Litchfield Villa, unmasked

  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.

Comments

[m.thew]

Beautiful. I haven't been in there in a decade, and they've done some nice work since. Pity it's not open on the weekends.

Three cheers for A.J. Davis! Bringing it back home another way: Davis worked with A.J. Downing, who was Calvert Vaux's landscaping partner before his (Downing's, 1852) tragic drowning (not to be confusted with Vaux's tragic drowning, 1895).