Prospect: A Year in the Park

'Brooklyn's first citizen'

No, not our clown prince Marty Markowitz. Back when giants roamed the earth, this gentleman, James S.T. Stranahan, earned that title twice over—once as the "father of Prospect Park" (he was the guy who hired Vaux and Olmstead), and then again as a key instigator of a modest project called the Brooklyn Bridge.

When I sought out this statue yesterday, my chief motivation was to further my Frederick MacMonnies jag. He's the same sculptor who did the Horse Tamers and the 'Quadriga' figures atop Grand Army Plaza. Given the wild mythic spectacle of those projects, I was even more delighted by the idiosyncracy and simple humanity of this tribute. Careworn but cantankerous, the great man might be heading for his carriage after a particularly vexing meeting with the city fathers, fending off another proposed budget cut on his beloved Brooklyn greensward.

Little remembered now, Stranahan's life bestrode the nineteenth century. A railroad and lumber man, he didn't even move to Brooklyn until his late 30s. His advocacy for Prospect Park began partly to keep the gentry from migrating to Manhattan, which was basking in the urbane glory of its new Central Park, but it evolved into a deeper passion.

This statue was unveiled in Stranahan's presence in 1891. On the eve of the ceremony, a reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle interviewed the 83-year-old, who confessed to having a case of "the grip," but laughingly allowed that he was "not as young as he was 50 years ago." Of Prospect Park's early years, he recalled:

"I spent 22 years of the best part of my life in planning, constructing, and laying out the park. I have done no more than my duty to the city where I have lived so long, and where I expect to leave my family after I am gone. The first park commission with which I was connected was made up of a noble set of men, but they all have concluded their life's work and are resting in Greenwood [sic]. Brooklyn should never forget the men who toiled for the benefit of the city in the laying out of Prospect Park."

Stranahan died in 1898 at age 90, a year after "vigorously" helping to plant an elm tree near Battle Pass in the park. His funeral cortege passed through Prospect Park en route to join his "noble" colleagues in Green-Wood. His statue stands within view of the Saturday Greenmarket, tucked inside the park entrance at Grand Army Plaza. Few passers-by seem to take notice of it.

Country matters

 

Pickles and bones were my two favorite sights at the Greenmarket this morning--artisanal pickled beets, peppers, and cukes from Rick's Picks (every free sample was delicious), and $6-per-pound dog bones from an upstate beef rancher.

Light crowds picked over the offerings of root veggies, kale, scallions, and other off-season fare; the blessed sun was offset by a brisk cold wind, but it was no match for this vendor's faux-hawk hat.

Today's Greenmarket Dog of the Week is Reggie, a long-haired Dachshund with rock-star ear coiffure. This girl (they were expecting a boy) is 2 years old, with a personality her person described as "cat-like," which presumably means, "able to get away with anything by looking innocently adorable."








I decided to walk home today to Flatbush from Grand Army Plaza. Skirting the Long Meadow, I heard squirrel alarm-cries (a monotonous squalling) from several trees at once, and as I looked up, a hawk settled high into a tree overhead. Sure enough, all the squirrels had backed up against the tree trunks (the equivalent of "hitting the floor"); the alarm cry must be a communal warning behavior, like that of meerkats or prairie dogs. What looked at first glance like a sunny woodland scene from Beatrix Potter was actually closer to Wild Kingdom, a death match of Nutkin Vs. Predator. The lazy squirrels that live off the bounty of our garbage cans (and cavort inside our walls) are pathetic and decadent compared to their park-dwelling country cousins.

Bonus Shot: Tree fungus! This dead tree had sprouted some beauties; this growth reminded me of the Sydney Opera House.

All in all, I walked in the cold for more than an hour, and loved it. (But I did take a nap with the cats once I got back home.)

'He perfectly acquitted himself'

Yesterday's scrutiny of the memorial to Lafayette at the Ninth Street entrance to Prospect Park has led me to the discovery of a great spy story for Black History Month. This man depicted holding the Marquis' lively horse may well be James Amistead, a black man who served as an undercover agent for Lafayette and the cause of American liberty while still a slave himself.

