Dewitt Clinton Park

The park gave its name to the surrounding blocks when it opened in 1905, still sometimes called Clinton after the 19th-century governor who championed the Erie Canal. Landscape architect Samuel Parsons Jr. laid it out with a running track and a bathing pavilion, and for three decades a children's farm garden here taught local kids plant science under the city's first female park administrator, Frances Griscom Parsons. Along the sports field's edge, a rock outcrop juts out that geologists date to roughly 450 million years, an exotic terrane welded together from two tectonic plates.