Elevated Acre Park, downtown Manhattan, is New York’s best-kept secret

Elevated Acre in New York.Mark Abadi/Business Insider

• Elevated Acre is a tiny, secluded park that sits on top of a parking garage in downtown Manhattan.
• Although the park covers just one acre, it offers incredible views of New York Harbor and the Brooklyn Bridge, and it’s one of the few places in the Financial District where you can get some peace and quiet.
• I visited Elevated Acre and discovered exactly why it’s considered one of New York’s best-kept secrets.

New York City is notoriously overcrowded — and there’s arguably nowhere in the city more congested than downtown Manhattan during business hours.

Business Insider’s office is right in the thick of it, located in Manhattan’s Financial District, just steps away from Wall Street and the World Trade Center. It’s often a struggle to walk to a nearby restaurant or subway station without bumping into strangers, squeezing in between parked cars, or awkwardly sidestepping around tourists who stop to take a picture.

It’s definitely not what comes to mind when you think “peace and quiet.”

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So when I heard about the Elevated Acre, a park in downtown Manhattan considered one of the borough’s best-kept secrets, I had to see it to believe it.

The park, built in 2005, sits on top of a parking garage and is sandwiched in between two FiDi office buildings on Water Street. It’s not far from the much more famous Battery Park, where tourist ferries depart for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

I headed down to the Elevated Acre on a breezy Tuesday afternoon, and was surprised by how few people were there. The secluded, one-acre park offered impressive views of New York Harbor and Brooklyn, not to mention some much-needed quiet time above the chaos of Manhattan.

Here’s what one of Manhattan’s hidden gems is like in person: