Prospect: A Year in the Park

Skyfall

 

 

Well, it sounds better than "deadfall." We need no Bond villainesses; we had one named Sandy. She specialized in gruesome deaths, including this spectacular impalement along Prospect Park Southwest...and this twisted victim nearby.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Near the Coney Island Avenue traffic circle entrance, Sandy's arboreal body count piled up, in what looked like a dam built by giant beavers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These mechanical beavers tore the pile apart, filling dumpster after dumpster with casualties of a hurricane followed days later by a crippling blanket of leaden snow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even as they worked, the park drive coursed with joggers, walkers, and folks just glad to be back out in our battered park and shell-shocked city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Underfoot: reminders that nature eventually makes her own amends.

 

 

 

 

"I feel like someone has died"

I confess: I was grateful that Prospect Park was formally closed (if easily entered anyway) for days in the sad aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. It seems like yesterday that Irene felled so many great trees, and now so many more have fallen. I'm a coward, and still haven't gone in; what was visible along the periphery (Prospect Park Southwest, below) was heart-rending enough.

Others, however, are not only brave but damn hard-working. Here's an excellent report from WNYC on the arboreal carnage in the park and the gutsy volunteers helping to start cleaning up (at least before the coming storm interrupts their cleanup of the last one):

...and it ain't over...

Island time

To celebrate the formal opening of the resurrected Music Island and gorgeously restored Esplanade, Prospect Park has put together a very nice video tribute. If you can't get over to the park on this gloomy October morning, you can follow the project's progress below in 6 minutes (and get background here):

Here are my three favorite things about the video:

1. It gives plenty of credit to Tupper Thomas, the park's chief for 3 decades, who had the vision and energy to get the project off the ground.

2. This image of a little girl sitting atop a section of the original decorative iron fencing, whose sole remaining section (the fence, not the girl) was excavated from the mud and replicated for the Esplanade.

3. The photo of the now-demolished little old Robert Moses-era rink, which is by me. Whether I will totally love its replacement, which is rising near the lake like...a really big, new skating rink...remains to be seen, but it will have to be better than its shabby predecessor. Scroll down to the previous entry for my impressions, and misgivings.

Mr. Olmsted Would Be Gobsmacked: A Blink at the Rink

 

 

Today: A Sneak Peak at Lakeside, Part II. Yesterday, I shared a look at the ravishingly restored original shoreline in Prospect Park's Concert Grove. Now for the rest of the tour:  Turn on your heel, and there, looming over the bucolic scene, is an unfinished pavilion so large, it brought to mind those spaceships in "War of the Worlds." (Or maybe I'm just traumatized by the grim landing of the Barclay's Arena downtown.)

Our guide, Christian Zimmerman, the park's VP for Design and Construction, gestured to the insulation-wrapped slice that cut the horizon in two. "This," he stated, "allowed us to do this," pointing toward the verdant lake shore. It seems as if the architects have put much effort into trying to camoflauge the staggering scale of this project, through "green roofs," sweeping berms, and other tricks. The sketches (like this one of the main entry) make the finished product look like a post-modern, eco-conscious utopia. Perhaps it shall be so.

 

We clomped across what would be a green roof. How you grow trees on a flat roof without disaster I'll never know, but it's all the rage, as at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's new entry pavilion. (The cynical renovator in me wonders, in 20 years, if we'll be sitting around LEED-certified buildings amid buckets full of rainwater, saying, "Remember the green roof craze?")

 

Looking down at the two rinks, the project's enormity hits you. The old Wollman rink was a pocket-sized affair (and set on a noticeable slant, requiring one to skate uphill), open only in winter. These rinks will offer two vast ice kingdoms in winter (linked by an "ice bridge"), and in summer the outdoor one (above, at left) will be a water playground while the sheltered one (now a dirt field, right) will provide Brooklyn with a roller rink (its only one after the lamented closing of a rink on Empire Boulevard some years ago).

Here's the dream rendering for winter...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...and summer, with (as Letterman says) "Prancing Fluids." (What artist gets the job of concocting these visions of sugarplums to dangle before donors and planning boards? I wish life would look like that.)

 

 

 

 

 

    

Freezing that much water with eco-correctness is an engineering challenge par excellence. I found the shiny, factory-fresh mechanicals pretty cool...like big Tonka toys.

 

The architectural details are classy, like elegantly joined granite blocks and a rink ceiling in starry-night blue and silver that suggests the swoosh of skate blades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to the park's plans, the two new rinks will cover 30,000 square feet, enough room to keep wobbly learners away from speeding hot-doggers. Also promised are a roomy cafe overlooking the ice (which we toured in raw-Sheetrock state) plus changing facilities, parking (on Breeze Hill nearby), and a new dock for pedal-boat rentals and electric boat tours. Lakeside clearly will tip the balance of park-power towards "my" side of the park, the often-neglected southern and eastern side; the Park Slopers will be heading our way with hockey gear in tow.

FUTURAMA, OR VAMPIRE SIBLING?

Lakeside will be dazzling, certainly in its first blush of youth. But recent events cast a shadow over those glowing renderings. Every donor and politician loves a ribbon-cutting, but this $74 million project is rising even as the rest of the park cuts staff and programming to the bone, with education—supposedly one of the park's big missions—taking it on the chin. School programs have already been suspended, as I wrote here, hoping that someone would protest. (No one did.)

The latest round of cutbacks are detailed here. Does anyone remember the fuss over the dramatically rescued-and-rehabbed Boathouse, a brief walk away? It opened with a flourish in 2002 as America's first and only urban Audubon Center, an environmental educational powerhouse for city kids. Now, says the park, the Center is cutting back public programs on-site to just two days a week, and renting the historic Boathouse out on weekends for badly needed "revenue."

 

 

The eco-friendly electric boat Independence may have a new dock, but it won't be plying the lake until a private operator steps up, due to more budget cuts.

 

 

 

 

 

And we're not done: The Lefferts Historic House has cut one member of its already tiny staff and cut programming and hours, as well as charging a modest admission fee that will still discourage many casual walk-in visitors.

Yes, I know: It's not like you could take dollars earmarked for Lakeside and give them to other players within the park. But there are only so many tax and philanthropy bucks to go around...and only so much public attention span.

 

 

 

BARRIER-FREE...FOR THE WALLET?

When the rink does open, it will be painstakingly compliant with ADA regs. But will it be economically accessible? The shabby Wollman Rink was at least fairly cheap, and non-affluent kids and families could rent skates and still afford hot dogs and cocoa. When I hear terms like "hockey" and "LEED-certified," my red-alert goes off: Will it cost $20 per-person to skate there, with a farm-to-table menu of $15 panini for refreshment afterwards? If so, I'll be watching from the sidelines, and eating a tote-bag banana, sulking.

I wonder what Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted would have made of it all. His and Calvert Vaux's original plans made little provision for sporting types of recreation. Brooklynites simply waited until Prospect Park Lake froze over, and showed up to skate. (That won't fly with legal these days, and just as well.) When Robert Moses built the first rink, active recreation for families was a towering priority (think Jones Beach). Today, our intentions are even nobler: not just fun, but eco-friendly, handicapped-accssible, organic and post-consumer-recycled fun. But if the cost keeps many of us far from that "access," it will torpedo Olmsted's high Victorian intentions of making the park a paradise for the common man. He foresaw how changing fashions would alter the park's sense of mission (and allocation of resources). I'll give him the last word:

 

Frederick Law Olmsted, by John Singer Sargent

“Suppose that you had been commissioned to build a really grand opera house; that after the construction work had nearly been completed and your scheme of decoration fully designed you should be instructed that the building was to be used on Sundays as a Baptist Tabernacle, and that suitable place must be made for a huge organ, a pulpit, and a dipping pool. Then at intervals afterward, you should be advised that it must be so refitted and furnished that parts of it could be used for a court room, a jail, a concert hall, hotel, skating rink, for surgical cliniques, for a circus, dog show, drill room, ball room, railway station and shot tower? That is what is nearly always going on with public parks. Pardon me if I overwhelm you: it is a matter of chronic anger with me.”   —Frederick Law Olmsted, 1891

 

Mr. Olmsted Would Be Pleased: Return to Music Island

Got a sneak peak at the new Lakeside project in Prospect Park...amazing things are happening.

We took a tour with Christian Zimmerman, the Park's vice president for design and construction, through the "What's Out There Weekend" program of a group called The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Few landscapes are as intensely cultural as Prospect Park's, and as Zimmerman led us through the construction fence, I realized that he is as conversant with Messrs. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park's original mid-19th-century designers, as a steward of Monticello would be with Thomas Jefferson.

