Central Park Art Guide
Central Park sits at the heart of Manhattan, but some of the most fascinating art isn’t inside the park — it’s scattered along the avenues that frame it. This walking tour traces a path from the gilded lobbies of Midtown up through Grand Army Plaza, into the park itself, and along Central Park West to the Upper West Side. Eleven stops, roughly 2.5 miles, and centuries of art history.
The route works best walking south to north, starting near 55th Street and ending at the New York Historical Society on 77th. Every stop is free and publicly accessible, though a couple of indoor venues have their own hours.
1. Dali at the St. Regis
2 East 55th Street
The St. Regis Hotel is arguably the most opulent in New York. The Beaux-Arts landmark opened in 1904, built by John Jacob Astor IV — who would go down with the Titanic eight years later. Every inch of the interior is packed with paintings, decorative moldings, and gilded excess.
What earns the St. Regis a spot on an art walk is its most famous long-term guest: every fall and winter through the 1960s and 70s, Salvador Dali, his wife Gala, and their pet ocelot held court here, throwing lavish parties with New York’s creative elite. The hotel became a kind of surrealist salon, a place where you might bump into Dali sketching in the lobby.
One more piece of cultural history: in 1934, St. Regis bartender Fernand Petiot invented the Bloody Mary here. The name was deemed too racy for the clientele, so it was rechristened “The Red Snapper.”
2. Bergdorf Goodman
754 5th Avenue at 57th Street
Window dressing is a completely underappreciated art form, and the windows at Bergdorf Goodman are the best in the city — maybe the world. Visual director David Hoey has said that some windows take up to six years to plan and execute. They weave whimsical narratives with vintage props, contemporary fashion, and sometimes borrowed master paintings. The Halloween and Christmas windows are legendary, but any time of year rewards a slow pass along the 5th Avenue frontage.
The building itself sits on historically charged ground. Before Bergdorf opened here in 1928, this block was home to the Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion — the largest private residence ever built in New York. A 130-room Renaissance palace that sprawled across an entire city block, it was the crown jewel of Millionaire’s Row. As the Gilded Age faded, the mansion was demolished, though its original gates survived and can still be found in Central Park at 105th Street and Fifth Avenue.
3. The Pulitzer Fountain
Grand Army Plaza, 5th Avenue & 59th Street
The ultimate posthumous vanity project. Joseph Pulitzer left $50,000 in his will for a fountain “like those in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.” Designers Karl Bitter and Thomas Hastings won the commission, and the fountain was erected in 1916 at the southeastern entrance to Central Park.
The bronze figure is Pomona, the Roman goddess of abundance — a fitting choice for a media mogul’s memorial. She pours water from a bowl into the pools below, flanked by ram’s heads with horns of plenty. The fountain sits directly in front of the Plaza Hotel, framing one of the most photographed corners in Manhattan.
Bitter had a perfectionist streak: he insisted on symmetry for the plaza, so the nearby Sherman monument was moved sixteen feet west to accommodate his vision.
4. The Sherman Sculpture
5th Avenue & 60th Street, Grand Army Plaza
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was a sculptor and coin designer for the U.S. Mint who studied at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. He built his reputation casting bronze Civil War memorials, and his most famous standalone work — Diana, balanced on one foot drawing a bow — lives at the Met.
His sculpture of General William Tecumseh Sherman stands at the northern end of Grand Army Plaza: Sherman on horseback, led by a figure of Nike, cast in bronze with a real gold-leaf surface. The gilded sculpture catches the light beautifully against the tree canopy of Central Park behind it. Saint-Gaudens also founded a summer artist colony in rural New Hampshire that attracted Maxfield Parrish, among others.
5. Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Central Park entrance at 60th Street & 5th Avenue
Just steps from the Sherman sculpture, the Doris C. Freedman Plaza hosts rotating public art installations presented by the Public Art Fund. The pieces change regularly, so there’s almost always something new.
One of the plaza’s most memorable installations was Thomas Schutte’s United Enemies — a pair of 13-foot bronze figures bound together in shapeless sacks, arms pinned at their sides, perched uncomfortably on wooden supports. Schutte conceived the series during a residency in Italy in the early 1990s, when several politicians had been arrested for corruption. The frustrated figures evoke a time when the crooked were dragged to the town square for public judgment. A grey-blue patina makes them look splashed with paint, adding to the indignity.
Check the Public Art Fund website to see what’s currently on view.
