I have a vague (and unsettling) feeling that I’ve shared this fact before, but I can’t find it, so I’m going to assume I haven’t. — Dan

The Secret Code of Central Park’s Lamp Posts

Manhattan’s Central Park, as the name suggests, is a large park roughly in the center of Manhattan. (Here’s a map.) It’s very large and very popular — at 843 acres, it’s the sixth largest park in the city, and it welcomes more than 40 million visitors each year, more than the bigger five. With smartphones and GPS now ubiquitous, it’s not hard to find your way around the park, but that wasn’t always the case. Central Park features seemingly endless windy paths, lots and lots of trees, and not a ton of landmarks to help you find your way. (Trust me, I’ve gotten lost in the park more than a few times.)

But before the advent of the iPhone and the like, there was — and still is — a way to find your location once in the park. Just look at the lamp posts. Let’s start with a picture of one, courtesy of CentralPark.com.

That lamp post has a number on it, as you can plainly see — it reads 6104. And that’s not a random number. It’s a locator. As Untapped New York explains, “The first two [or three, if you go north of 99th Street] indicate the closest cross street, and the last two numbers indicate which side of the park the lamp is closer to: even numbers, in this case, mean the east side, and odd numbers mean west. The last two digits also indicate location, with the numbers increasing as you move closer to the center of the park.” So in this case, the lamp post is near 61st Street, and the 04 notes that it’s too far from the east side of the park. There are roughly 1,600 such lamp posts throughout the park, so no matter where you are, you’re only a few feet away from knowing your location. Armed with this information, as Conde Nast Traveller notes, you’ll “never get lost in Central Park again.” (Unless you go into the part of the park known as the Ramble, between 73rd and 79th Streets; per PIX 11, “there are no lamp posts in the 36 acres of woodlands and trails” in that area.)

But don’t thank the lamp post makers for making this map for you — that wasn’t their intention. As the New York Times reported, “The original electric lamps were designed in 1910 by Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial,” and he wasn’t thinking about lost strollers. Rather, he was hoping to help park staff keep Central Park illuminated. Rather, per Works that Work, “This numerical system was designed to assist park employees in locating a lamp that is in need of servicing.” If someone came across a lamp that wasn’t lit, all they needed to do was tell the park administrators the four- or five-digit code on the lamp, and the repair crew would know (almost) exactly where to do.

And those of us with a love of nature — but a bad sense of direction — are the unintended beneficiaries.

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More About Central Park

Today’s Bonus fact: There’s never been a battle in Central Park, but there’s been a lot of explosions. As Wikipedia’s editors explain, “Central Park was difficult to construct because of the generally rocky and swampy landscape. Around five million cubic feet (140,000 m3) of soil and rocks had to be transported out of the park, and more gunpowder was used to clear the area than was used at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War.”

From the Archives: The Squirrel in the Park: There are a lot of squirrels in Central Park… but that wasn’t always the case.

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And thanks! — Dan