Fort Tryon Park

Fort Tryon Park is a 67-acre park in the Washington Heights neighborhood of northern Manhattan, perched on a dramatic ridge overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades of New Jersey. The park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (son of Central Park's co-designer) and given to the city by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1935.

The park's crowning architectural feature is The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to medieval European art and architecture. The museum incorporates architectural elements from five medieval French cloisters and is set within a building designed to evoke a medieval monastery, surrounded by gardens planted with species documented in medieval botanical texts.

Rockefeller purchased the 56-acre Billings estate and surrounding land in the 1910s and 1920s, then commissioned the Olmsted firm to design a park that would take advantage of the site's extraordinary natural topography. He also purchased the Palisades cliffs across the Hudson to permanently preserve the view from the park.

The park's terrain includes dramatic rocky outcroppings of Manhattan schist, steep wooded slopes, and sweeping lawns with panoramic river views. The Heather Garden, one of the largest public heather gardens in the Northeast, is a botanical highlight featuring hundreds of varieties of heath and heather along with spectacular spring bulb displays.

Fort Tryon Park takes its name from the last British colonial governor of New York, William Tryon. The site saw action during the Revolutionary War when American forces attempted to defend the northern Manhattan heights against the British advance in November 1776. Remnants of the fortifications can still be traced in the landscape.

Today Fort Tryon Park is maintained by the Fort Tryon Park Trust in partnership with NYC Parks. The park offers hiking trails, gardens, stunning seasonal foliage, and some of the most dramatic vistas in New York City. It remains one of Manhattan's great treasures: less visited than Central Park, but rivaling it in natural beauty and far surpassing it in dramatic topography.