 

 

The park's founding fathers, especially Olmsted, must have been giving him an earful...because the area we trod yesterday was an egregious desecration of Olmsted's utopian rural vision. Robert Moses, the "Master Builder," literally paved paradise and put up a parking lot...and a pug-ugly early-1960s skating rink.

 

 

 

The site of this desecration was the "Concert Grove," the most formal part of the original park design--an ampitheatre-shaped swath off the East Drive whose shoreline faced a man-made "Music Island," once a site for genteel summer concerts. (More about this delightful folly here.) The first phase of the park's multi-zillion-dollar Lakeside Project has been to demolish the ratty old rink, reclaim the original shoreline, and recreate Music Island, this time as a wildlife habitat. The job is virtually done, and the results are stunning.

 

 

Above, a shot of the Concert Grove back in the late 1800s; the statue of Abraham Lincoln still stands there, but thanks to Mr. Moses, Mr. Lincoln spent decades gazing at the Zamboni shed. Here is almost the exact spot today. Our tour group stands above the same wall in the earlier photo; it was buried in sludge for the rink project and, when excavated, needed only some pointing to gird the lake once again. (Lincoln is just out of sight to our left.)

 

 

AND NOW...VICTORIAN PUBLIC DECOR PORN!

The massive dig to restore the shoreline revealed no dead mobsters or even guns, said Zimmerman, but it did turn up this fanciful water fountain (circled in red). Yes, the rink-builders just tossed it into the mud.  The park folks hope a donor will come forward to restore this treasure, although probably not as a working drinking fountain due to ADA regulations for wheelchair accessibility.

 

 

 

 

 

These spectacular bronze urns, which disappeared during the park's decades of hard times, were meticulously replicated from photographs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The urns sit atop the original stone bases, whose weathered carving is like a glorious 3-D picture book of Victorian ornamentation...

      

cornucopias of fruits and wild game, a spunky owl...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and lush music-themed assemblages, some carved with composers' names.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The closest thing to Olmsted's heart, however, would have to be the restoration of the lake's "natural" contours and the artful use of native plantings. He was a firm believer that the common folk needed to rest their eyes on nature's beauty as a restorative for society's ills.

An adolescent swan and a red-eared turtle already seem to approve. Tomorrow, in Part II of the sneak peak at Lakeside, we'll go inside something that Vaux and Olmsted could never have imagined.

For Jeffrey, who did not want to die

It's happened again. A young man has died violently a few blocks from our house, in a place where children play.

It happened near the Dillon Stewart Playground, a leafy corner of the Parade Grounds section of Prospect Park, on the day before yesterday, a sunny Sunday morning. The story made no headlines, just got tucked into round-up articles about the city's weekend of heat-wave carnage. According to the Daily News:

 

 

Another fatality Sunday occurred in broad daylight on a basketball court in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, when Jeffrey Jeune, 19, of Brooklyn, died after being stabbed three times about 11:50 a.m., officials said.

 

“I gave my life to raise him,” said Jeune’s sobbing mother Marie Talleyrand, 47. “He was a good son, my only child.”

 

Jeune collapsed on Parkside Ave. and Parade Place after climbing a fence from inside the Prospect Park Parade Ground, witnesses said.

 

“He had a big hole near his heart,” said witness Jean Brunel Julot, 58. “I tried to hold the bleeding until the ambulance came.”

 

“He said, ‘Somebody help me. I don’t want to die,’ ” Julot added.

No media ran any pictures of Jeffrey. (Perhaps this surveillance camera, installed after last year's community outcry, may have captured some.) I don't know if he and his mother lived nearby. But every time this happens, I feel like the lawyer in the gospel who, "desiring to justify himself," asked Christ, when told to love his neighbor: "And who is my neighbor?"

When a neighbor dies within our realm of "Victorian Flatbush" homes, we e-mail one another, send condolences, reminisce together, attend the wake. If the unthinkable happened and a young person were to perish as Jeffrey did, we would have no need of e-mail; it would be headline news. (In fact, it was, in 2005, when a young man from outside the neighborhood was killed within the historic district of Prospect Park South.)

But Jeffrey Jeune vanishes into an ambulance two blocks from my front door.  The crime scene tape flutters and is gone; a few extra cruisers patrol the Parade Grounds for awhile.

