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Prospect Park history
Prospect Park company history timeline
In 1814 Robert Fulton’s ferry service contributed to the expansion of East River commerce and linked the growing town with its neighbor and competitor, New York City.
John Willink built his family mansion in 1835.
Founded in 1838, this final resting place for many of New York’s 19th century luminaries was also a popular spot for picnics and carriage rides around the tombs.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and brooklyneagle.com cover Brooklyn 24/7 online and five days a week in print with the motto, “All Brooklyn All the Time.” With a history dating back to 1841, the Eagle is New York City’s only daily devoted exclusively to Brooklyn.
The City of Brooklyn built a reservoir on Prospect Hill in 1856.
Lured by the promise of creative freedom, Olmsted and Vaux were drawn back into city park design after an exhausting experience with the “infernal scoundrels” of Central Park in 1857.
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.
In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had created Central Park in Manhattan, which became the first landscaped park in the United States.
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.
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.
When construction of the park began in 1860, they were “quietly removed” through eminent domain, according to official records.
In 1860, the largest and most ambitious planned park was centered around Mount Prospect on the outskirts of the city.
By late 1860, land had been purchased for Viele's plan.
First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Prospect Park, 1861.
Egbert Viele began drawing plans for "Mount Prospect Park", as the space was initially called, and published his proposal in 1861.
The delay prompted some reflection; Stranahan invited Calvert Vaux to review Viele's plans early in 1865.
Vaux recruited Olmsted and formally presented the plan in February 1866.
In 1866, the New York state legislature passed a bill approving the acquisition of additional land on the southwest side of the park.
The first section of the park opened to the public on October 19, 1867, while it was still under construction.
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.
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.
In its 1870 annual report, the Brooklyn park commissioners reported that the lake was nearly completed, and that widening of nearby streets was underway.
The 1873 financial panic caused work on the park to largely cease, scrapping the more ambitious elements of the planned public space but finally giving Brooklyn a premier public park.
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.
After Brooklyn Mayor Alfred C. Chapin walked through the park in 1888, he requested that $100,000 be allocated for improvements.
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.
After the Soldier's and Sailor's Arch at Grand Army Plaza was built in 1892, the park commissioners engaged the McKim, Mead, and White architectural firm to redesign Grand Army Plaza in a complementary, neoclassical way.
Stately Reservoir Tower High atop Brooklyn’s second highest point on Mount Prospect sits the reservoir tower, only a couple decades old (1893) but looking like a medieval ruin in this image.
Stanford White's Maryland Monument was installed near the Terrace Bridge in 1895 in recognition of the Maryland 400, who fought in the Battle of Long Island on the slopes of Lookout Hill.
The city of Brooklyn merged with Manhattan and other outlying boroughs in 1898, creating the City of Greater New York.
James Sowerbutt opened Prospect Park “Quarry” in 1901.
The Prospect Park Boathouse, built in 1905, was one of the first buildings in New York City to be designated as a national landmark.
The name survives today as the Willink entrance to the park and the Willink comfort station built in 1912.
Date of this picture is unknown, although the ground for the Brooklyn Public Library main branch building was broken in 1912, so it was clearly sometime before then.
The decline started after 1915 with management and maintenance cutbacks as a result of a decrease to the park budget.
A two-story brick building was opened in the Menagerie in 1916, housing monkeys, some small mammals, and several birds.
Also on that list is the Lefferts Historic House, a Dutch colonial farmhouse that is now a museum (though it’s currently closed for restoration), which predates the park, although it was relocated in 1918 from its original location on Flatbush between Maple and Midwood.
After the end of World War I, a memorial commemorating fallen soldiers was proposed; it was dedicated in 1921.
In 1932, a faux Mount Vernon was built in Prospect Park to commemorate the bicentennial of George Washington's birthday.
In 1934, Robert Moses, the powerful yet controversial commissioners of parks in the city, made his mark on Prospect Park by creating new playgrounds, a bandshell and the Prospect Park Zoo.
The building was destroyed in 1935, though the locavores of Brooklyn may make a case for its revival today.
The Prospect Park Zoo opened in 1935 on the east side of the park, replacing the former Menagerie.
The Thatched Shelter, designed by Calvert Vaux, burned in 1937.
In 1940, the City transferred control of Mount Prospect to Parks, which then developed the land into a playground, simultaneously built with the adjacent Brooklyn Public Library, completed the following year.
Though the defenses were disbanded in 1944, traces of slit trenches and sandbagged gun emplacements could still be found several years afterward.
In addition, the Carousel was opened in 1949 as a gift from the foundation of the late philanthropist Michael Friedsam.
In 1959, the southern third of the Long Meadow was graded and fenced off for ballfields.
He built Wollman Rink in 1960, destroying one of Olmsted and Vaux’s most picturesque vistas; other asphalt-heavy Moses additions to the landscape include playgrounds, the ballfields on the Long Meadow, the bandshell, and the zoo.
The Alliance soon formed plans to restore Music Island and the original shoreline, both obliterated by the construction of the original rink in 1960.
Plans for the Kate Wollman Memorial Rink were approved the following year, and the rink opened in December 1961.
In September 1964, the Parks Department was within forty-eight hours of demolishing the Boathouse on the Lullwater.
In 1965, the city allocated $450,000 to renovate the Vale of Cashmere and the Rose Garden ahead of Brooklyn's 300th anniversary, and the park's 100th anniversary, the following year.
However, some of the contracts were delayed, including renovations to the Boathouse and the tennis courts, as well as a reconstruction of the Music Pagoda, which had burned down in 1968.
In 1969, Warren Brothers Inc. (a division of Ashland Oil and Refining Company) acquired the quarry.
By 1971, the city had spent $4 million to renovate Prospect Park, including renovating the Boathouse and dredging the lake.
By 1979, park attendance dropped to two million, the lowest recorded level in the history of the park.
The mayoral administration of Ed Koch formed plans in 1980 to turn over the administration of the troubled Prospect Park Zoo to the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Then the Prospect Park Alliance was formed in 1987, to help maintain and improve the park.
The Alliance has paid special attention to preserving Olmsted and Vaux’s work, rebuilding the designers’ rustic shelters with the original methods—no nails, only pegs and dowels to keep the wooden lakeside structures together. It launched an extensive restoration project for the Ravine in 1994, one area that was particularly rundown, so that its bridges and waterfalls are again close to what Olmsted and Vaux intended.
In 1996, a $552,000 renovation of the playground, funded through the efforts of City Council Member Mary Pinkett included play equipment, swings, game tables, benches, a spray shower, a drinking fountain, a new drainage system, and new trees.
Nine years later, in 1996, it started a $4.5 million restoration of the Ravine.
In 1998, Mayor Giuliani allocated $111,615 in funding for play equipment upgrading, safety surfacing, and handball courts.
The National Audubon Society signed a lease for the Boathouse in 2000, and the building became the site of the nation's first urban Audubon society.
By 2000, the Wollman Rink was deteriorating, and there was a need to replace it.
As part of the Wollman Rink's replacement, plans for the restored Music Island were announced in 2009.
The Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Center at Lakeside was completed in December 2013 at a cost of $74 million.
During the city's 2016 fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2016, politicians also contributed funds toward various restoration projects in the park.
In 2016, the Alliance also received $3.2 million from NYC Parks' Parks Without Borders program to construct two new entrances on Flatbush Avenue, the park's first new entrances in over 70 years, as well as rebuild the Willink entrance.
The Well House, located on the Lake, reopened in 2017 as a composting restroom, and the Dog Beach along the watercourse's Upper Pool was renovated.
The Concert Grove Pavilion reopened in April 2021 after a one-year renovation.
© 2022 Everything Brooklyn Media
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