At Fifty-ninth Street, where Fifth Avenue reaches Central Park, are three huge hotels: the New Plaza, the Savoy, and the Netherland. In the middle of the Plaza rises a bronze-gilt equestrian statue of General Sherman, of fine artistic merit.
Mt. Sinai Hospital is between One Hundredth and One Hundred and First Streets.
In Central Park, close to Fifth Avenue at Eighty-second Street, is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At One Hundred and Twentieth Street Fifth Avenue reaches Mount Morris Square, the mound in the center of which commands good views. Beyond Mt. Morris Square the Avenue is lined with handsome villas, some of them surrounded by gardens. It ends in a district of tenements and small shops at the Harlem River.
New York has many public parks, the finest of which is the Central Park. The district in which it is located was once a wilderness of rocks and swamps. Plans by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were so admirably carried out as to make the Central Park in ten years one of the most beautiful pleasure-grounds in the world.
Of its eight hundred and forty acres, four hundred are wooded. There are nine miles of drives, with thirty miles of paths, several lakes used for boats in summer and for skating in winter, immense lawns for baseball, tennis, etc., a zoological garden, and conservatories.
The chief promenade is the Mall, near the Fifth Avenue entrance, which is lined with fine elms and contains several statues and groups of sculpture, including Shakespeare, Scott, Burns, Halleck, Columbus, and the Indian Hunter. From the Terrace, at the north end of the Mall, flights of steps descend to the Bethesda Fountain and to the Lake, used for boating in summer and skating in winter. The most extensive view in the park is afforded by the Belvedere, which occupies the highest point of the Ramble, to the north of the Lake.
The North Park, beyond the Croton Reservoir, has fewer artificial features than the South Park, but its natural beauties are greater, and the Harlem Mere, of twelve acres, is very picturesque. Near the southeast corner of the park (nearest entrance in Sixty-fourth Street) are the Old State Arsenal and a small Zoological Garden. On the west side of the park is the American Museum of Natural History, and on the east side is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To the west of the latter museum rises Cleopatra’s Needle, an Egyptian obelisk from Alexandria, presented by Khedive Ismail Pasha to the City of New York in 1877. The obelisk is of red syenite, is sixty-nine feet high and weighs two hundred tons. Among the other monuments in the park are statues of Webster, Bolivar, Hamilton and Morse, allegorical figures of Commerce and the Pilgrim, and several busts and animal groups. Just outside the park, beside the Sixth Avenue entrance, is a statue of Thorwaldsen.
In Manhattan Square, on the west side of Central Park, between Seventy-seventh and [612] Eighty-first Streets, stands the American Museum of Natural History, which contains collections of natural history, paleontology and ethnology.
