Find out more about our additional safety precautions, program cancellations, and potential closures before you head to a park or recreation center. For more information, please visit our Service Announcements page. Directions via Google Maps. For additional park information, please visit the Prospect Park Alliance website. Designed and constructed over a thirty-year period by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the masterminds behind Central Park, Prospect Park has blossomed into a premiere destination for Brooklyn visitors and residents alike.
He's responsible for the arches, the Concert Grove, bridges, and rustic shelters that blend into the landscape. He also created several other structures that have since been demolished. Prospect Park's design was largely inspired by Birkenhead Park in England. Egbert Viele created an original plan for the park, which would have been built had the Civil War not halted construction, giving the parks commission time to review other designs.
Viele's plan was acres smaller than Olmsted and Vaux's and included much less landscaping. It did not have a lake, ravine, waterfalls, or many of the structures. The walkways, paths, and drives of the original park had no straight lines to create "the impression of unending space.
Olmsted was way ahead of his time in creating a drainage system for the park that fed runoff into the streams and lakes. Still in use today, the network of pipes branches out under the Long Meadow and through the Ravine and Nethermead. The economic Panic of canceled the construction of several grand structures. A restaurant with cascading terraces near the Concert Grove, an observation tower planned for the top of Lookout Hill, and a carriage concourse that looked like a giant top were just a few of the Vaux designs that never came to be.
In the late s, archery was one of the most popular activities on the Long Meadow. During winters, the lake was jampacked with skaters and other ice sports, including the incredibly dangerous sounding game of ice baseball. Picnics were illegal in Central Park during the late s, but they were wildly popular in Prospect Park. From an Brooklyn Eagle article: "The park authorities of Gotham would shudder at the thought of picnic parties in Central Park, where the grass is sacred to sheep but denied to children.
Near the end of the 19th century, the park was in desperate need of repairs. In a single year, the machines transported trees that weighed a ton or more, the posting said. The Lefferts family gave the handsome Dutch Colonial farmhouse to the city in to make way for development at its original site on Flatbush Avenue. The shingle and clapboard house was constructed between and to replace an earlier Lefferts home that burned down during the Revolutionary War. Now there are exhibits inside the landmarked house and old-fashioned tools, games and toys to try out.
The landscape architects designed it to give visitors the impression that it stretches to infinity. The building, which is rosy-red brick with bands of decorative stone, was constructed in The open-air pavilion with 28 columns was built in In the early 20th century, people played croquet on the north end of the Long Meadow. Artist Alexander Phimister Proctor made the statues. The original boathouse was built in when the park first opened. Here it is in the s.
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