Riverside Park

Riverside Park is a 330-acre waterfront park stretching four miles along the Hudson River on Manhattan's Upper West Side, from 72nd Street to 158th Street. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux beginning in 1875, it is one of only eight officially designated scenic landmarks in New York City and one of the finest urban waterfront parks in the world.

Olmsted designed the park to work with the challenging terrain: a steep, rocky slope between Riverside Drive and the river, complicated by the New York Central Railroad tracks along the waterfront. His design created a series of terraced landscapes, wooded slopes, and curving pathways that transformed an unpromising site into a masterwork of park design.

In the 1930s, Robert Moses oversaw a major expansion that buried the railroad tracks beneath a new section of park and created the Henry Hudson Parkway. This expansion added playing fields, playgrounds, the iconic 79th Street rotunda (housing the Boat Basin marina and cafe), and the Cherry Walk, a beloved promenade lined with flowering cherry trees.

The park contains numerous notable features: Grant's Tomb (the General Grant National Memorial, the largest mausoleum in North America) at 122nd Street, the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument at 89th Street, the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument at 72nd Street, a community garden, dog runs, tennis courts, basketball courts, a skate park, and multiple playgrounds.

The Riverside Park Conservancy maintains the park through a public-private partnership, supplementing city funding with private donations to support horticultural care, programming, and capital improvements. The conservancy has restored naturalized areas, improved waterfront access, and expanded community programming throughout the park.

Riverside Park represents Olmsted's mature vision of the public park as a democratic landscape accessible to all. Its four-mile stretch offers an extraordinary range of experiences: formal promenades, wild woodland, active sports facilities, quiet gardens, and river views that rival any waterfront in the world. For Upper West Side residents, it is not merely a park but a way of life.