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Photo: AP/Akira Suemori
While New Jersey certainly boasts its fair share of parks and recreation areas, sometimes it’s nice to cross the river for a change of scenery and pace. For a fun outing with your dog, head across the Hudson River and spend an afternoon in New York’s Central Park.
Spanning more than eight hundred acres, Central Park is known not only for its beauty, but for its internal diversity. Each section of Central Park sports its own look, feel, and atmosphere. Visit the Alice in Wonderland monument for a whirlwind of curious sites, or take a stroll through peaceful Strawberry Fields.
A fitting stop on your Central Park tour is the Balto statue, a magnificent bronze monument paying tribute to the legendary heroic dog. For the fitness-minded, Central Park’s Bridle Path offers miles of soft stomping grounds for you and your favorite buddy. You can also take a quick jog around the famous Central Park Reservoir, where the cool breeze from the water will help push you along this easily-conquerable 1.6 mile loop.
Central Park is so large and diverse that a single afternoon there will only give you a taste of what it has to offer. To maximize your time, visit http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/centralpark/highlights for a list of some of the more spectacular sites.
While dogs are welcome throughout most of the park, please note that certain areas are, unfortunately, off-limits. Pay attention to signs and be sure to keep your dog on a leash. Certain areas will allow you to let your dog off-leash, but these areas are limited and usually involve time restrictions. Due to the popularity of – and population within – Central Park, the safest bet is to keep your dog leashed at all times. There are no dedicated off-leash dog run areas in Central Park, but most New Yorkers consider it a dog-friendly area nonetheless. In other words, the more you explore the park, the more canine friends you are bound to encounter.
Central Park is accessible from multiple locations within Manhattan. The park starts down at 59th Street and runs all the way up to 110th Street. For directions using public transportation, please visit http://tripplanner.mta.info/.
Comments
Well, using public transportation is of course always recommended, BUT how to get a big dog to Central Park from NJ or elsewhere? (Dogs which fit in containers/bags of some sort are allowed, but of course this usually means smaller ones).
Metro North seems to unofficially allow dogs off-peak.
In Boston, Calgary, San Francisco, Seattle and Toronto urban transit allows big dogs; with some of them it is also only off-peak. See dogfriendly.com
How about taking PATH to the City with your pal on the weekends?
To help make this happen see "Dogs on Board!" at greenidea.eu
In Central Park, like every other NYC park, dogs may only be run off-lead from dawn until
9 a.m. and again from 9 a.m. until the park
closes at 1 a.m. Besides that, there are areas, such as the Great Lawn, where dogs are
never allowed and other areas, such as the
Rambles, where dogs are allowed only on-lead
at any time. The most dog-friendly parts of
Central Park are usually areas near one of the
park drives or the transverse roads or Fifth
Avenue or Central Park West. In other words,
the city struck a hard bargain with the dog
owners groups over legal off-lead park hours.
One more thing the B&T crowd needs to remember
is that scooping is mandatory anywhere in NYC.
In Central Park, where most dog owners routinely scoop most of the time, people who
forget are usually gently reminded by other
dog owners. If they don't "get it", the
reminders become quite forceful.
I think Roberta means from 9p.m. until the park closes. Actually, it's from 9p.m. to 9a.m. And, as far as I know, you cannot run your dog with you around the reservoir.
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