To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Olmstead and Vaux’s Greenward Plan — the blueprint for what would become Central Park — a company called Aeroballoon is offering a bird’s-eye view of the park from this helium-filled balloon. It’s tethered to a cable and winch and rises more than 300 feet in the air. I took a ride on it this morning with an 81 year-old WWII vet and his grandson, and shot video for TIME.
Look for that piece next week. The view was extraordinary (though I experienced it mostly through the eyepiece of a video camera).