6. Eagles and Prey
The Mall, Central Park
Central Park is full of sculpture — some extraordinary, some forgettable. Eagles and Prey by Christophe Fratin falls firmly in the first category, at least for its history: cast in Paris in 1850, it is the oldest bronze in all of Central Park.
The piece depicts eagles attacking their quarry with a realism that borders on gory — unsurprising given that Fratin’s father was a taxidermist. Manufacturing magnate Gordon Webster Burnham commissioned the work and gifted it to the city as a display of civic generosity and personal wealth.
From here, walk west through the park toward Central Park South.
7. The Little Prince
240 Central Park South
The Little Prince hardly suggests New York City, but Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s beloved story has deep roots here. The French aviator and writer fled to New York in 1940 after the Nazi occupation of France grounded him. He began writing the book in Northport, Long Island, then continued at an apartment on Beekman Place and finally at 240 Central Park South — evidence of characteristically chaotic working habits.
The character of the Little Prince may have been influenced by Land Lindbergh, son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who were close friends of Saint-Exupery until the two men parted ways over differing views on the war. Shortly after publication in 1943, Saint-Exupery returned to flying reconnaissance missions for the Allies. His plane vanished over southern France. Sixty-four years later, wreckage and his identification bracelet were recovered from the Mediterranean shore.
8. Gainsborough Studios
222 Central Park South
Central Park South today means tourists and horse carriages, but in 1908 a group of artists built an entire apartment building here so they could have uninterrupted northern light. A painter named V.V. Sewell complained that no one understood how hard it was to find a decent studio in New York — so he and a collective calling themselves the Gainsborough Corporation pooled resources and built their own.
The building stands out among the high-rises on the block. The lower levels feature intricate Victorian stone carvings, including a bust of Thomas Gainsborough himself. The upper floors display ornate Edwardian tiles in bright colors, sourced from an 18th-century German pottery studio in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The interiors boast 18-foot ceilings — a rarity at the time — and the original layouts included enormous studio windows designed to flood each apartment with even, painterly light.
9. Botero’s Adam and Eve
10 Columbus Circle (Time Warner Center)
Fernando Botero is known for voluptuous, larger-than-life figures in sculpture and painting — some politely call them “curvaceous,” others just say “fat.” Trained as a matador and set designer in Colombia, Botero has called himself “the most Colombian of Colombian artists.”
His bronzes are scattered in public spaces around the world, and here in New York, two of them — Adam and Eve — greet shoppers at each escalator inside the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. At twelve feet tall, they tower over visitors. Eve may have cause for jealousy: most of the attention goes to Adam, specifically to one anatomical detail. Years of public fondling have worn the patina on his nether regions to a shiny gold. Probably the only time anyone will describe a Botero sculpture as “groin-grabbingly good.”
10. Hotel des Artistes
1 West 67th Street
The Hotel des Artistes opened in 1918 as a residential building for artists of all genres. Its most famous feature is a series of murals by former resident Howard Chandler Christy, an illustrator compared to Norman Rockwell. Titled “Fantasy Scenes with Naked Beauties,” the murals were painted from 1928 to 1935 in Christy’s studio upstairs.
The building’s lobby still evokes its artistic past. Over the decades, residents included George Balanchine, Rudolph Valentino, Fanny Brice, Norman Rockwell, and Isadora Duncan. The original Cafe des Artistes closed after the 2008 recession and was replaced by The Leopard at des Artistes, an upscale Italian restaurant. It’s pricey, but the interior — murals and all — is a genuine glimpse of old New York. Budget tip: the bar offers pre-theater specials.
11. Keith Haring’s Pop Shop Ceiling
New York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at 77th Street
The famous doodle-covered ceiling from Keith Haring’s Pop Shop lives on at the New York Historical Society. After a major renovation in 2011, the museum acquired the ceiling and installed it over the visitor desk — an appropriately playful welcome to one of the city’s oldest cultural institutions.
Haring’s Pop Shop on Lafayette Street was a downtown institution from 1986 until it closed in 2005. The ceiling, covered in Haring’s signature interconnected figures, is one of the few surviving large-scale installations from the original space. Merchandise and ephemera from both the New York and Tokyo Pop Shops are on rotating display in the Luce Center on the fifth floor.
This is the final stop on the tour, but the museum itself is worth an extended visit — and the American Museum of Natural History is just two blocks north if the day is young.