THE CENTRAL PARK CONSERVANCY HAT LUNCHEON

The Hat Luncheon is a lunch for the Central Park Conservancy, given by its Women’s Committee in early May under a tent in the Conservatory Garden, near the park’s northeast corner. It is formally the Frederick Law Olmsted Awards Luncheon, and it is known by what everyone wears to it.

In 2026 it raised more than five million dollars, a record, for a park most New Yorkers assume the city pays for.

The Dust Bowl

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the competition to design Central Park in 1858 with a plan they called Greensward.

A century and more later the city could no longer keep it. After the fiscal crisis of 1975 the park was close to abandoned: its lawns worn to dust, its buildings defaced, its paths avoided after dark.

In 1980 the Central Park Conservancy was formed to take it in hand, and in 1998 the city gave it the running of the park by contract. It now raises nearly eighty per cent of the park’s budget.

The Women’s Committee gave its first luncheon in 1983. It is the Committee’s signature event.

The Garden

The Conservatory Garden is the only formal garden in the park: six acres off Fifth Avenue at 105th Street.

It takes its name from a glasshouse. In 1899 the city built what was then the largest municipal conservatory in the country on the site, and in the autumn of 1901 more than a million people came to see its chrysanthemums. Glass is dear to heat and dearer to mend, and in 1934 it came down.

The garden that replaced it opened in 1937 in three parts: French to the north, around a fountain of three dancing maidens; Italian in the middle, a lawn beneath a single jet; English to the south, around a fountain for Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote The Secret Garden.

Its gate came from further down the avenue. It was made in Paris in 1894 for the Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion at Fifth Avenue and 58th Street, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney gave it to the park. It is the way in.

What to Know

It falls on a Wednesday in early May, at midday.

Places are sold, and they sell out. Tickets begin at three thousand dollars in the committee’s presale, a few at fifteen hundred go out with the general invitation, and tables of ten start at twenty thousand.

A hat is the whole of the dress code, and it is taken seriously: made for the day, and kept on through lunch. The rest is a spring dress, or a lounge suit for the men, who come in far smaller numbers and wear hats as well.

The tent holds if it rains.

The mistake is a hat made for the photographers at the gate rather than for the two hours of lunch that follow.

The Court

The Hat Luncheon is not the Court’s own. Places and tables are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the afternoon: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. It sells out, so a member who wants it should say so early in the year.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.