I walked the area yesterday, uncertain of the precise location of the stabbing, and didn't even find a makeshift shrine.

Except for his mother and, I presume, his other family and friends, no one will remember Jeffrey's name.

Unlike the preppy young victims who populate the morning news narratives (especially the pantheon of "slain blonde co-eds"), he won't become a symbol of random mayhem to haunt the anxious and privileged.

And unlike poor young Trayvon, he won't become a symbol of injustice to stoke the rage of the underprivileged. The Reverend Al Sharpton is not expected to demand justice in his name.

But if you would like to try to remember Jeffrey's name, here is a helpful hint. His last name, Jeune, is French.  It means "young."

Sub-Porcine Humanoids Attack Prospect Park!

This was the bucolic scene last Sunday south of Prospect Park's lake, perhaps the post-prandial souvenir of a festive Mother's Day picnic. The arborial placement is interesting, especially when it involves a small mountain of hot coals. Apparently if you nestle your crap against the base of a tree, it is mysteriously less offensive. (Trees love hot coals, right?) Or maybe there is a popular Internet rumor that the Keebler elves emerge at midnight to recycle it? 

 

 

 

 

Here's another Garbage Tree a few yards away. Oh, come on, the poor things. How could you expect them to drag their loathesome leavings to a nearby receptacle when it was at least 5, or maybe even 7, interminable yards away?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Want some more? Here's some more. Three trees down, a McDonald's orgy was in evidence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Prospect Park Alliance, of which I am a member, is a private group that "supplements" the park's government funding by PAYING TWO-THIRDS OF THE COST OF PARK MAINTENANCE. They sent out 50 extra trash-removal sweeps last year, but with such imbeciles on the greensward, they'd need a sweep an hour. What the hell do we do about this?

Well, the Alliance has a well-intentioned new campaign: They have e-mailed lots of high-functioning, responsible park supporters, asking them to sign an Internet pledge to "pitch in" and "put trash in its proper place." Because that is, like, totally the target audience who are doing this crap. There are informative graphics, too:

I'll sign the pledge, but may I suggest some more...persuasive signage and strategy? I'll borrow some "messaging" from my favorite Web cartoonist, a dazzling psychopath who styles himself The Oatmeal. (To make up for stealing and repurposing his stuff, I have enabled click-through to his original works of genius on each image. Much of it is deliciously unsafe for work or family audiences.)

A THREE-PART STRATEGY FOR PROSPECT PARK DUMPERS

1. Stop calling them "pigs." This insults pigs, who are reportedly quite intelligent.

2. Import bears from nearby suburban New Jersey, which has extra bears. Set bears loose preferentially on dumpers who also provide their own musical accompaniment.

3. Patrol Prospect Park with robotic Tyrannosaurs equipped with chipper-shredder jaws to consume offenders on site.

Well, that oughta do it. On to tomorrow's unprecedented Hipster ChowHound Convention, the Great GoogaMooga. Let's see how that crowd does when it comes to trashing the place.  

Blue sky over Church Avenue

Just a block south of the Parade Grounds of Prospect Park, Church Avenue has slumbered for years, a strip of scruffy retail nothingness. But word on the street is that Church is poised for a long-awaited rebirth, and today, its first street fair looked like a wild success.

Meet some of my neighbors on "our side" of the park.

    

In the middle is Dr. Courtney Perry and Geneva (a rescued friend and patient) in front of her new veterinary practice, PAWSitive. She's a Wellesley and Cornell grad who's come home to Ditmas Park, and we're very glad.

   

More dog excellence: a Noble Pitbull and a Chillin' Husky, both rescues. (Note: There is, yet to come, a Greenmarket Dog of the Day!)

Another eagerly welcomed newcomer to the strip is Am Thai Bistro, whose absurdly gorgeous staff were dishing up curry puffs, coconut rice balls and spring rolls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sensory overload for small fry. Sometimes good...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...sometimes not so much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The vendors were the usual suspects (including sausages and crew socks, those street-fair essentials), but there were also Latin-themed totes and tiny suits with ties.

 

   

Robopuppy? Copter-on-a-stick? Cheap machine gun?

 

 

Congratulations to the Church Avenue BID, whose efforts to breathe life into this languishing corridor have begun to bear fruit. A coffee shop called Lark is in the works,  joining mom-and-pop ventures like Shayna's roti shop and La Huasteca, so wander on down after a soccer match or a tennis game; Cortelyou Road, look to your laurels. And chefs, merchants, countrymen, come on down; as you can see from the montage of fine novelty wares above, Church Avenue lends a magical glow to any merchandise.

