With more than 800 sprawling acres in the middle of America’s densest city, Central Park is an urban masterpiece, a living model to countless successors around the world. But before it gained its shape and name, it was home to New Yorkers of many different backgrounds, the site of farms, businesses, churches, burial grounds, and war. In this new book of the same title, Sara Cedar Miller, historian emerita of the Central Park Conservancy, presents an unofficial but definitive account of the land in modern times. From the first Dutch settlers through the crusade to establish America’s first major urban park, Miller chronicles 250 years of history, telling the stories of indigenous hunters, black slaves and white slaveowners, Patriots and Loyalists, the Afro- and Irish-American landowners and pig farmers of Seneca Village, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more—tales of political chicanery, real estate speculation, cons, and scams, as well as democratic idealism, immigrant striving, and powerfully human lives. Along the way, she unveils a British fortification and camp built during the Revolution, a suburban retreat from yellow fever epidemics constructed at the turn of the last century, and the properties that a group of free black Americans used to secure the right to vote, showing how much of the history of early America is still etched upon Central Park’s landscape today.

Ken Chaya, the NYC artist, designer, and urban naturalist (creator of Central Park Entire: The Definitive Illustrated Map), joins in conversation with the author.