Prospect Park (Brooklyn)
Prospect Park is a urban park in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The park is situated between the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush, and Windsor Terrace, and is adjacent to the Brooklyn Museum, Grand Army Plaza, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. With an area of, Prospect Park is the second-largest public park in Brooklyn, behind Marine Park. Designated as a New York City scenic landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Prospect Park is operated by the Prospect Park Alliance and NYC Parks.
First proposed in legislation passed in 1859, Prospect Park was laid out by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for the then-independent city of Brooklyn. Prospect Park opened in 1867, though it was not substantially complete until 1873. The park subsequently underwent numerous modifications and expansions to its facilities. Several additions to the park were completed in the 1890s, in the City Beautiful architectural movement. In the early 20th century, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation commissioner Robert Moses started a program to clean up Prospect Park. A period of decline in the late 20th century spurred the creation of the Prospect Park Alliance, which refurbished many parts of the park from the 1980s through the 2020s.
Main attractions of the park include the Long Meadow; the Picnic House; Litchfield Villa; Prospect Park Zoo; the Boathouse; Concert Grove; Brooklyn's only lake, covering ; and the Prospect Park Bandshell that hosts outdoor concerts in the summertime. The park also has sports facilities, including the Prospect Park Tennis Center, basketball courts, baseball fields, soccer fields, and the New York Pétanque Club in the Parade Ground. There is also a private Society of Friends cemetery on Quaker Hill near the ball fields. In addition, Prospect Park is part of the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway, a network of green spaces that stretch across western Long Island.
History
Before the park
Approximately 17,000 years ago, the terminal moraine of the receding Wisconsin Glacier that formed Long Island, known as the Harbor Hill Moraine, established a string of hills and kettles in the northern part of the park and a lower lying outwash plain in the southern part. Mount Prospect, near the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway, is one of the tallest hills in Brooklyn, rising 200 feet above sea level. It is the highest among a string of hills that extends into the park, including Sullivan, Breeze, and Lookout hills. The area was originally forested, but became open pasture after two centuries of European colonization. Significant stands of trees remained only in the peat bogs centered south of Ninth and Flatbush Avenues, as well as in a large bog north of Ninth Street, and contained chestnut, white poplar, and oak. Some of these stands were preserved in the modern-day Prospect Park Ravine and nicknamed "The Last Forest of Brooklyn".During the American Revolutionary War, the park was a site of the Battle of Long Island. American forces attempted to hold Battle Pass, an opening in the terminal moraine where the old Flatbush Road passed from the villages of Brooklyn to Flatbush, where a large white oak tree was cut down to block the progress of the British forces. It fell after some of the heaviest fighting in the engagement, and its loss contributed to George Washington's decision to retreat. Even though the Continental Army lost the battle, they were able to hold the British back long enough for Washington's army to escape across the East River to Manhattan. Plaques north of the zoo, as well as the Maryland Monument at Lookout Hill's foot, honor this event.
The then-independent city of Brooklyn built a reservoir on Prospect Hill in 1856 to serve the western half of the city with water pumped from the Ridgewood Reservoir. The need to keep the lots around the reservoir free of development, as well as the preservation of the Battle Pass area, were cited as two reasons for establishing a large park nearby.
Planning
The original impetus to build Prospect Park stemmed from an April 18, 1859, act of the New York State Legislature, empowering a twelve-member commission to recommend sites for parks in the City of Brooklyn. At the time, Brooklyn was the world's first commuter suburb, and it became the third largest city in the country from 1860 to 1880, behind New York City and Philadelphia. During this time, concepts concerning public parks gained popularity. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had created the design for Central Park in Manhattan, which became the first landscaped park in the United States. James S. T. Stranahan, then President of the Brooklyn Board of Park Commissioners, believed that a park in Brooklyn "would become a favorite resort for all classes of our community, enabling thousands to enjoy pure air, with healthful exercise, at all seasons of the year..." He also thought a public park would attract wealthy residents. Stranahan originally envisioned one large park extending eastward to Jamaica. However, the city's rapid development made this impossible, and today, the largest remnants of this proposed landscape are Prospect Park and the Forest Park in Queens.In February 1860, a group of fifteen commissioners submitted suggestions for locations of four large parks and three small parks in Brooklyn, as well as a series of boulevards to connect said parks. The largest of these proposed parks was a plot centered on Mount Prospect and bounded by Warren Street to the north; Vanderbilt, Ninth, and Tenth Avenues to the west; Third and Ninth Streets to the south; and Washington Avenue to the east. Egbert Viele began drawing plans for "Mount Prospect Park", as the space was initially called, and published his proposal in 1861. The park was to straddle Flatbush Avenue and include Prospect Hill, as well as the land now occupied by the Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Brooklyn Museum.
By late 1860, land had been purchased for Viele's plan. However, the onset of the Civil War stopped further activity, and the boulevards and smaller parks were pushed back. The delay prompted some reflection; Stranahan invited Calvert Vaux to review Viele's plans early in 1865. Vaux took issue with Flatbush Avenue's division of the park, thought that the park should have a lake, and urged for southward expansion beyond the city limits and into the then-independent town of Flatbush. Vaux's February 1865 proposal reflected the present layout of the park: three distinctive regions, meadow in the north and west, a wooded ravine in the east, and a lake in the south, without being divided by Flatbush Avenue. Vaux included an oval plaza at the northern end of the park, which would later become Grand Army Plaza. The revised plan called for the purchase of additional parcels to the south and west to accommodate Prospect Lake, but it excluded parcels already purchased east of Flatbush Avenue, including Prospect Hill itself. In addition, engineer-in-charge Joseph P. Davis and assistants John Bogart and John Y. Culyer were named to work on the project.
By then, land speculation was underway. The plot bounded by Ninth and Tenth Avenues between Third and Fifteenth Streets was held by real estate developer Edwin Clarke Litchfield, who had erected his home, Litchfield Manor, on the east side of Ninth Avenue in 1857. The Parks Commission ultimately acquired the Litchfield plot in 1868 for $1.7 million, forty-two percent of the overall expenditure for land, even though the plot constituted just over five percent of the park's acreage. Much of this acreage houses the maintenance yards and is rarely seen by the public. In 1866, the New York state legislature passed a bill approving the acquisition of additional land on the southwest side of the park. The park was built around the preexisting Quaker cemetery, which was accommodated by an agreement under which the Society of Friends deeded their unused acreage to the park. In exchange, they retained the remaining 10 acres for their private cemetery in perpetuity, as well as the rights to access the cemetery.
Construction
Despite the repercussions of Vaux's revisions, Stranahan championed the revised proposal. Vaux recruited Olmsted and formally presented the plan in February 1866. The revised plan was accepted by May. Construction started the following month, and initial work focused on draining the land. Then, the roads, bridle paths, and walks within Prospect Park were graded and individual features were landscaped. Three scenic roads, the West, Center, and East Drives, were built within the perimeters of the park. Depending on the time of year, between 250 and 2,000 workers were employed. Much of the landscaping focused on removing obstructions such as pits and swamps, and enhancing other natural features such as hills. Trees were only removed if they blocked a roadway or path that was being built.The first section of the park opened to the public on October 19, 1867, while it was still under construction. The segment that was open to the public included part of the East Drive between the north end of the park, at modern-day Grand Army Plaza, and Coney Island Avenue at the southeast corner. The park initially contained the Playground, which had a croquet lawn, a sailboat pond, a maze, and a summer house. By 1868, the open portions of Prospect Park were patronized by 100,000 people per month, and several miles of roads, paths, and walkways had been completed. The land for Prospect Park's Parade Ground was acquired that year. A series of pedestrian arches to separate pedestrian and vehicular traffic in the park were also built during this time.
Over 200 benches were installed to accommodate the new visitors. Rustic wooden shelters with "various oblong and polygonal shapes" were placed along the shore of Prospect Park's lake and were designed to be used as scenic overlooks. Several bridges and eight hundred bird houses were installed to enhance the park's rustic quality. In its 1870 annual report, the Brooklyn park commissioners reported that the lake was nearly completed, and that widening of nearby streets was underway. By 1871, the monthly visitor count had increased to 250,000. The park's patronage continued to increase, and in an 1873 article, The New York Times described Prospect Park as having become an "indispensable Sunday resort for the toiling thousands of Brooklyn." However, the high patronage also had downsides: an 1875 editorial in the Times observed that many people would take shortcuts along the grass rather than travel on designated routes.
Prospect Park was substantially complete in 1873, but with the financial panic of that year, Olmsted and Vaux stopped collaborating on the park's construction. Some of the originally envisioned facets of the park, such as an observation tower, a terraced restaurant, and a top-shaped Carriage Concourse, were not built. Olmsted and Vaux had also planned for a system of parkways to connect to Prospect Park, though only two were built: Ocean Parkway, running to Coney Island in the south, and Eastern Parkway, running to Crown Heights, Brooklyn in the east. Overall, the city of Brooklyn spent more than $4 million to acquire the parkland, while the actual cost of construction amounted to more than $5 million.
Stranahan was regarded by his 19th-century peers as the true "Father of Prospect Park", a reputation established through his 22-year reign as Park Commission president, engagement of Olmsted and Vaux, overseeing complex land acquisitions, securing funding to build the park, and after the park's completion, defending the park against changes that were not compatible with the overall design. A statue of James S. T. Stranahan was proposed in 1890. Located inside the Grand Army Plaza entrance, the statue was sculpted by Frederick MacMonnies and presented to Stranahan in June 1891.