Too cold for a walk in the park? You can always troll E-bay looking for archivey goodness. Usually it's postcards and stereopticon views of the historic treasure across the street from our house, but today yielded a real gem: A rare original copy of Vaux and Olmsted's 1868 plan for the Parade Grounds, the part of the park we see from our front porch.
Geographicus Fine Antique Maps describes it thus:
An extremely scarce example of Vaux and Olmstead’s map of the King County Parade Ground (today known as the Prospect Park Parade Ground, or the Prospect Park Base Ball Grounds). The Parade Ground is bounded by Parade Place, Franklin Avenue (now Parkside Avenue), Caton Avenue, and Coney Island Avenue. The Ground was designed by Olmsted and Vaux in conjunction with the adjacent Prospect Park. The Parade Ground saw its first parade in 1867 when the 11th Brigade's Howitzer Battery strutted their stuff. Although intended from the start as a military facility, sports moved in early, and by 1871 the Parade Ground was being described by Henry Chadwick as the finest free ball ground in the United States." This map was published in the 1868 edition of William Bishop’s Manual of the Common Council of the City of Brooklyn .
I love the unbroken rectangle of "Green Sward" (now a grid of soccer and baseball fields, but still green thanks to synthetic turf), and the "carriage drive" and "gravelled area." When this map was created, this land, including our home, was probably open fields. The building site "A" was first an elegantly colonnaded club house and is now a reportedly rat-infested police station; site "B" is a tiny white house that has served various functions over the years.
The price for this gem? Listed at $412.50, well out of my range, although something in me instinctively lunged for the "buy it now" button. I often feel like Tony Stark in this moment when he first spies Scarlett Johansson in Iron Man 2; my inner Pepper Potts reliably checks my impulses.
Tony doesn't get Black Widow, and I don't get a map, but we can both dream.
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