What happened at the Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park?

On the evening of Saturday 19 September 1981, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang together on the Great Lawn of Central Park for the first time in years. The concert was free. About half a million people came, and it was held to help pay for repairs to a park that New York could no longer afford to look after.

A park in ruins

By the late 1970s Central Park was in a bad way. The city had nearly gone bankrupt, and there was little money left for the park's upkeep. Lawns had turned to dust, monuments were covered in graffiti, and Belvedere Castle, empty since the weather staff left, had been vandalised. In 1980 a group of New Yorkers founded the Central Park Conservancy, a charity, to raise money for its rescue.

The city's parks commissioner, Gordon Davis, had a related idea with the concert promoter Ron Delsener. A free concert in the park, filmed for television, could raise money from the broadcast and the recordings. The cable channel HBO agreed to show it. They wanted an act that belonged to New York.

The reunion

Simon and Garfunkel grew up in Queens and had been one of the most successful duos of the 1960s. They split in 1970, soon after Bridge Over Troubled Water. Delsener put the idea to Paul Simon in the summer of 1981. Simon was unsure, but he called Garfunkel, who was in Switzerland, and Garfunkel flew home.

Rehearsals were tense. Simon wanted a full band with horns and electric instruments for his newer songs. Garfunkel had hoped for the old sound of two voices and a guitar. In the end eleven musicians played behind them.

The night

Rain fell all day. The first fans still arrived at daybreak with folding chairs and picnic blankets. The Parks Department had expected about 300,000 people, and about 500,000 came.

The stage was built to look like a New York rooftop, water tank and all. At twilight Mayor Ed Koch walked out and introduced the pair, and they opened with Mrs. Robinson. After the second song, Simon told the crowd it was "great to do a neighborhood concert".

They played twenty-one songs, old hits and newer solo songs, including Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Boxer and The Sound of Silence. The album of the night, released in February 1982, sold more than two million copies in the United States. The concert drew attention to the state of the park, other benefit concerts followed, and with donations from the public the park was restored through the 1980s.

Where to stand

Stand at the southern tip of the Great Lawn, with Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle behind you. The stage stood on this lawn. The ground under your feet is itself a story: the lawn fills the bed of an old reservoir, drained in 1930, that once held the city's drinking water.

Hear it where it happened

The Trevlo tour Central Park: Bethesda to Belvedere ends on the Great Lawn, where this story is told. It starts on the Literary Walk under the elms, goes on to Bethesda Terrace and its fountain, crosses Bow Bridge into the woods of the Ramble and climbs to Belvedere Castle, the old weather station, before coming down to the lawn. Seven stops, about nineteen minutes of listening, at your own pace.

The first stop is free to play on this page, and your first tour in the app is free.