What a movie: In 1718, with his master's permission, Armistead volunteered to serve with Lafayette during the siege of Richmond, Virginia. Behind enemy lines, posing as an escaped slave, he gathered intelligence on British plans and troop movements, and his undercover work in General Cornwallis's camp helped the American victory at Yorktown. In 1784 Lafayette, by then a fervent abolitionist, testified to Amistead's service and helped him win his freedom:

This is to certify that the bearer by the name of James has done essential services to me while I had the honour to command in this state.  His intelligences from the enemy’s camp were industriously collected and faithfully delivered. He perfectly acquitted himself with some important commissions I gave him and appears to me entitled to every reward his situation can admit of.


James Armistead took the last name of Lafayette in the General's honor; after the glory days of the Revolutionary War, he was a farmer and family man (and, ironically, the owner of several slaves).  During Lafayette's triumphant "Farewell Tour" in 1824, it was reported that the aging war hero recognized his old comrade in the crowd in Richmond, called him by name, and embraced him.  Lafayette never succeeded in turning his beloved friend George Washington into an active abolitionist (although Washington admired his "benevolence" and expressed sympathy for his ideals). But the Frenchman's advocacy for his "Negro brethren" was tireless, and the heroism of Amistead may have been one of the key relationships that forged his convictions.

I don't know whether the 1782 painting above by Jean-Baptiste Le Paon, depicting Lafayette and Amistead at Yorktown, may have influenced Daniel Chester French's park sculpture; if so, the sculptor certainly upped the dignity quotient for leader, servant and horse. (In the painting, the horse is mugging like Mr. Ed, and  Amistead is gotten up like RuPaul.) I prefer this 1824 engraving by a local Richmond artist, John Blennerhasset Martin, showing Amistead in old age with a face as sagacious as Morgan Freeman's. The writer's strike is over, folks; let's see a treatment!

TWIPP (This Weekend in Prospect Park):

* You can participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count at the Audubon Center on Saturday from 12 to 1:30. The GBBC, a sort of birdwatching supercomputer, collates data from everyone from ornithologists to schoolkids to get a snapshot of changing avian demographics.

* The Cherry Tree Ten-Miler is a footrace run by members of the Prospect Park Track Club. Too late to join, but you can watch them start running at 10 a.m. and be glad you're not them.

 

Lafayette, nous voilà

For Valentine's Day, I decided to take a close look at a dashing Frenchman. I had passed this monument to the Marquis de Lafayette countless times over the years, but barely glanced at it; entering Prospect Park through the Ninth Street entrance (a block from our newlywed apartment in Park Slope), we usually made a beeline for concerts at the bandshell or Long Meadow.

After reading this, from An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn by Francis Morrone, I was intrigued:

"(Daniel Chester) French, a consummately gifted sculptor, captures both the nobility and the foppishness of the French aristocrat. Behind Lafayette is his horse in profile, facing north, almost filling the frame of the stele. Behind the horse's head and holding its bridle is a black man, presumably a slave. Rising behind the horse's tail and arching over its back is a beautifully rendered leafy tree...It is much underrated, and shows French at his best."

All that, and more, glowed in the late afternoon sun. The tree is a chestnut, and a nifty bit of pine tree lies at the Marquis' feet. Until I reread this quote, I never noticed that the horse-handler was a black man; what did strike me was the spontaneity and vigor of his "Whoa, Nellie!" moment with the animal.

Funny thing about public sculptures; they are supposed to keep sacred memories alive, but I'll bet that these boys playing football nearby in the bracing chill, like most passers-by under age 50, would barely know who Lafayette was. The Memorial was unveiled in 1917, the same year that Lieut. Col. Charles Stanton declared "Lafayette, we are here!" before ecstatic French crowds at the tomb of the Marquis in Paris, acknowledging in a well-publicized flourish that the arrival of our doughboys in World War I served as payment for a historical debt stretching back to the American Revolution. (The quote is often misattributed to General John J. Pershing.) As the whole drama slips further out of the public's memory, it's apt that the playful hands of young Americans are still keeping Lafayette's elegant boots polished.

The view from here

When I said we can see the Peristyle from our front porch, I wasn't kidding. There it is, through several scrims of chain-link fence across the Parade Grounds at the southern perimeter of Prospect Park. The effect is one of proximity mingled with a certain unreality. Most times, cars, buses and big trucks are barreling past in the foreground, while Stanford White's Corinthian columns stand guard peacefully as they have since the era of the horse-car.

This was as close as I decided to get on a day when rain fell mournfully into ankle-deep slush. But I regretted the decision sharply when I passed the park in the car and noticed thick ground fog rising as the temperature crept into the 50s. Somewhere in there, it looked exactly like the curtain-up opening of Swan Lake, complete with swan.

Something cold and soft

Snow at last! No structure in Prospect Park looks better in wintry white than Stanford White's 1904 Peristyle. We can actually see this little gem from our front porch. It used to be called the "croquet shelter" and the "Grecian shelter," according to various sources; it was renovated in 1966 after narrowly escaping demolition. Vaux and Olmsted would have hated this and other neo-Classical accretions to their original "rustic" design, but I adore it.

Nearby, the lake was blanketed in white and all was snow-quiet. So far, I've never seen one of these "ice rescue ladders" stolen; the sign, begging people to leave them alone for lifesaving, seems to work.

A black-capped chickadee was out exploring...







and so was a lone cyclist.

 

“Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.

“Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well…”

              --C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

A bridge too far

On this bitterly cold day, I dragged Spouse along, and he was a good sport. We headed first to the Wellhouse, curious to see if the outlines of the massive old brick well might be detectable (now that I know where it was before they filled it in). I'm certain I can see a broad, round, shallow depression right where the tree branch shadows intersect. Now I wonder: Did they cap the well, or backfill it? Either way, it would have been a great spot to bury treasure (or a dead body), arrr! Knowing it's under there makes me feel like a true "Forgottener."

This strappy plant growing next to the frigid lake looks like a denizen of desert or tropics, yet there it is all green in the deep frost of a Brooklyn February. I think it's Yucca filamentosa (in which case it bears gorgeous white spikes of flowers in summer), and I should get some for my garden, because it is clearly unkillable.




Back to the Terrace Bridge we went, to verify a loyal reader's observation that there is an "18" and a "90" on cartouches flanking the arch on the other side. (I found only an "18" on the first side.) Correct!

Under the bridge, two nifty details were observed.
One was this abstract floral design on the base of the arch, with some Seventies vibe added by the rust and graffiti.

The other was this wasp construction. Would the wasp have built the tunnels and then drilled the holes in them, or did a carpenter bee decide to squat there, or what? Between this and the bridge itself, there was plenty of precision engineering to appreciate in the perfect quiet and bright sunshine...until we realized we were bloody freezing and walked (very) briskly homeward.

Gold and greens

On a raw February morning, I find myself very grateful to the stalwart vendors who show up every week at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. Collards and sweet potatoes were excellent, and I got a wonderful loaf of "Catskill wheat bread" (who could resist that name?) from "Bread Alone."

The forsythia and daffodils are blatantly hothouse-forced, of course, but offer a sweet preview of what lies ahead in an eternity a month or so.

Last summer's golden apples having a conversation with the daffies of spring-yet-to-be: What are any of us doing here in the dead of winter?

Sticking your face into pots of herbs brings back sharp, exquisite yearning for summer gardens.

Today's Greenmarket Dog of the Week is the foxy Zuki, a Shiba Inu. This native Japanese breed of dog is described by the AKC as "an excellent watchdog and companion"; his owners describe his temperament as "Zen." This coat coloration (black-tipped red) is called "sesame." He looks exactly like the shrine-guardian statues in the Japanese Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We couldn't decide which we loved more, his fabulous snail-tail or his ultra-plush face.

 

Breaking away

No post, or park visit, yesterday--I was "all wound up" (as my Uncle Don used to say) in the kick-off for my Next Amazing Adventure: I have committed to ride 100 miles (a "century" ride) to Montauk this coming May 18 to raise at least $3,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through their "Team in Training" program. That is "ride" as, "on a bicycle." Most of my training will be in, yes, Prospect Park.

