Central Park is one of the world's most audacious public works projects, born from a simple idea with outsized ambition: give New Yorkers a countryside within the city.

Transforming a barren rocky swamp required 20,000 labourers to literally move mountains and redirect water from a reservoir forty-one miles away. The park's design competition of 1857 was so exacting that it captured the imagination of a young landscape architect named Frederick Law Olmsted, whose vision would influence urban park design globally.

Walk through Central Park today, and you're surrounded by accidental history. A serum-run dog named Balto has his own statue here, the only celebrity present at his own bronze unveiling in 1925. The park contains memorials to figures whose deaths it inadvertently caused, including the newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant, who died from injuries sustained at a statue-unveiling ceremony. Even the symbols of American political parties owe their existence to a zoo-escape hoax that played out within these bounds.

VoiceMap's Central Park tour traces this improbable story: how a cholera outbreak and civic ambition collided to create the blueprint for urban green spaces worldwide, and how a patch of swampland became a stage for New York's most remarkable human dramas.