Parks are part of the landscape of the largest cities and many smaller ones. The idea behind them was that urban dwellers should have access to places that have what cities do not offer: trees, large sections of lawn, flowers and even wildlife. Parks began to be created as cities become places crowded with people and buildings. The trend started in the 1800s, when many of the great city parks were built.

It is no coincidence that the greatest designer of city parks lived between 1822 and 1903. Frederick Law Olmsted designed large parks in Chicago, Montreal, Rochester and over another dozen cities. His masterpiece has always been considered Central Park in New York City.

To identify the most-visited local park in the United States, 24/7 Tempo reviewed and aggregated data from The Trust for Public Land. Parks were ranked by the number of annual visits. Many of the parks we considered are in California. Among them is Griffith Park in Los Angeles, which boasts a mixture of natural wonders like Bronson Canyon, as well as other attractions like the Los Angeles Zoo and the Griffith Observatory. Virginia has several widely visited parks, including Chesapeake City Park, First Landing State Park and James River Park.

The most visited local park in the United States is Central Park in New York City, which gets about 42 million visits a year. New York’s 843-acre Central Park, the nation’s first landscaped public park, was designed by Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who won a landscape design contest in 1857. That year, the New York legislature authorized the city to buy more than 700 acres in the middle of Manhattan. The park opened in 1859, and by 1865, the park had 7 million annual visitors.

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Click here to see all the most visited local parks in the United States.

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