Prospect: A Year in the Park

Not far afield

Here, the two archetypal players to be found on the Parade Grounds: a grown-up practicing mad skills honed in distant lands (foreground), and a herd of private-school youngsters immersed in this sport we Americans mysteriously abandon as adults.  The kids were doing their post-game low-fiving ritual, a square dance of sportspersonship. To one group, soccer is a blood sport, as in "in my blood," played with raw passion and fierce grace;  to the other, a middle-class rite of passage, attended by parents armed with snacks and enthusiasm. I have never seen the two groups interact, although perhaps I just haven't noticed.

 

 

  I had limped over, nursing a broken toe, to see a young lady of my acquaintance do her spunky thing as a goalie. These soccer fields, a hundred feet from our front door, have lifted my spirits through some dark days; the ever-present players and their Brownian motion draw me out of myself in a way that life in a quiet cul-de-sac could never do. Soccer is all about staying in the moment with a vengeance, whether you're a pee-wee or a Pelé, and as the sun sets and the players head for home, they all seem pretty spent and exhilarated.

Something invisible and weightless

The Parade Grounds, the eve of Labor Day, at sunset. As games break up, barbecues on the sidelines begin. Music is everywhere, and a few people dance in the lengthening shadows. This eases my heart.

...And every year there is a brief, startling moment

When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and

Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless 

Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: 

It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;

It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

Excerpt, "Fall," from Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch Copyright © 1986 by Edward Hirsch. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.  

 

  

Winter? Bring it on

This shot was labeled "Boys Ice Skating, Prospect Park, NY" on the original glass plate negative by photojournalist Jenny Chandler, sometime between 1890 and 1910. I'd never heard of Chandler, a real working photographer back when most ladies pursued it as a genteel hobby; the Henry Ford Museum's archive of her work (left behind in her Washington Ave. townhouse after her untimely death in 1922), includes fascinating shots of the park and other New York City environs.

These Urchins on Ice look like troublemakers to me, laced up to wreak carnage on the park's frozen lake. There's no more lake skating, but the doomed Wollman Rink is open for at least one more season starting this weekend; for hours and more info, go here. My favorite time to skate is very early on weekdays, when the ice is almost empty except for a few fellow oddballs. To meet the 21st-century counterparts of these rascals, however, the weekend is your best bet.

Image: Jenny Chandler, Henry Ford Museum. Creative Commons license:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thehenryford/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

A walk to the mailbox

Since Prospect Park and I have been drifting apart a bit lately, I summoned the will to leave my car keys at home, and walked across the park to the Windsor Terrace post office to mail a package. I was rewarded with...

...the Bishop Ford High School football team, getting chewed out but good by Coach on the Parade Grounds. 

 A very young rider being reassured before cantering off around the lake.

 

Turtles basking on the lake, which has turned very green.

 

The Vanderbilt Playground, totally torn up for renovation. The scene of my forays with the toddler Child has been erased, although I feel little nostalgia: Child was never a great fan of playgrounds in those years, and I mostly recall a lot of forced cheer as I attempted to stuff her into swings or entice her onto the climbing gym.

And finally, unaware of the rich symbolism they evoked, a plump and vigilant hawk, poised hungrily above a rather gormless-looking dove.

                

I'll have to get over to the Post Office more often.

Run for a good guy

If you love running in Prospect Park, you can do 5K for a fantastic cause this Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 7 p.m., starting in the parking lot by Bartel Pritchard Circle (opposite the Pavilion Theater). Greg, a young man on staff at JackRabbit, the amazing sports store in Park Slope, is in the fight of his life against testicular cancer, and the $20 entry fee goes towards his mounting expenses. Register here. (Race volunteers are also needed.) The folks at JackRabbit explain:

Before the diagnosis he was training to run his first Ultramarathon, a 50 miler. Now, between the disease and the chemo, he struggles to climb the stairs to his apartment. His dream of joining the FDNY has been put on hold while he focuses all of his energy on getting better.

Greg is 22 years old, and has worked at JackRabbit since he arrived in NYC almost two years ago. As an assistant manager first in the Union Sq store and now in the Brooklyn store, Greg has helped thousands of people start running, get faster, and reach their goals. This is our opportunity to give back for all the support he’s given us over the years.

I'm not sure if Greg is the sweet and smart guy who fitted my daughter for her first running shoes this summer (and eased her fears of joining her new high school's track team). But he sounds like a helluva kid, facing an unimaginable challenge with the courage that leads young men to become, oh, ultramarathoners and firemen. Please get out there and run for Greg.

Image: GLiving.com

Heaven's gate

God bless Daylight Savings Time. At about 6 p.m. on a cool Sunday evening in March, the sun is still high enough over the Parade Grounds to break through the clouds and call forth a soccer ball to the Rapture. Of course, we will know winter is truly vanquished when those tennis bubbles deflate and disappear.

Sight for sore eyes

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.

Ramping up

On a warm November twilight, when golden leaves glowed under a low gray sky, old-fashioned boyhood was alive and well in the deserted parking lot of the Wollman Rink. Enterprising youngsters have turned a derelict park bench and some plywood into an impromptu X-Games arena. Three little guys on scooters and wheelie-sneakers were enjoying it. 

A second ramp has been rigged using a coil of snow fencing as a fulcrum. The guys were delighted to show me some tricks. Imagination supplied most of the "air" for their stunts, but at least there were no adults around to torment them with safety mats, crash helmets, and cheerful Scandinavian designs. Creative freedom, exercise, and recycling—all in one subversive package that would give nightmares to a "helicopter parent" on the other side of the park.

They were very young, and it was getting very dark. I told them it was time they were getting home. They totally ignored me; more power to them!

Falling back into November

Farewell to Daylight Savings Time; the sun now lies low at 4 p.m., casting long shadows on unmistakable signs of November. Like the Brooklyn Skyhawks, ending a game in sportsmanlike fashion (before descending on a spectacular parentally-provided feast at the edge of the Parade Grounds—their moms' macaroni and cheese could fuel the entire NFL).

Within the park, the gluttonous geese migrated picturesquely from one side of the lake to the other in search of handouts, along with their mallard camp followers. When I was a kid, seeing them pass overhead in flight, honking, in their mysterious "V" formation, was a goosebump-inducing sign of seasonal change. When did they decide, Homer-Simpson-like, to just stick around and gorge here all winter?

The foliage along Prospect Park Lake is so gorgeous that numerous people stopped to take pictures of it, a sort of bookend to spring's cherry-blossom rituals.

In front of the Peristyle, a cyclist got off her bike to take out her camera. This tree was one of the reasons.

And, tucked into a tree trunk, was that most traditional of autumn signposts: the abandoned Florida Beanie Baby Bear, offering its mute warning of colder times to come.

Some notes: The pictures are up of the recent Forgotten New York tour of Prospect Park, and of course I missed a blockbuster.

Looking ahead to this Tuesday, the folks at Lefferts Manor will hold a mock election for the kiddies to vote in, from noon to five. To honor the old Dutch tradition of premature East Coast exit polls, the votes will be counted at four p.m., making it pretty pointless to arrive late. Most interesting is the promise of Election Day Cake to be served. I will be making one myself; it will be the only thing on this historic day about which I will not have mixed feelings.

Arrows of desire

The Long Meadow yesterday seemed unusually full of Chariots-of-Firey action. Young men and women, singly or in pairs or packs, circled the playing fields and gathered on the western slope.

A school guard setting up regalia said that it was a citywide high-school track and field event. Most of the young people converging on the greensward were asking where the bathrooms were; some apparently came from as far away as the Bronx.

Somehow, it was more than just "the perfect autumn afternoon." The October sun seemed to fuse it all into a golden distillation of youth itself; if you could inhale here yesterday and not be transported back to rapturous release from stuffy classrooms, or remember the heedless freedom and energy of an adolescent body, you belong not here but in the Quaker Cemetery over yonder hill.

More fusion with the past: to blessed toddler afternoons, when the highlight of an entire day might be a long interlude with Elmo. Time moves by different laws of physics in those years, so how is it possible that they end?

As I headed out of the meadow to pick up my own young person, (who is poised on the brink between childhood and high school), I drank in a draft of sparkling air, unpolluted by stock market reports, election smears, or my own crotchety mid-life mental noise. Between now and Hallowe'en, the temporal jumpgates back to youth will be unusually accessible; I suggest you get out there and enjoy them. 

 

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

       —William Blake ("Jerusalem")