By my definition of park, there are only two in New York

When I first moved to New York, my British friend – who’d been resident in the city for a few years – told me to “live by the park”. I thought that was quite quaint. I’m moving to the Big Apple here, not considering a retirement home! I thought smugly to myself.

Parks?! What about hidden underground bars, overpriced spas, subways with lines that go directly to Times Square, proximity to restaurants which serve burgers bigger than my head?! Who cares if I don’t see a tree for the next seven years? I’m going to the big city!

Well, it turns out we all love trees more than we think we do.

There are essentially two parks in New York: Central Park, in Manhattan, and Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. Central Park is the one everyone knows about – the one with the skyscrapers towering round it, the bridges, the beautifully decorated underpasses where opera singers practice, and the iconic ice-skating rink in the middle. It covers 843 acres, so it’s pretty sizeable – you’d be lucky to get round it in a day.

Central Park’s hipster cousin, Prospect Park, is another huge expanse of grass and forest with some pretty wonderful ponds and rivers to wander round in the middle. At 526 acres, it’s a little smaller than its Manhattan counterpart, but it’s also a lot less crowded. You can still get lost in the woodland and spend an autumn walk spotting herons. The Brooklyn Museum is in the middle, and once a month they run a well-attended yoga class in one of their picturesque galleries (well, I told you it was hipster).

open image in gallery

But when my fiance and I first moved here, we didn’t understand there were only two parks. We looked at our trusty Google Maps and counted a park every half a mile. We considered that these would be like the little spots of grass and benches you find round London and, on the first sunny spring day, made a beeline for the nearest green square among the yellow strips marking out roads and streets.

When we arrived – ready to sunbathe – we found a flat, grey rectangle of concrete with a basketball hoop at one end and a fence around it. Two hours later, we realised that every “park” within a five mile radius was offering the same thing. Google Maps is a devastatingly committed liar.

If you don’t want your heart broken by a concrete wasteland, you have to suck it up and make a trip to either Central or Prospect Park. Once there, you’ll have a whale of a time. They do Halloween costume competitions, summertime exercise classes, weekly summer food festivals, autumn cider festivals, half-marathons, fun runs, boating on the lakes, family photoshoots, “dress up your dog” days – the list goes on.

But if you traipse down to your local “park” – as delineated on a map – get ready to have your picnic in the blazing sun on a glorified building site while a broken fire-hydrant sprays you periodically in the face. You might not have missed little Britain until that point, but you sure as hell will then.

And yes, you will become the kind of person who “goes to the park” just to be there. No matter how many amazing underground speakeasies you visit, or how many head-sized burgers you consume, that human need for nature will come creeping back – the one that you never really noticed before because you lived in London, one of the greenest cities in the world. We recently moved to Park Slope, an area of Brooklyn which – as the name suggests – borders Prospect Park, and we couldn’t be happier.

This week, one of my friends mentioned she’s thinking of moving to New York next year for work and asked if I had any advice about where she should live. “Manhattan or Brooklyn, just make sure you live by the park,” I said. She said it wasn’t a priority.