Prospect: A Year in the Park

Crowd sauce

The opening weekend of "Smorgasburg" in Prospect Park lived up to its New York Times' description as "the Woodstock of eating" if by "Woodstock" you mean "muddy mob scene." As we ascended Breeze Hill, we passed about 70 people waiting on line for some kind of cult French fries. "There's no French fry in the world worth waiting for," groused one passer-by, in a minority opinion.

The "Raindrop Cake" was one of this season's novelties. I have no idea what it is, but it's "Instagram-ready." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My only purchase was a nice little cherry pie from Noble Pies of Warwick, N.Y. and a smooth, intense iced coffee from "Ministry of Kaapi," made from beans from southern India in a novel little filter system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The lines were so long at almost every stand that you couldn't tell who was waiting for a ramen-burger versus a "calamari cone." 

 

Prickly-pear lemonade was a gorgeous color, but we ditched the whole thing and got some pleasant, if less exotic, fare--and a seat, with little waiting--at the park's own nearby Bluestone Café.

 

 

Nearby, ice skaters sailed around the Lakeside rink in the spring sunshine. Other activities underway: hula-hooping; hip-hop/capoeira fusion dancing; drumming; skateboarding; paddleboating; pot-smoking; and somewhere, to judge from the smell of charcoal starter, some early-season grilling. 

And just hanging out on the shore, far from the madding crowd.

Pining away

A bitter cold Epiphany morning, after the first snowfall of 2017. We saw a few "bro" types walking around Brooklyn in shorts and flip-flops, but this bro, one of the two "Horse Tamers" at the Park Circle, has them beat for under-dressed macho.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A nearby lion sheds snowy tears.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But we're not here to admire the statuary; we're here for "tree-cycling." It's the circle of life: The (only slightly crispy) tree stuffed in our trunk was dragged home from the Greenmarket, at Prospect Park's other end, just a week before Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It always saddens me to see them, stripped of their finery and fed into the chipper, as the glorious, resinous smell of Christmas fills the air one last time.

Some bags of mulch, a consolation prize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And so all the Christmas festivity wraps up, just as winter's journey really begins its slog. Time for the Wise Men to go back home by a different route and remember what they saw beneath the star.

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Foraging at Dead Horse Bay

Does that sound faintly menacing? It's marvelous. On the first Saturday in May, a cool gray one, I signed up with the doyenne of urban gourmet foraging, Marie Viljoen, for a spring forage walk along seaside paths across Flatbush Avenue from Floyd Bennett Field. I love this wild fringe of Brooklyn, and I knew that strange things awaited us down on the beach. Our small group gathered, bags in hand, to pick nature's neglected salad greens (invasives only, nothing scarce or endangered) under Marie's sharp eye.

 

Marie is that gorgeous girl in school, the total original with the seemingly effortless style, but so incredibly nice you can't hate her for it. Tall, ginger, erudite about botany and with a sharp sense of humor, she could be a lifestyle guru (just see her blog 66 Square Feet (Plus)) if she were just less intelligent, quirky, and nuanced. She introduced us to the mysteries of pokeweed, whose young shoots are relished by Southerners (and, in this case, a South African), but whose mature plant parts and berries are toxic.

 

 

 

We gathered lots of tender garlic mustard tips; this pesky weed made a delicious, broccoli-di-rape-like green for my pasta that night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dead nettles--edible despite their dreary name--rose above a fairy-forest of violets and other wildflowers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Young milkweed--or maybe it's dogbane, a poisonous look-alike. They both have milky sap, but only milkweed has hollow stems. Butterflies eat it, too, so Marie recommends only foraging it in areas where it is plentiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we headed toward the water, I nibbled the bases of phragmites (didn't care for them) and some resinous immature bayberries (delicious). Marie uses bayberry leaves like bay leaves, infusing gin or vodka with them, and the buds like capers. We emerged onto Dead Horse Bay, with the Marine Parkway Bridge rising in the distance. At our feet: sea rocket, a salt-loving little green with the kick of wasabi.

 

 

 

 

 

Also at our feet: the surreal washed-up detritus that has made Dead Horse Bay a famous mecca for beachcombers and bottle collectors. The currents turn up an unceasing harvest of glass, ceramic, shoe soles, and other urban imperishables, along with the occasional horse bones--remnants of its past (as a home for glue factories and slaughterhouses) reflected in its memorable name. I've been here before, and it's always fun to watch the incredulity of a first-timer at this dystopian harvest.

Some of the bottles are clearly recognizable, and as you toss them back you wonder, Whose nighttable did that Noxema sit on, and when? What family, after a pancake breakfast in some other decade, consigned that maple syrup bottle to a watery limbo? And, is "Miracle Power" strong enough to overcome the evil of an ancient crushed dollhead?

  

Next, we climbed up a low bluff, where Marie laid out a superb picnic: Vietnamese spring rolls, translucent wraps around bouquets of spring nibbles; pokeweed-sprout finger sandwiches; and a refreshing homemade cordial brewed from various natural elixirs gathered on her walks. And a buttery loaf cake scented with almond-y mahleb, or cherry pits. