2008 marks 150th anniversary of the Greensward Plan, Frederick Law Olmsted's and Calvert Vaux's design for Central Park. 

To observe the event there is an exhibition at the Arsenal in Central Park. The Central Park Conservancy and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation are hosting a free, special exhibition at the Arsenal celebrating the history of the Park, its landscape and use, subsequent deterioration, and recent transformation by the Central Park Conservancy.  

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On October 13, 1857, just two weeks after the original park dwellers left their homes, the Board of Commissioners of Central Park offered prizes of four hundred to two thousand dollars for the four best proposals for "laying out the park." This notice for the first important landscape design competition in the United States elicited thirty-three varied proposals, which revealed the influence of English and continental traditions of landscape design as well as more eclectic vernacular ideas about what would make this public place appealing. But when the commissioners opened the proposals six months later, they found one curious entry. Plan 2 by an anonymous contestant was nothing but a pyramid.

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