Why There's No Gate at Inventor's Gate

Stand at 5th Avenue and East 72nd Street, look into Central Park, and you’ll notice something missing from Inventor’s Gate: a gate. There has never been one, and if the park’s designers had their way, there never will be.

When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux drew up their plan for Central Park in the 1850s, the great parks of Europe were built for aristocrats. Manicured landscapes, glittering ornament, carriage paths engineered for the smoothest Sunday ride — and, crucially, gates, to keep everyone else out. Olmsted and Vaux had a radical counter-proposal: a park that belonged to the people of New York, open and freely accessible to anyone.

They won that argument, and the entrances tell the story. Each of the park’s perimeter openings was given a name honoring the ordinary working people the park was meant for: Merchants’ Gate, Mariners’ Gate, Artisans’ Gate, Scholars’ Gate, and so on around the park. No gates, just names.

Inventor’s Gate is the one that doesn’t quite fit the pattern. Inventors, as the tour guide in our Central Park adventure likes to point out, are not regular people. Which is a good excuse to walk a few steps inside to the bronze statue of Samuel F. B. Morse — painter, inventor of the telegraph, and the first stop on a route where communication turns out to be the thread that ties everything together.

Inventor’s Gate is where the Central Park Space-Time Adventure Tour begins. It’s free, it takes about an hour, and it ends behind the Met at a 3,500-year-old obelisk.