It's big, it's green and it's free for the movie and TV industries, which have been taking advantage since 1908 when a silent version of Romeo and Juliet utilized what is called the largest man-made work of art in the city.
Visitors spending just a few minutes at the park's most popular entry point at 5th Ave. and 59th St., at the Plaza Hotel, will recognize scenes from The Way We Were, Sex In The City, Splash and Barefoot In The Park. Seven pictures that used the park won Academy Awards: Annie Hall, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Fisher King, Kramer vs. Kramer, Love Story, the first version of The Producers and On The Town.
For cinefiles wanting the whole story of the park's screen lore, On Location Tours operates a two-hour, family friendly walkabout of landmarks, detailing their place in some 200 films.
Guided by aspiring actors who re-create the camera angles at each shoot -- and add some dialogue or song lyrics on request -- there is also great people watching along the way. There is an amusement park with a turn of the century carousel (The Producers), the wintertime Wollman Skating Rink (Love Story, Home Alone) and The Mall (Maid In Manhattan, Vanilla Sky).
Busking musicians are everywhere, though they don't follow you around en masse as they did fairy princess Amy Adams in Enchanted.
The rich history of the 154-year-old park enhances the tour as well.
The first urban landscape in the U.S. was conceived when affluent New Yorkers became fed up with Europeans nagging them about valuing personal wealth ahead of civic endowments. City fathers in the mid-19th century evicted 1,600 renters and squatters from a rocky swamp and spent 10 years digging and planting a gigantic English-style garden. It gave the well-heeled a place for a carraige ride and the poor some badly needed green space and recreation.
Another company, Big Onion Walking Tours, covers the park's past exclusively in its tour, but also offers two hours of sites along the under-rated Upper West Side near Central Park West. Beginning at the upscale shops of Columbus Circle and ending at the Dakota apartments, the tour hop-scotches the park, Lincoln Centre and the "gilded ghetto," where dock workers once thrived.
Slower to develop its character than the East Side, this area caught up in recent decades. There are street glimpses of the giant lofts and luxury apartments that once housed Norman Rockwell, Rudolph Valentino, Fred Astaire, Isadora Duncan and gangster Luck Luciano.
TOUR BASICS
On Location Tours (212-209-3370 and screentours.com) also offers bus trips of general New York film sites, as well as The Sopranos, Gossip Girls, and Sex And The City. Big Onion Walking Tours spans the entire island of Manhattan, including themes on the Gangs of New York, Wall St., Immigrant New York and Harlem. Call 212-439-1090 or bigonion.com. Most tours cost between $15 to $20 US.
