Prospect: A Year in the Park

Quiet riot

I confess: I've been avoiding Sakura Matsuri, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's cherry-blossom festival, for awhile now. In the rare years (like this one) when the blossoms manage to coincide with the event, it's mobbed; when the blossoms are too early or already underfoot, it's still mobbed. The point of "hanami" ("flower viewing") is admittedly to party; apparently there's a Japanese saying, "Dumplings rather than flowers." But the last time we went, we even waited 40 minutes for a Bento box.

But I won't miss the annual "running of the perennials": the BBG Members' Preview of their annual plant sale. At 4:30 sharp, garden loons descend with rusty red Radio Flyer wagons on the Cherry Esplanade, which was still madly blossoming yesterday after last weekend's orgy of hanamania. Young children did backflips on the tender grass; older ones, like mine, were pressganged into helping plant-crazed parents haul their loot.

 

 

 

I got heucheras, which thrive in my shady, arid problem patches, and 3 different kinds of cherry tomatos, because the big beefy heirlooms keep dying tragically in midseason of unnamed diseases. There's also a rose geranium and an alpine strawberry in there, an Asian eggplant and a "Labrador violet," which is dainty and not at all like a goofy drooling dog.

 

 

 

 

 

It was just about the quintessence of spring, this last day of April—cool breeze, fresh green, and overhead the lavish blooms that my college-bound daughter described at age 5 as looking like "the trees were wearing fluffy pink sweaters." And now, to kill those plants.

All photographs Brenda L. Becker

Scant signs of spring

Blame the interminable cold, but I haven't been walking in Prospect Park for ages. (Hey, even my crocuses are lagging this year.) With more proof just in that parks ease brain fatigue, I bestirred myself. There weren't a lot of takers for the strong sun and stiff chilly breeze, but these boys of would-be summer gave it their best.

Nearby, these guys practiced some sort of thing with long, shiny metal sticks. Mostly, they dropped them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing is greening up yet; the park seemed bleached and bare in spots. The recent loss of hundreds of trees has made a palpable difference in the feel of things: more sky, less sense of remove from the surrounding city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Babies remained bundled. By now, green leaves, sandals, and the smell of barbecue grills all seem like a distant fantasy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, I did find a very cool decommissioned wasp nest, just lying at my feet. Its marvelously engineered pods were all vacant. I was grateful to be carrying an empty tote sack—one looks a bit absurd carrying a wasp nest down Prospect Park West—and bagged it for my cabinet of curiosities. The Daughter found it fascinating but disgusting, and said that if a wasp roused itself from within and invaded the house, "we will kill you." (For even more disturbing Kunstkammer specimens, go here...if you dare.)

 

A mere dusting

The arctic temperatures, not the token snowfall, were the story at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket, where the lettuce was frozen and the snakes were grumpy at being made to wear lacy mantillas.

 

 

 

 

 

 Over on the Long Meadow, the parents and kids of Park Slope and environs bundled up and set forth in search of snowy fun. Everyone sort of kidded themselves that there was much more snow than there actually was. In fact, even in the frigid air, it was still muddy enough to smell the earth.

 

 

 

Spouse and I reminisced about bringing Daughter and her snow-saucer contraption over to the park in far deeper snow; meanwhile, across the street in the public library, said Daughter gamely endured an interview for a prestigious university.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone talks about "surviving" various phases of early childhood, but by the time people are hounding your child for the umpteenth recitation of her scores, talents, grades, clubs, and "passion," the years when happiness could be bought with a snow saucer and a restorative lunch of Spaghetti-Os seem exquisitely simple. Today, we warmed up with a Thai lunch, assuring her over dumplings that it would all work out fine.

 

'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.

"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.

A big glass box full of happiness

That is how I would describe Jane's Carousel, the restored 1922 gem that sparkles at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's the undisputed star of the DUMBO Art Festival, making all the latest, ironic "interactive installations" look drab and contrived.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They heart DUMBO, and each other:

A wedding party (Russian, we guessed) took a romantic spin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The groomsmen took care of the handheld electronic devices, along with a smuggled-aboard open champagne bottle (not shown). Jane's Carousel is the only one I've seen where people compulsively take pictures from inside looking out, as the Manhattan skyline whirls past. 

 

 

 

 

 

 Everyone is a kid again, including dads...and other grown-ups.

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In fact, carousel magic might even be more potent for the young at heart...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...than the young in age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PHOTOBOMB OF THE DAY

Poor fellow, in his official Festival regalia. He's not Moby, and he's not being taken seriously.

Water colors

The problem with the DUMBO Arts Festival is that the artworks...or installations, or performances, or whatever...get so outrageously upstaged by Brooklyn Bridge Park, our guest park of the day. The "art," like this golden waterlily, tends toward the quirky and trivial, while some of New York's most iconic views rise up in the background and remind you that great design, and real life, kick butt without pretense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spouse is a much better audience for this sort of thing. He gamely peered over a canvas in the roofless Tobacco Warehouse...

 

...examined the backpack "galleries" of these inventive young strolling artistes...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...and wandered into "Silhouettes of Us," which, according to the inevitable Artist's Statement, "explores what personal space means in an urban environment." (The clotheslines "act as a transcendental ever-changing canvas that plays with light, scale and perception," it also said, and it went on from there but I didn't.)

 

 

After a brief downpour, kids and parents re-populated the "Art Village" to make a "Skyline String Installation" and paint a mural.

 

 

 

   

 

 But in this park, the skyline is the mural, and vice versa.

Tomorrow: Some shots from DUMBO's one masterpiece "installation," Jane's Carousel.

Rainy-day people

The western edge of Prospect Park only appeared deserted on a rainy morning in late September. This is Brooklyn; there's always somebody around.

In the playground, a lanky young person in striped socks and ponytail swung high and low through the downpour—whether with careless cheer or grim determination, I couldn't tell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steps from Prospect Park West, a loner with a backpack seemed very alone indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Closer to Bartel Pritchard Circle, what I first took for a cardiac resuscitation turned out to be a trainer stretching her prostrate client.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rain beat down the first ranks of the color guard, although it still felt like summer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rainy day people always seem to know when it's time to call
Rainy day people don't talk, they just listen till they've heard it all
Rainy day lovers don't lie when they tell 'ya they've been down like you
Rainy day people don't mind if you're cryin' a tear or two.

--Gordon Lightfoot

 

 

Unfathomable perfection

Do I wish I'd taken this picture? You bet I do. Thanks to a Windsor Terrace comrade, Geri Williamsen Shanks, who reports that the kids run track for Prospect Park Youth Running Club (Coaches Sean Rice and wife Fi with Ann Dolan Vasquez). This was a USATF Meet held at Van Cortland Park in the Bronx, but I call it the heart of Brooklyn, worn on a green sleeve.

 

We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;

        You furnish your parts toward eternity;

        Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

                                -- Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry