Nathan Schiller

Van Cortlandt Park, the third-largest in New York City, and one of the only three covering more than 1,000 acres, boasts the first public golf course in the USA, constructed in 1895. 

The park is also home to cricketers, who got ten full fields developed on the park’s old parade grounds in 2013.

And it’s hallowed ground for high school distance runners, thousands of whom race the punishing cross-country course every fall.

Their route begins on the fields, summits Cemetery Hill, destroying your hips going up and quads coming down, and rings around the rollicking back hills, where, sucking wind, you want to keep your toes above rogue roots and erosion beams.

Not being a high school cross-country runner, now or ever, I tend to experience these areas at a desirable pain threshold; same for the numerous footpaths that dart through them.

Some are marked and named, others are inconspicuous connectors, worn from years of wandering.

The options and the solitude, unimaginable when you’re a mere dozen miles south in Times Square, would be enough to make this city park first-rate anywhere.

And that’s just the west side. 

There are only two ways to bridge the halves on foot, and with a little ingenuity anyone can explore their way across them. 

The east side is even more forested, with parallel straight tracks on three levels of elevation, one of which will take you Canada . . .

. . . while another merely continues into Westchester County . . . 

. . . and a third, unmarked, cuts diagonally across them, the second-best 400 meter hill repeat in the city.

There’s so much more to show about Van Cortlandt Park—the track, the pool, the playgrounds, the ponds, the highways, the 1 train—so to keep it cozy I’m featuring only photos from a run not long ago, except for a single shot I caught early one bitter morning this winter, when I truly had the park to myself, and could carve out a little perch from which to watch the sun and the moon brighten the skyscrapers.