Bryant Park, tucked behind the New York Public Library, is named after the poet and critic William Cullen Bryant. Bryant collapsed here in 1884 at the age of 83, while unveiling a statue, an event from which he never recovered.

The four-acre park that bears his name has had a far more dramatic history than its current manicured lawns suggest. In 1945, a B-25 bomber pilot lost in fog veered to avoid the Chrysler Building and crashed into the Empire State Building just blocks away. By 1979, the park had become so neglected that New York seemed to have given up on it entirely.

The park's reinvention came through private management and radical thinking about small public spaces. Today it offers board games, ping-pong tables, putting greens, free juggling and yoga classes, and its celebrated public restrooms—restored after thirty years of closure with rotating art and classical music.

VoiceMap's tour reveals how Bryant Park became a laboratory for urban recovery, showing how thoughtful design could resurrect an abandoned space.