In the middle of a quiet corner of Central Park there is a circle of black and white marble 34 feet across with a single word at its centre: IMAGINE. It was a gift from Italy, laid by craftsmen from Naples, and it has become the most visited mosaic in the United States.

This is the story of how it got there — and, because most people arrive here while planning a trip, how to find it.

Visiting Strawberry Fields

The mosaic sits flush in the path, so you walk onto it rather than up to it, and it is almost always dressed with flowers left by visitors — often arranged into a peace sign over the lettering. Someone is usually playing a guitar.

Look up and west and you will see The Dakota, the apartment building where Lennon lived and outside which he was shot on 8 December 1980. The memorial is a few hundred yards from that spot, and the sightline is deliberate. Yoko Ono still lives there.

Two dates draw crowds: 9 October, Lennon's birthday, and 8 December, the anniversary of his death, when people gather at the mosaic through the day and into the evening. The rest of the year it is calm, which is the point — it is a Quiet Zone, and the designation is enforced.

A few practical notes:

• Go early. Before about 9am you will often have it to yourself. By mid-morning there is usually a circle of people waiting for a clear photograph.
• The flowers are not official. They are left and rearranged by visitors, so the mosaic looks different every day and is sometimes almost completely covered.
• It is level and paved, so the mosaic itself is step-free, though the paths approaching it roll a little.
• Keep the noise down. Quiet Zone status means no amplified music — the acoustic guitar you will usually hear is about as loud as it gets.

The mosaic itself

The design is a radial starburst in black and white, worked in the style of Portuguese pavement — the hand-laid stone paving found across Lisbon and much of the Portuguese-speaking world — and drawing on Greco-Roman pavement patterns. There is no image and no portrait. One word, set in a plain roundel, inside a pattern that is two thousand years older than the song it quotes.

That restraint is why it works, and it very nearly did not happen.

What Portuguese pavement means

The technique has a name: calçada portuguesa. It is a paving tradition built from small hand-cut blocks of limestone and basalt, set by eye into a bed of sand and cement by specialists who work kneeling, and it covers pavements and squares across Lisbon, Macau and Brazil — the wave pattern on the Copacabana promenade is the same craft.

Three things follow from that choice, and together they explain why the mosaic has survived four decades of being walked on by millions of people:

• It is paving, not decoration. The stones are structural. This was built to be a path first and an artwork second, which is why nothing is roped off.
• Black and white only. Traditional Portuguese pavement works almost entirely in contrasting limestone and basalt. The restraint is inherited from the technique, not a design decision made for Lennon.
• It can be repaired piece by piece. Individual stones are reset as they wear. The mosaic you stand on is continuously maintained rather than preserved.

How it was chosen

Yoko Ono wanted Strawberry Fields to be an international garden of peace, and once that was known, gifts arrived from around the world. The New York Times listed them in 1985: a tile bench from Morocco, a fountain from France, a totem pole from the Aleutian Islands, an enormous amethyst from Paraguay.

Bruce Kelly, the landscape architect, knew the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission would never approve that collection. He told Ono she could keep one. She chose the round black and white mosaic sent by the Italians, and Neapolitan artisans came to New York and built it on site.

The two songs

Strawberry Fields Forever

The memorial takes its name from the song, and the song takes its name from a real place. Strawberry Field — singular — was a Salvation Army children's home in Woolton, Liverpool, near where Lennon grew up. He played in its gardens as a boy and could hear the Salvation Army band in summer.

He wrote the song in 1966 in Alméría, Spain, on an acoustic guitar, between takes while acting in the film How I Won the War. Recording it took another 45 hours of studio time, and the result, released as a single in 1967, was a sharp change of direction for the Beatles and the catalyst for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Lennon called it his finest work with the group.

Imagine

The song at the centre of the mosaic came from the 1971 album of the same name. It is 22 lines long and asks the listener to picture a world without countries, religion or possessions.

Lennon said later that much of the lyric and content came from Yoko Ono; she was formally given a co-writing credit in 2017, forty-six years after release.

Rolling Stone placed it third on its 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, calling it an enduring hymn that has carried listeners through grief — from Lennon's own death to September 11th.

How the memorial came to be

The site had been a scrubby median between West Drive and two slip roads. Kelly, chief landscape architect for the Central Park Conservancy, turned it into rolling ground planted with species from around the world: 150 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 20,000 perennials.

Ono's one instruction shaped everything. She asked for a living memorial rather than a statue, on the grounds that Central Park already had enough statues. At the groundbreaking she said the two of them had taken their last walk together in that small hilly area, and that Lennon would have been proud to be given an island named after his song rather than a monument.

From Central Park to Liverpool

There is a second Imagine mosaic, and we made it.

A client approached us wanting the design for the gardens of a Salvation Army facility in Liverpool that supports young adults with disabilities — the same organisation, on the same site, that gave the song its name. The circle closes: the mosaic in New York is named after a Liverpool children's home, and this one was going back to it.

Getting permission

The garden is a public space, so the first job was not craft but clearance. That meant conversations with the New York Copyright Records Department, with Yoko Ono's attorneys, and with the original makers in Italy. Only once all three were satisfied did work begin.

Making it

The architects supplied drawings, and the dimensions had to be exact for a permanent installation: 6.4 metres across, just over 252 inches. Two marbles were used — polished Thassos White and Tala Black — chosen to hold the hard contrast the design depends on.

The method for a piece this size is unforgiving. Printed outlines go down first, covered with clear plastic, with the mesh base laid over the top. The artwork specifies not only the size, shape and colour of every tile but the direction each one faces, because on a radial pattern the grain and the cut angle are what make the rays read as rays. Tens of thousands of tesserae were trimmed and set by hand, many placed with tweezers.

Four artists worked on it for 16 weeks.

If you want the technique behind this kind of work, our guide to mosaic methods covers the mesh-mounted approach used here, and Roman mosaic techniques covers the pavement traditions the original design draws on.

Elsewhere in Central Park

If you have come this far for mosaic, walk east. The Bethesda Terrace Arcade has a ceiling of 15,000 encaustic tiles made by the Minton company in England, to designs by Jacob Wrey Mould. It is the only tiled ceiling of its kind in the world, it was dismantled in the 1980s and painstakingly restored, and most visitors walk underneath without looking up.

It is about fifteen minutes' walk from Strawberry Fields and worth the detour.

Owning the design

The medallion can be made to order in marble at the size your space takes — the Liverpool piece is simply the largest one so far. For a smaller gesture, a geometric accent in the same black and white language works as a threshold, a hearth or a table top.

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