The Mall & Literary Walk

The Mall is the only deliberately straight line in Central Park — a quarter-mile promenade the designers aimed at Bethesda Terrace and roofed with American elms, planted in the 1850s and now among the largest surviving stands of them anywhere. The trunks lean inward and the canopy closes overhead, so walking it feels like moving through a green cathedral nave, column after column.

The southern end is the Literary Walk, where Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott hold their pedestals among the elms. Olmsted and Vaux meant the Mall as the park's one formal social stage — the place to see and be seen — and it still functions: portrait photographers, roller dancers near the bandshell, readers on the benches. In snow, it is arguably the single best walk in Manhattan.