While I was in New York City for two months, I spent a lot of time in parks and gardens to relieve some of the pressure of the concrete jungle. Of all of the ones I visited, Washington Square Park was my favourite. It’s one of the prettiest places in New York and is so lively yet peaceful at the same time.

We stopped in Washington Square Park between exploring SoHo and West Village. On hot August day, the park was teeming with families, joggers, tourists, NYU students and chess players hunched thoughtfully over their boards.

We noticed faint piano music coming from deeper inside the park. It was the Amelie theme tune. We followed the music, until we found a man was playing on a grand piano in the middle of one of the park’s major arteries. At least a hundred people sat and listened, and we joined them. I wondered what this guy did during the week, whether he was a full time musician with a Saturday side hustle, or whether he was a talented hobbyist, escaping the routine of his 9-5.

Washington Square Park has undergone dramatic transformation over some two centuries, as New York City grew up around it.  It started as a marsh, then a potter’s field, then a cemetery and then a parade ground, and finally, became a park that would host a spectrum of community activity, from parades and performances to protests and mourning marches.

Author Henry James described wrote fondly of Washington Square Park, “… this part of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has the kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long shrill city.” I have to agree. It is so recognisable as New York, yet in my two months there, I didn’t find anywhere else quite like it.

Have you been to New York City? Where’s your favourite place in the city?