In 1853 the city used an act of eminent domain to acquire the land in the center of Manhattan for the creation of a public park. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the competition to design the new park with a proposal that erases the 1811 grid within its borders, even as it hints at the grid’s formal regularities. Olmsted and Vaux’s entry, called the Greensward Plan, respects the grid most clearly at its boundaries, as it covers an area exactly three blocks wide and 47 blocks long, from Fifth to Eighth Avenue between 59th and 106th Streets. (Central Park was extended to 110th Street in 1863.) Within that rectangle, a circulation system combines north–south and east–west routes to form a relaxed grid of gently curving roads and paths. This system connects to the surrounding 1811 street grid at regular intervals around the perimeter of the park, allowing for continuous travel from one side of the city to the other. The Greensward Plan offers an escape from the grid, but it does not ignore it. CY