Prospect: A Year in the Park

No rest for the cheery

April 1 is three weeks gone, and the sun is out, and it's Saturday. The grass gets a workout after its winter rest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Long Meadow is, like all Prospect Park's iconic spaces, a place that Brooklynites turn to their own uses. Some choose to bake, prostrate, in the strong spring sun, while others lunge for projectiles--often within the same few square feet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Digital springtime: Lean against a budding tree and check your phone. Near this guy, a young woman sat cross-legged in blinding sunlight peering at an open laptop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get out there with your personal trainer and work the man-buns. The dude in black put his bro in blue through an unlikely series of strength and agility exercises.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Close-up: The redbud was blooming, but why do they call it "redbud"? The buds are the precise color of "orchid" in the old jumbo box of Crayolas, and they have the outrageous habit of blooming in pom-poms directly out of the tree's bark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Longshot: Pastels, not Crayolas, smudged and hazy. Greens and so much more.

Unforgotten Prospects

What happens when you take a "Forgotten New York" tour with time-lapsing historian Kevin Walsh?

Well, if you've been photographing and blogging about Prospect Park for 8 years, you still see stuff you never noticed before. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This bronze statue by Henry Kirke Brown, originally placed in Grand Army Plaza in 1869, was the first statue of Lincoln ever erected in the Union. (It was moved here to the Concert Grove in 1896.) I never knew that the "USN" and "USA" on the base stood for the army and navy.

Kevin agrees that Abe spent years looking vaguely disgusted at his view of the Zamboni for the ratty old Wollman skating rink. (At right: Construction several years ago, as the lake shore was reconfigured). The spiffy new rink sits south of here, and now Abe gazes on the recreated "Music Island" as part of the park's epic Lakeshore redevelopment.

 

 

Here's his view today, just as spring started smudging the trees with green. Today's offshore island is for wildlife, not concert bands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We covered too much ground to recount in detail, but I loved seeing these two details for the first time.

I pass the colonnaded shelter at the Coney Island Avenue traffic circle, right opposite the TD Bank, almost every day, but had never gone inside and looked up. If you do that, here's what you see. This pigeon parent has good taste in real estate: McKim, Mead and White, no less.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And if you peer closely at the dense detailing atop the Corinthian columns on the "Grecian Shelter," which I can see from my front porch, there are slender, scalloped mushrooms!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We ended up on the porch of the Crazy Stable, where refreshments came at a price: hearing the ripping yarn of how the StableMistress inadvertently convinced the New York Times that our Caton Park neighborhood on the park's southern edge was called NoProPaSo. For the full tale, minus cookies and lemonade, go here. Thanks to FNY's incredibly gifted photographer Shunsuke Takino for this lovely shot of the Stable!

Kevin gives several of these great tours every year; you will see the cityscape with a layer pulled back, with bygone times revealed, sometimes, by the faintest traces. Go here for a full schedule.

Airborne

I'm not a big fan of drones--when I look up and see one hovering overhead, it scares the hell out of me, and they have the potential to mess with birds' peace of mind--but this video of the park I love couldn't have been captured any other way. It gives me the same feeling I got during a helicopter tour of Manhattan: a proprietary tenderness, as if I suddenly owned all that lay beneath me. To see places I've walked so many times from a totally fresh perspective is part of the impact; an even greater part is the vivid evidence of how Prospect Park serves as "the lungs of Brooklyn." You can also view it directly by going here. Many thanks to "Airtistry" on Vimeo!

 

Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York [ April 2, 2016 ] from Airtistry on Vimeo.