The Team in Training (TNT) gang are all fired up with assurances that they will whip even the sorriest butt into shape to cross that finish line. But as I looked and listened, I realized all the things I never thought about when I signed up for this:

• My $200 hybrid bike was a big splurge for me, but people who ride 100 miles tend to ride on fast-and-fancy racing-style bikes, because, as a coach said last night, "unless you're Lance Armstrong, you're not gonna ride 100 miles in 2 hours." Maybe two days? weeks? I honestly have no idea.
• I am still barely able to change a tire (or pump air into one). An incredibly fit and manic guy named Felix, who is a Racing Dude, insists that he will have me doing this like a pro. Heh heh.
• Fitness-wise, I was flat-lining after climbing four flights of stairs to the meeting room. Almost everybody else was younger than me. Absolutely nobody else was gasping and clutching at bannisters. Got a lot of work to do.
• Did you know there were bike shoes? Neither did I! Apparently I'd better get some.
• Finally, I realized that I have absolutely no idea how far 100 miles west from Montauk is, (there is nothing east of Montauk except, I think, Iceland), and I am afraid to look. Maybe I can just start from my front porch.
• Even more finally, I, like Sally O'Malley, am 50. Five-oh. And feeling every bit of it.

I'm doing it anyway. Last night we met some of our "honored teammates," people who have lived with blood cancers and, so far, are beating them. One adorable young woman with curly black hair had already endured chemo, radiation, one relapse, and a marrow transplant; the Society paid her cab fare to daily doctors' visits so that, exhausted, she wouldn't have to struggle on a train or bus. This struck me as the deepest sort of good, along with the life-saving research they do, of course.

But, like many on my new "team," I have a personal grudge against leukemia and its ilk. This is my dad, Richard Q. Becker, in 1945, a private with the 240th Military Police battalion stationed in Honshu, Japan with our Reconstruction troops. We'll never know if his presence in various post-Bomb sites around Japan qualified him as an "atomic vet," but we lost him to leukemia in 1985 at a young, joyful and vigorous age 69, in a family that routinely lives into its late 90s. Many of the patients on his unit were half his age, like our honored teammates. I can do this for him, and for them. You can help; donations fund treatments that are getting better and better, support for brave people who have endured what most of us can only imagine, and, most importantly, a search for the cure.

I have a fund-raising website; check it out here. It's called "Good Grief, It's Brenda on a Bicycle," and the pun is intentional, because with your help we can bring goodness out of grief. Go donate some money, honey, and I'll see you in the park; I'll be the gasping one with the cheap bicycle and the sore butt.

Image: New York Public Library Collection

Break on through (to the other side)

So far, all my excursions into the park have been from its western or southern boundaries (Park Slope and Flatbush, respectively). Today I snuck in over the eastern border, from Flatbush Avenue. And I do mean sneak; I slipped in through one of the countless breaks in the fence and clambered up the muddy berm over slippery dead leaves.  The maintenance on this "other" side of the park always seems markedly poorer than on the Slope side, with broken pavements, rotting deadfall trees, and a vague sense of abandonment.

Just as I got to the crest of the berm, the sun broke out for its one brief appearance all day. Mist rose off the Long Meadow in the unseasonable warmth, and I could smell the earth.

Nearby, I gazed through the Endale Arch. The Long Meadow appeared through the other end like a silvery-green mirage, and the arch's deep low tunnel was as inviting, and slightly menacing, as a summons in Alice in Wonderland. Having come of age in the 1970s, I hesitated like a small game animal approaching the lions' watering hole; but seeing no lurking predators, I entered. In another holdover from my Dark Age youth, I braced for the stench of human waste in the dank shadows, but there was nothing but the faint smell of wet stone.

Here's looking back out from the Long Meadow side. The striped stonework is lovely, and at the pinnacle is a carved bouquet of daisies.

As if the warmth and the sun hadn't been enough, one final break with winter: witch hazel in bloom. I don't know why it blooms in winter, but it does. (Yes, the skin astringent was made from the bark.) This wasn't the most fragrant variety, but had a faint scent of citrus and camphor.

Events I missed today: ticker-tape parade for football team, Mardi Gras party anywhere, and Super Tuesday voting. (I am not a registered anything.) But I did not miss the witch hazel, which made me happier than any of them would have done.