GREENMARKET DOG OF THE DAY

Behold the charming Bica, strolling with an old friend of mine at Saturday's Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. He is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and his name is a slang term used around Lisbon for espresso.  Appropriately enough, he enjoyed licking the foam from my latte.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turbo-spring

Two weeks of late May mysteriously land in the middle of March, and I manage not to get over to the park more than once or twice. The reason: My own garden has been bursting out and yelling at me to perform every manner of service for it. A dozen rosebushes alone have been screeching to be pruned, and without the excuse of being miserable in the cold, I have been their slave.

But I've got to get over there because all sorts of stuff is going on. From my front porch, I can see that the trees are greening up, smudged with verdant pastel, a full month ahead of schedule. And that's not all.

* The Lakeside project is shaping up to be pretty damn amazing. Here's the Animated Architect Sketch; I love the snowy part, and the part where the trees drop down magically on Music Island. And the part at the very beginning where the Robert Moses crap building just disappears. (Thanks to the Q at Parkside blog for the heads-up.)

* The "Googa-Mooga" festival is stirring wild interest among the hip; it's some sort of food and music fest on May 19 and 20 that mysteriously, while "free," requires a ticket of extraordinary scarcity. Spouse has managed to acquire at least one of these prized tickets, which has him very excited even though we have yet to learn what bands are playing. Oh well: The festival's website proclaims that "food is the new rock," so we can dance along to the artisanal pickles.)

 
  * And on March 31, the Carousel reopens for its hundredth anniversary. It's been given a nice tune-up by Todd W. Goings, a carousel doctor (what a dream job!), nicely profiled here. (Photo, right: Chester Higgins, New York Times)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* At the Prospect Park Zoo, the Golden Tamarins have a wee baby riding around on their blond backs. (Photo: Julie Larsen Maher/WCS)

 

 

Meanwhile, check out a nicely researched gem on the park's mysterious Vale of Cashmere at the wonderful history blog of the Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklynology. This is the long-gone "Children's Shelter." The Vale, that haunted and troubled gem, looks very different than the playground envisioned by Vaux and Olmsted. Time to get over there and see for myself.

Sea-change carousel, rich and strange!

The first crazy-warm day, and news pours in to fuel my raging carousel obsession.

First: The Prospect Park Carousel, surely the world's most utterly perfect (here's why), re-opens Saturday, March 31 from 12 noon to 4 pm, and celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. (After April 1, it's open Thursdays – Sundays and school holidays, 12 to 5 p.m.; rides are $2 each or $9 for a book of five tickets, and if you only joined the Prospect Park Alliance for the unlimited free rides, that would be reason enough.) The 1912 masterpiece of legendary carousel designer Charles Carmel, it dwelt in Coney Island from 1912 to 1952, and the Alliance restored its delights in 1990. Note: It has a real Wurl band organ, not cheezy piped-in Muzak!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GUEST PARK ALERT:

NEW CAROUSEL OF MIND-BENDING AWESOMENESS

PLANNED FOR BATTERY PARK

This has come to my attention: "Sea Glass," an aquatic fantasy-themed carousel unlike anything in the known universe, is scheduled to open in Battery Park this fall. Yes, I love every sacred, carnival-esque gaudy detail of traditional carousels, but this new take looks brilliant. Evoking the long-ago aquarium at Castle Clinton on Manhattan's tip (and perhaps even linked to the current Coney Island Aquarium by a ferry), the new herd will consist of translucent, glowing angelfish and seahorses, turning dreamily inside a chambered nautilus with trippy projections of marine life. Engineering marvels abound, as described here. The animated rendering below, Debussy and all, brought tears to my eyes. Plus, if you have lots of money, you can sponsor a fish, which I would totally do if I were rich. Can you tell I am just a little excited about this?

 

 

Finally, here's a great wrap-up of all the carousels, operating, planned, and under renovation, in the city. How cool would it be to have a marathon that connected all of them and demanded that runners ride each one before continuing onward! I was shocked to note that there are some I have not yet ridden, a deficit I plan to remedy shortly. I am also reminded of how grateful I am that, despite suffering from embarrassing vertigo, I can still ride carousels without triggering it. Get spinning!