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Enjoying the 'people's park' in Brooklyn

By Linda Perney | amNY.com

August 11, 2006

In the heart of Brooklyn, Prospect Park is a marvel -- more than 500 acres of prime real estate that provides a backyard for a borough short on green space, long on people. More than a century ago, its designers -- Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux -- saw the park as a way to bring nature to city dwellers, and that is precisely what it does.

A walk through it takes you from open meadows to splashing waterfalls, from the lordly airs of Grand Army Plaza to the country charms of a rustic arbor on a lake, from the rigors of a hard-fought tennis match to the relaxed vibe of a picnic.

Explore the 'People's Park' with amNew York:

Start your walk from the cool shelter of a stone arch just inside the park, looking out on the Long Meadow, nearly a mile long, an undulating open space patchworked in shades of green.

If you've come early enough, your companions on the road will be runners and power walkers and bike riders starting their day with a bit of exercise; later, there will be people pushing toddlers in their strollers, and dog walkers and their charges.

Cutting across the Long Meadow, you might hear the sounds of a baseball game in progress, the thwack of wood connecting with leather, coming from the eastern edge of the meadow, where the ballfields are. And maybe you'll catch a glimpse of an errant balloon escaped from a child's birthday party as it drifts among the trees.

The 585-acre park is the most densely used in the borough, according to Tupper Thomas, the park's administrator. But because of the genius of its designers it's easy to find spots that feel private.

"In the Meadowport Arch,' says Christian Zimmerman, the park's landscape architect, "there's a tap dancer -- he brings a board with him, and he practices, and the sound echoes off the arch. We used to have bagpipers in the morning. And there's an older guy who still comes in the morning, a musician who practices his trumpet."

BEFORE THERE WAS A PARK ...

The place wasn't, of course, so bucolic. This was farmland, and pastureland, ponds, swampland. Because it had little significance, the space was an easy mark for the dreamers of the 1850s, men who looked at what was taking shape in the middle of Manhattan, at Central Park then under construction, and, not to be outdone by their rivals across the river, said: Brooklyn, too, should have a grand park.

Chief among those dreamers was James Stranahan, an entrepreneur who made his money in railroads and would go on to help assure the building of the Brooklyn bridge. But for now, he was consumed with building a park. His timing was all wrong, though: By the time the first plans were drawn up, the Civil War intervened, and the project was put on hold.

That original plan called for a park to be built on land that now includes the Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. When the war ended, and Stranahan revived the notion of a park, he approached Vaux, asking the great man his opinion.

Rejecting the original notions, Vaux pointed to the land east of Flatbush Avenue, then as now one of Brooklyn's main thoroughfares. There, he said, is where you should build. On a parcel big enough for a bigger vision, enough land to put in watercourses, to preserve woodlands, to build a lake big enough to skate on in winter, to row on in summer.

"You could never build this park today," remarks Zimmerman. For one thing, land had to be acquired from various sellers, and costs began to skyrocket. As development progressed, as many as 300 laborers were employed, and they all had to be paid.

Building the park cost a tidy sum -- both for the original structures and for those that came later. For example, in 1905, it cost some $52,500 to build the Boathouse ($1,141,300 in today's dollars); nearly a century later, it cost $5 million to restore it.

"Originally, it was all public money. Some came from the city of Brooklyn, some from the state. Stranahan never made anything off the park," Zimmerman says, a remarkable record in an era when municipal politics were dominated by the likes of William Marcy Tweed, who made millions from constructing something as puny as a courthouse.

But though the land seemed unremarkable, there were parts of it that were worthy of note. Even today, the old Quaker cemetery is in the park but not quite of it - fenced off, private property.

And there was a connection to an even earlier time: Leaving the Long Meadow behind, you come to an area known as Battle Pass. Here, part of the Battle of Long Island was fought on an August day in 1776. Four hundred men from the Maryland and Delaware battalions held off the British while an unseasoned general named George Washington turned tail and retreated all the way back to Manhattan.

THE RAVINE

Just east of Battle Pass is the Ravine, one of the most remarkable places in Prospect Park. This is a rustic landscape, a prime example of Olmsted and Vaux's vision of bringing nature to the city.