The park's first areas were opened to the public in late 1858. Additional land at the northern end of Central Park was purchased in 1859, and the park was completed in 1876.

Finishing Central Park was a monumental engineering feat that took approximately 15 to 20 years of continuous labor. While the park "officially" opened to the public in phases starting in 1858, the construction—based on the "Greensward Plan" by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—continued until about 1876. The project was far more than just "planting trees"; it required the removal of nearly 5 million cubic yards of stone, earth, and topsoil. Thousands of workers, many of them Irish immigrants, used more gunpowder to blast through the rocky Manhattan "schist" than was used during the Battle of Gettysburg. The landscape was entirely transformed: swamps were drained to create lakes, hills were built from scratch, and over 4 million trees and shrubs were planted. The complexity was increased by the "transverse roads," which were sunken below the park's surface to allow cross-town traffic to pass without disrupting the pastoral environment. While the "main" construction was done by 1876, the park has been in a state of constant evolution and restoration ever since, but the foundational Victorian masterpiece was a two-decade-long labor of intensive manual and industrial force.