On this All Souls' Day, two little souls who enjoyed Prospect Park long ago, and were captured on a summer day in a photo that wound up in a stereoview card set.
The park was featured often in these sets (the predecessors to ViewMasters and IMAX 3-D), testifying to its magnitude as a tourist attraction. The ghostly figures, fixed forever in the distant past on my same familiar and beloved park spots, often remind me of my favorite lines from Dead Poet's Society:
If it ever...ever...ever stops raining, grab your Dad and take him to the park! This wonderful shot (late 40s? Very early 50s?) looks like the Prospect Park Zoo, and hails from the Brooklyn Public Library's nifty Brooklyn collection archives. The skeptical miens of tots and adults suggest a staged shot (with mothers perhaps corralled nearby, eager to twitch collars and pull up socks for the camera). Ah, those were the days, before men dressed like teenagers and wore their babies in pouches!
Happy Father's Day to all AYITP-visiting dads!
Check out my latest E-bay prize: an antique postcard of the sheep meadow in Prospect Park. There were real sheep clipping the greensward right up until the 1930s, I believe; today, I'm sure the possibility of sheep-related lawsuits would nix this picturesque possibility (not to mention the turf battles between sheep and Frisbie players). It's a shame, really, think how the dogs would love chasing them during off-leash hours! Note the guy in the grey flannel suit playing the role of border collie here, along with the lad in what looks like a sailor suit next to the tree.
This archivey goodness comes instead of a real-life report, since I haven't been to the park in more than a week...precisely the sort of slippage I'd feared once I slacked off my strict daily-visit goal. Same old excuses--too busy, too cold out, etc. Did anyone participate in last weekend's volunteer clean-up bash? If so, send me some good shots of your labors!
Prospect Park must once have been the DisneyWorld of its day, judging from how many "stereopticon" or magic-lantern slides that pop up on E-bay. (Shown is half of one; you put them in an ancestor of today's 3-D glasses and marveled at the Scenic Views.) Some of the views remain familiar; others evoke a ghost park of vanished romantic structures.
Like this bridge, with its hoop-skirted observers leaning over the railing. No current park bridge looks like this, so I asked Park archivist Amy Peck for help. Mystery solved: It's "Lullwood Bridge," the predecessor to today's Lullwater Bridge opposite the Boathouse/Audubon Center.
According to Ms. Peck, it was a 90-foot span bridge of white oak finished in 1870. "I'm not sure why it was replaced relatively quickly," she adds, "but by 1885 the report to the Brooklyn park commissioners is referring to its replacement." The bridge is barely visible at middle left in this photo from The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted Vol. VI, but across the lake you can clearly see another ghost: the old wooden boathouse, standing opposite the site of today's Audubon Center. (I also love the wooden gardener's basket plunked in the foreground.)
Photo, right: Courtesy of Prospect Park Archives
And here is today's Lullwater Bridge, a single steel arch with stone abutments. This archivey goodness has been brought to you by the weather, which is gray, cold, windy, and thoroughly disappointing, causing me to boycott the park because I am sick, sick, sick of wearing gloves and a hat.
Intellectual Property Wonk Note: Fellow IPWs are invited to weigh in on the ethics of using a non-watermarked E-bay image, as I have done above with the magic-lantern slide. I would have linked to the auction but it has elapsed. The image itself is of course public domain, but the physical slide is the property of...whoever won the auction, and was the property of the E-bay seller at the time I downloaded it. I'm not using the image for commercial purposes (well, not yet, anyway). Those not afflicted with the sin of scrupulosity would just pretend they owned the damn slide themselves (there were undoubtedly hundreds produced), or would not care, but I am picky. It's Holy Week; what do you think, have I sinned against the copyright gods?
After careful consideration, I determined that conditions today were finally right for a time-honored tradition in my family: the recitation of My Mother's December Poem.
Today's unseasonable warmth was all wrong, but the quality of the light was perfect this morning, before the sun broke out. It had the correct leaden quality that, once a year, would inspire my mother to dredge up an oration she had been forced to learn by heart in her Brooklyn childhood: the opening lines of John Greenleaf Whittier's "Snowbound." (That was back before rote memorization was considered too stifling to the creativity of the young.)
Some years, she would recite it in plummy tones worthy of Dame Judith Anderson (or Dame Edna). Others, she would channel one of her fellow students from Transfiguration School, shifting from foot to foot, eyes tracking, and slaughtering the verse with a dead-on early-20th-century Williamsboig accent.
"De sun dat brief December day...rose cheehless ovah hills. Of gray?
And dawkly soickled, gave at noon, a sadduh light dan wanin' moon."
(That's my mom, Mathilde, on the right; her sister Rosemary, my godmother, is at left. Love those berets!)
On a certain sort of dismal December day, an evil gleam would enter Mommy's eyes, and she would announce that it was time for The Poem. This memory is precious to me as a keepsake of my mother's original and better self, the one with a rapier wit and Pythonesque sense of the absurd, which was robbed from her by severe depression in her final years. She was born 95 years ago today, and has been gone for nine. Alone at the lakeside of Prospect Park this morning, where poetry-reciting lunatics can orate with impunity, I honored the tradition in the observance rather than the breach. Happy Birthday, Mommy.
"Snow-Bound"
The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Slow tracing down the thickening
sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than
threat,
It sank from sight before it set.
A chill no coat, however stout,
Of homespun stuff could quite
shut out,
A hard,
dull bitterness of cold,
That checked, mid-vein, the
circling race
Of life-blood in the sharpened
face,
The coming of the snow-storm told.
--John Greenleaf Whittier
When I was little, we made a yearly pilgrimage to see the Christmas windows in Altman's and Lord & Taylor's, with their themed vignettes of winter wonderlands. If only there were a picture of this Prospect Park scene from the long-vanished Young's Dry Goods Store! It testifies to the park's hold on the imagination of Brooklyn as of December, 1886, when the Brooklyn Eagle ran this enchanting little item about holiday shopping more than a century before the advent of Bratz:
Fort Greeners, I'm curious: What stands at that intersection today?
Image: (c)2000 Denise Van Patten, Doll Collecting at About.com
Prospect Park attracts interesting characters, and apparently it always has. On this December 4, I missed my park visit, so let's go back 127 years to December 4, 1881, when the Brooklyn Eagle profiled a gentleman named Anton Gerster. To the young lady at left, he was just Uncle Anton the carpenter, and thereby hangs a tale.
An Eagle reporter, strolling in the woods near the Litchfield villa, found "an old tumbledown building" and within, a carpenter shop lit by a red-hot stove over which stooped an aging Hungarian artisan. His supervisor, "jolly-faced Boss Moran," tipped the reporter off that the old fellow "had a history" involving the celebrated diva Etelka Gerster (left), who was even then touring the United States to rave reviews.
Gerster was "busily engaged in perfecting one of those little rustic birdhouses with which the park abound." (A modern reference states that the park started out with some 800 of them; the carpenter shop apparently created all the fanciful woodwork within the park, like the rustic shelter near the waterfall.) A well-educated former lieutenant in the Hungarian army, Gerster had fled Europe for America for political reasons, and found work in Central Park building shelters, bridges and arbors. When the Civil War broke out, he volunteered for the Union and won renown as a civil engineer. After the war, he settled in Brooklyn, in a house on 13th Street and Fifth Avenue, and picked back up his livelihood as a master of rustic park structures.
But the Eagle was more interested in the humble Gerster's celebrity connection to his niece, the diva. "Seated on...a nail keg, surrounded by a playful squirrel, a couple of frisky dogs, numerous planks, boards, benches, soldering irons, furnaces and tin wares," the carpenter gave up some details about his brother's daughter, the "cantatrice," who was only about 26 years old. Gerster's flowery quotes about Etelka's dazzling musical career sound suspiciously like a press release, but his proud recounting of dinners in his "South Brooklyn" house with Etelka during her tours sound more authentic. He recounted that the young songbird had recently married an opera manager some years her senior and had a 15-month-old daughter who loved to sing. He added that Etelka was "quite a housekeeper...and a good cook and can make a pie or cake in first-class style."
Now for a mystery: According to the scant Web references to Etelka Gerster, she suffered a mysterious vocal decline after giving birth to her daughter, and the diva settled for a career as a voice teacher in Europe. And her daughter, who grew up to marry conductor Fritz Reiner, supposedly inherited her mother's gift and its short-lived span. According to Time Magazine in 1923, Etelka didn't tell her daughter of her own history, "but
with a strange anxiety turned the child's bent toward singing,
determined to realize in her the graces of song of which the child had
deprived her. One day, when the girl was half grown, an angry maid
taunted her bitterly with having caused the ruin of her mother's voice.
Still mother and daughter could not bring themselves to speak of the
theme that had been hidden, and the woman died with the silence
unbroken. The daughter became a singer, but did not follow her art for
more than a little while. She renounced it for a home and
family."It's a great melodrama, but why, then, did the Birdhouse Builder of Prospect Park report cheerfully on his niece's effortless-seeming vocal technique and active touring career more than a year after she became a mother? Could it be that both mother and daughter, in their turn and for their own reasons, chose home over stage, and sought a diva-worthy tale to justify their retirement? The Eagle reporter, while conjuring up a fine yarn in a setting worthy of Disney, gives us no answers.
As for the birdhouses and rustic structures crafted by Mr. Gerster, it is safe to say that none survive, although some, like the waterfall shelter, have been closely reconstructed from photos of the originals, which may well have been his handiwork.
Images: Top: Luminous Lint; middle, Prospect Park archives.
Ah, the Wollman Rink, commonly referred to as Prospect Park's "eyesore," usually after a contemptuous reference to Robert Moses, who installed the dismal building in 1960. Those diamond-shaped thingies croak out a faint echo of low-slung Sixties pavilion architecture, but there's really just one good excuse for this blot on the lakeside: outdoor ice skating. The key is to look up and out at the lovely surrounding woods and sky (a good tip for not tripping over your toe picks anyway).
Despite eagerly anticipated plans for its demolition and replacement with an ambitious new "green-roofed" skating center, the rink will survive for at least one more year. It is slated to re-open on Thanksgiving Day, and
today the unsightly machinery (in plain sight, alas)
was chugging and steam-puffing in preparation, while bundled-up parks workers groomed the ice with brooms. I wonder if the new rink will fall into limbo in "today's harsh economic climate"? (That's my new all-purpose excuse. "Sorry, can't make waffles, not in today's harsh economic climate." "Laundry? Not amid the current economic uncertainty!")
What was here before the eyesore? One of the loveliest and most quixotic parts of the park's original design: the Music Island and Concert Grove. The musicians would perform concerts on a small man-made island off the shore, and audiences would gather in the grove.
The idea was romantic but impractical, and poor acoustics over the water eventually prompted the concerts to be moved to the Music Pavilion near the Nethermead. But for decades,
huge crowds turned out (including swells like these gents circa 1890) and horse-drawn carriages thronged the drives, for programs by "the Twenty-third Regiment Band, under the leadership of Mr. L. Conterno." In August of 1872, the Brooklyn Eagle reported,
"The Grand March composed by Mr. Conterno and dedicated to Prospect Park elicited the warmest applause of the listeners. Some of the passages are martial in the extreme, and sound as if meant for the leading strains of an army. J.R. Thomas's pleasant little ballad "Happy be thy Dreams" was cleverly handled, and coming as it did after the grand march, gave some conception of the compass of the band."
Today, if you mosey along the periphery of the rink's chain-link fence, you can trace the reed-choked outline of the original shore, over which the martial strains once wafted. The masonry wall along the water lies in chunks.
The sign on this poor lamp seems curiously apropos. Yet the Concert Grove (if you turn your back to the Eyesore) retains the outlines of its formal beauty (making it beloved, as we have seen, by photographers on Asian Bride Mondays.)
It may take awhile before the Grove gets restored to elegance and crowned with a 21st-Century skating palace. Meanwhile, time to get my skates sharpened.
Archival images: Prospect Park Archives
BONUS E-BAY ARCHIVEY GOODNESS
I am on the wagon, E-bay-wise, in Today's Economic Climate, but you go ahead and bid here on this nifty image (a photo, not a postcard) of a lady in a delicious bit of millinery, standing, oh, about the second tree back in the picture above, behind Lincoln, who gazes out at the rink-less lakeside.
She removes her terrifying mask to reveal the face of an angel--yet her dagger is still raised. What the hell story was this, anyway? We can't be certain. It's the only little piece of a ceiling fresco to be revealed in Prospect Park's Litchfield Villa; the rest is still covered with tin. Yes, you thought tin ceilings were old.
This place is older. The family moved in before the Civil War and before the park itself existed, in 1857. For decades, it has served (with varying degrees of indignity) as the park's headquarters. Last time we visited, I skulked around the exterior; today, I got the grand behind-the-scenes tour.
When you walk into the lobby (which is open to the public during business hours), these tiles are underfoot. (They're from an English factory that was still around more than a century later to provide replacements during recent renovation.)
The receptionist sits in what once was an elegant circular "Great Hall."
Look up, and a delicately wrought balcony opens onto the second floor; above that, daylight streams down from a cupola overhead. You don't have to be an archi-wonk to realize that the proportions of this space are as exquisite and as confidently balanced as a Mozart string quartet.
A graceful double staircase leads upward, or straight into a grand parlor space.
Below, the second-floor balustrade seen from a sweet little window up above. The architect, Alexander Jackson Davis, took obvious delight in tricking the eye and playing with the dimensions of a surprisingly compact space.
This once-magnificent parlor is now a fluorescent-lit conference room. On the wall hangs a faded photo of its Victorian decor, which was actually quite restrained and airy by the suffocating standards of the 19th Century. Yes, it's the same room; look at the columns.
In a congested office right off the main entrance, park folks work at very ordinary desks alongside this show-stopping marble mantle.
These maidens, holding scrolls and drafting equipment, lift the spirits of the office residents.
You can tell the boss's office; it's got the best lighting. This jewel box, another perfect circle, was once Mr. Litchfield's library and is now the office of Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel.
Another perfectly-proportioned space, once a chapel and a schoolroom, serves as Prospect Park administrator Tupper Thomas's lair, but I would have needed a wider-angle lens to capture its charm. Here, however, is a resident cherub.
There was one more astonishing space that I couldn't do justice to: a ballroom (now a big office painted an alarming shade of blue) with another lofty cupola/skylight overhead. Litchfield, his wife Grace, and their four children lived here until the city built the park around them and then appropriated the Villa and its lands. (They leased it back for awhile.) When it was built, it was way out in the country; during their tenure, it was a famously posh magnet for Brooklyn high society on the outskirts of a fast-rising neighborhood called Park Slope. They even seem to have had central heating (decorative duct covers can be seen throughout the house, although the present system uses these nifty ancient radiators.)
Many thanks to park publicity ace Eugene Patron and his colleagues who patiently allowed me to poke around and enthuse all over their workspaces today. Tomorrow, Part II: The Ravishing Roof and the Bottomless Basement.
Earlier tonight, at 6:42 p.m., was the ninetieth anniversary, to the minute, of the Malbone Street wreck, the worst disaster in New York transit history and the third-worst disaster in Brooklyn history. (The top two were a fire in 1876 in the Brooklyn Theatre on Fulton Street that claimed 295 lives, and the 1960 crash of an airliner in Park Slope that killed 95.)
I've been researching the wreck because it took place underground directly in front of Prospect Park. (Above, the tunnel leading into the Prospect Park station where an unqualified motorman, filling in for a striking worker, lost control of the train along a dangerous downhill curve, leading to a derailment and pile-up that killed at least 93 rush-hour commuters.) The wreck also ranked among the 10 worst disasters in metropolitan New York until 9/11. (The worst, a fire aboard the steamboat General Slocum, took 1,030 lives.)
Lincoln Road entrance to Prospect Park station of Brighton Beach subway line, 1916 and today.
Image, above left: Brooklyn's Flatbush by Brian Merlis and Lee A. Rosenzweig
The grisly events of November 1, 1918 made Malbone Street, a grim name to start with, so infamous that it was rechristened Empire Boulevard. The accident lived in Brooklyn's memory for decades. But even decades melt away, and remembrance fades. There is no monument to the Malbone Street victims, but even monuments don't confer immortality on grief; there is one (in Green-Wood Cemetery) to the Fulton Street fire casualties, and another (in Tompkins Square Park) to those who perished on the General Slocum, and those tragedies are comparably obscure. (However, fellow Brooklyn blogger Flatbush Gardener has posted a moving tribute to the Malbone wreck: a meticulous Google map of the victims' homes. Amazing use of the tools of the present to bring alive the past!)
Many aspects of this 1918 story evoked disturbing comparisons to 9/11: the surreal disruption of an ordinary working day (November 1 was a Saturday in 1918, but many people still worked a 6-day week); the carnage and the chaos of rescue operations; the frantic efforts to locate the missing; the years of finger-pointing and litigation over settlements to victims' families; the gnawing lack of "closure." (The Malbone motorman, who survived uninjured, was prosecuted for manslaughter but acquitted, and was believed to have lived in obscurity to old age.) But perhaps the most unnerving parallel is the city's ability to heal and regenerate and keep on going—and, eventually, to begin to forget, the one thing that everyone in the immediate aftermath swears must never be done.
On these days of the dead—today, All Saints Day (and tomorrow, All Souls Day)—I found myself warily cheered by that thought. This month and next contain the anniversaries of the deaths of both my parents and four other beloved elders, all gone within the past few decades; each year I find it harder to remember who died on which date. This year, I decided not to transfer the notations to my calendar, and to just wish them all well at Mass this weekend and be done with it. No matter what memories lie beneath our feet, there is always a new day to walk in the park—preferably with someone young enough not to remember.
Above: Ocean and Flatbush Avenues, 2008
More about the disaster:
The Malbone Street Wreck by Brian Cudahy (Fordham University Press, 1999)
The American Experience, "New York Underground" (a PBS series)
NYCsubway.org, a site for subway obsessives.
Forgotten New York, for the clearest explanation of what happened where.
