NORTH END
(97th-110th Streets)
From 97th - 110th Streets; includes Harlem Meer, North Woods, Great Hill, Davis Center, The Ravine, The Meadows and Conservatory Garden.
The Map
Geographic Setting
The North End extends from 97th Street to 110th Street and forms the northernmost region of Central Park. Its neighborhoods include West Meadow, North Meadow, East Meadow, The Pool, The Ravine & Loch, Conservatory Garden, Great Hill, The Blockhouse, North Woods, Davis Center & Forts, and Harlem Meer.
Its geography is among the most varied in the Park. Broad meadows give way to wooded slopes, rocky heights, ravines, streams, formal gardens, and open water. Rather than being organized around a single dominant feature, the North End is composed of a succession of distinct landscapes whose variety gives the region much of its identity.
The Northern Capstone
Etymology and Function
The Northern Capstone describes both the North End’s position and its role within Central Park. As the Park’s concluding region, it functions almost as a microcosm of Central Park itself, gathering many of the landscape types and civic experiences encountered farther south into one final, concentrated section.
The open Meadows recall the contemplative scale of Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn. North Woods provides a dense, tangled landscape comparable to The Ramble, while Harlem Meer combines the reflective quality of the Reservoir with the intimacy of The Pond. Conservatory Garden introduces a highly formal landscape that would not feel out of place within the gardens of Versailles, while the Davis Center represents an entirely different expression of park life: a contemporary, adaptable civic space designed around changing seasonal uses.
The result is a genuine capstone. The North End does not simply terminate Central Park geographically; it gathers many of the Park’s recurring ideas—openness and enclosure, wilderness and formal design, historic landscape and contemporary civic life—and brings them together at its northern edge.
Connections & Transitions
To the west, the North End meets Manhattan Valley, while Harlem stretches across the Park’s northern boundary and Spanish Harlem, or El Barrio, approaches from the east. These surroundings give the region a markedly different urban context from the Midtown-facing South End, placing the northern landscapes of Central Park directly alongside the neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan.
From south to north, the Northern Capstone unfolds through an unusually varied sequence of topographies. The openness inherited from the Reservoir and surrounding meadows gives way to woods, hills, ravines, and flowing water before opening again into the cultivated landscape of Conservatory Garden and the broad surface of Harlem Meer. Rather than tapering quietly toward 110th Street, Central Park ends with one of its greatest concentrations of contrasting landscapes—a diverse and emphatic conclusion to the Park.
The Neighborhoods
The Neighborhoods:
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The Blockhouse
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Conservatory Garden
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Davis Center & Forts
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East Meadow
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Great Hill
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Harlem Meer
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North Meadow
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North Woods
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The Pool
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The Ravine & Loch
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West Meadow
The Iconography
Geographic Icons
The geographic landmarks of the North End demonstrate the region’s extraordinary topographic range. The Pool introduces a quiet body of water along the western side of the region, while The Ravine and The Loch draw visitors into a deeply enclosed landscape shaped by flowing water and steep terrain. North Woods expands that sense of immersion into one of Central Park’s largest wooded environments.
Farther north and east, Great Hill provides one of the region’s major elevations, while Harlem Meer opens the landscape again at the Park’s northeastern corner. Together, these places create a progression from water to woodland, ravine to hilltop, and enclosed interior to expansive northern edge.
Civic Icons
The North End’s civic landmarks represent three very different chapters in Central Park’s history. The Blockhouse preserves one of the landscape’s earliest surviving military structures and recalls a history that predates the creation of the Park itself. Conservatory Garden represents the highly cultivated and formal side of Central Park, providing a carefully composed counterpoint to the surrounding woods and rocky terrain.
The Davis Center introduces the region’s newest major civic landscape. Designed for changing seasonal uses and contemporary public life, it adds a distinctly twenty-first-century layer to the North End while remaining integrated with the historic landscapes surrounding Harlem Meer.
Taken together, these landmarks reinforce the idea of the Northern Capstone: a region where Central Park’s past, present, formal design, and evolving civic life meet at the Park’s northern conclusion.
The Photography
Visual Identity
Central Park has no single visual identity. It moves between open meadow and enclosed woodland, exposed bedrock and carefully planted garden, reflective water and hard-edged skyline. Its paths can narrow into shade beneath old trees, then open suddenly toward towers, lakes, monuments, or a broad field filled with people. The Park’s character is made from those transitions: the designed discovery of one landscape giving way to another.
Water and horizon recur throughout its geography. The Lake, Reservoir, ponds, fountains, and seasonal pools of light create places of reflection—sometimes literal, sometimes figurative—where the city appears fractured, softened, or enlarged. Beyond them, Manhattan’s towers remain present as a constant reminder that this cultivated landscape exists within, not apart from, one of the world’s densest cities.
Its visual language also changes dramatically with the seasons. Winter exposes branches, stone, and skyline; spring briefly turns the Park into blossom and color; summer fills its lawns and paths with activity; autumn intensifies the drama of canopy, water, and light. Central Park is designed to be revisited, and its identity is never fixed for long.
Through The Lens
Photographing Central Park means photographing a dialogue between nature and construction. The camera finds the Park’s deliberate artifice in bridges, arches, terraces, fountains, paths, and carefully framed views—but it also finds moments when that design seems to disappear beneath weather, foliage, water, or human activity. A stone arch becomes a threshold. A bare tree becomes a skyline frame. A meadow becomes a public stage.
The photographs move between intimate and panoramic scales. There are close encounters with sculpture, lampposts, roots, branches, rock, and water; there are also long views across open lawns, reservoirs, and lakes toward the changing skyline. Together, they reveal Central Park as a place of layered vantage points: a landscape built not simply to be looked at, but to direct how one looks.
People remain part of that visual story. Runners, walkers, picnickers, visitors, performers, couples, children, and solitary figures animate the Park without ever fully overwhelming it. Their presence makes clear that Central Park is not an urban backdrop or preserved monument. It is a lived landscape—continually reinterpreted by the people who enter it.
Explore Central Park
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The Southern Gateway
From 59th - 72nd Streets; includes The Central Park Zoo, The Pond, Sheep Meadow, The Mall, and Tavern on the Green.
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The Landmarks
From 72nd - 79th Streets; includes: The Lake, Cherry Hill, Bethesda Terrace, Conservatory Water, Strawberry Fields, and The Ramble.
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The Heart
From 79th - 86th Streets; includes Belvedere Castle, Turtle Pond, The Great Lawn, Seneca Village, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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The Reflections
From 86th - 97th Streets; includes the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir and the South Meadows.
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The Northern Capstone
From 97th - 110th Streets; includes: the Meadows, The Pool & Loch, Harlem Meer, The Great Hill, North Woods, and Conservatory Garden.