Prospect: A Year in the Park

'Visual medicine'

I can't wait to see the exhibit now at the Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library (the big one at Grand Army Plaza, Reflections by Jamel Shabazz.  According to the BPL, 

"A prolific photographer of street culture in New York City, Jamel Shabazz has been documenting this borough since the 1980s.  His work is showcased throughout the Central Library, and in the Brooklyn Collection we're displaying a selection of images donated by Mr. Shabazz."

I was vaguely familiar with Shabazz's work (he did a series on hip-hop's more innocent early days titled, memorably, "Before Crack"), but didn't know he was a fellow Prospect Park obsessive. The BPL has put up a truly wonderful 5-minute slide show with Shabazz in voice-over telling us what the park has meant to him over the years—an enchanted preserve for a boy from the projects, where he wooed girlfriends, refreshed his soul, trained his body, mentored youth, and blossomed as a chronicler of people-in-the-city. He calls the park "the path of life—you meet people in search of peace. Whatever people I was suppoed to meet, I would meet."

And Shabazz sums up the whole reason I started this blog almost 5 years ago (is that possible?):

"It's great visual medicine for me."

Come to think of it, I haven't been taking my medicine regularly. Maybe a recommitment to my daily visit is just what the doctor should order.

Not gonna be pretty

As Sandy prepares to make landfall, and we worry about the giant tree over our own house, Prospect Park is already feeling the wrath. The park's Facebook page posted this picture (I know exactly where this is on the Neathermead because of that unique tree behind the fallen one), and they report:

There is a very limited staff working in the Park today and they are using extreme caution while they check on the condition of the Park. One of them sent in this photo during their inspection rounds.

Several branches and 2 trees are down in the Park so far as a result of the gusting winds. We have a report that one of the downed tress nearly hit a runner. Please stay out of the Park for your own safety and the safety of others!

 

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."

Girding for Googa

My hip and happenin' Spouse! Through his alertness and vigor, we have secured 2 tickets to The Great Googa-Mooga Festival, a free-but-sold-out extravaganza of food and live music in Prospect Park this weekend. The line-up of chefs definitely overshadows the musical acts (including Hall & Oates, the underwhelming* headliners).

The entire affair is starting to scare me, based on its wild hype (including this reverently snarky account in the New York Times calling it part of a "gastronomic summer of love"). It sounds as if Williamsburg will uproot, like Howl's Moving Castle, overshadow the Long Meadow, and touch down. In one particularly disturbing development, we have been alerted that "Line Talkers" in purple, Barclay's-Arena-sponsored T-shirts, will be on hand to tell us about menu choices up ahead. Are those like Navajo code-talkers, only for banh mi and panini? Dear Lord, what kind of apocalyptic lines are they expecting for foie-gras donuts and duck rolls?

 

 

 

According to the event's organizers (the merry pranksters at right), "Approximately 75 food vendors, 35 brewers, 30 winemakers and 20 live music performances will be on hand to help us relish some of life’s greatest pleasures—gathering with friends and neighbors to eat, drink, talk, laugh, dance, linger and just . . . be together." Personally, I can't wait to see the prices for all these artisanal noms and craft microbeers.  

A MICRO-RANT: If I am shelling out $20 for an al-fresco lobster roll with organic endangered wildflower sprouts and a touch of lavender foam, I want to eat it at a nice table with a clean bathroom nearby, one with running water and, preferably, a set of previous users smaller and less...free-spirited...than the population of Burning Man. The whole groundlings thing, with mobbed Port-O-San visit followed by lots of hand sanitizer, just doesn't jive with the exquisite haute-cuisine picnic angle for me.

In a slightly discordant note amid all that mellow vibe, for an incredible $250, you can get exclusive "Extra Mooga" tickets, including lectures on "Molecular Mixology" and "Textures of Rhubarb," along with the chance to worship at the shrines of Ruth Reichl, Anthony Bourdain, and other luminaries and, for all I know, personally butcher a heritage pig or a fast-food executive. (No word on whether this ransoms you out of the Port-O-San scene, however.)

But I quibble. Perhaps tomorrow you will see me crowd-surfing with a sprig of cilantro hanging off my lower lip, waving a draft lager brewed from hummingbird tongues and sobering up with some shade-grown, dolphin-safe macchiato. If you failed to score tickets, let's agree on a spot near the fence, and I'll toss you over a $40 sausage or something.

'READY FOR MARTY'?

* Hall & Oates belong to a category of act that we call "Ready for Marty," in reference to Borough President Marty Markowitz's long-running series of free summer concerts featuring well-loved but often fading pop acts. Markowitz, who relishes his role as B-list impresario, once mused aloud before a concert, when a crowd member shouted a suggestion for the line-up (Kenny Loggins, if memory serves): "Yeah...he's about ready for us."

When the robins come

Are robins becoming more numerous? Every spring, there seem to be more of them. This guy was taking a violent bath in the park's lake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Freshly storm-soaked and chilly, Prospect Park at sunset was subdued and lightly populated. Spring green, a thousand shades of it, is everywhere, along with splashes of delicate white.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's surprising how many trees glow red in their first tender foliage. This maple on Nellie's Lawn was one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The baby leaves on this oak blushed, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost home, in the Parade Grounds, I happened on this sidewalk memorial. A quick Googling revealed that Tamon Robinson was a beloved employee in a Fort Greene "Connecticut Muffin" coffee shop where, curiously, we just stopped in last Sunday after catching a movie at BAM. We had wondered about the oaktag memorial poster in the window; apparently the young man was run down by an NYPD squad car last week under mysterious circumstances and later died. Not surprisingly, his grieving family is seeking answers. How he came to be mourned among the ballfields of Flatbush, or by whom, I do not know.

 

If I shouldn't be alive

When the Robins come,

Give the one in Red Cravat,

A Memorial crumb –

If I couldn't thank you,

Being fast asleep,

You will know I'm trying

With my Granite lip!                                      

                            --Emily Dickinson

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.

New Thai restaurant near Prospect Park!

That oughta help Google bring success to Am Thai, the new Thai restaurant that just opened on Church Avenue between Coney Island Avenue and Stratford Road. To those of us who have been rooting for this rather dismal commercial strip along once-vibrant Church Avenue to perk up, it seems like a sort of miracle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We went over tonight to patronize the establishment on their opening day, but they wouldn't let us; instead, we were invited to a party on the house! Lots of gorgeous dressed-up ladies and gents who seemed like close friends and family, plus a scattering of happily stunned neighbors, feasted on delicious sushi and spicy head-on shrimp and other delicacies while techno music thumped rapturously. Hard to believe this was the late "In-Between Eatry [sic] and Pastry," a short-lived roti shop. (When will one of our local Caribbean take-out places, with their heartbreakingly good roti and jerk chicken, offer this fare in a pleasant dining spot with real cutlery?)

 

 

 

 

I wish I'd been there this morning, when monks blessed the place and even performed a wedding! Wonderful coverage on the Ditmas Park Blog and on Prospect Park Days, whose Ditmas Deb took the great picture to the left. Deb has also been devotedly covering the park while I have been moping around the house, and I salute her dedication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We love our sliver of Brooklyn that lies sandwiched between the Parade Grounds of Prospect Park and the historic district of Prospect Park South; to date, the only thing missing has been a vibrant shopping strip.  Poor Church Avenue, between Coney Island Avenue and the tough commercial scrum near the Q train stop, has been close to moribund; the strip has so many empty storefronts and rolldown gates that the local Business Improvement District has dreamed up a mural contest to decorate them. A few plucky restaurants (and one terrifying Chinese takeout dump) have held on; this new addition may herald a tide that will lift all boats. The sight of happy people eating and drinking is better than any mural. Good luck, Am Thai--you'll be hearing from us.