park Apartments Inc. is a licensed New York State Real Estate Brokerage located at 295 Madison Ave and in no way represents itself as the official building website or the exclusive on site agent for any of these published Central Park apartments.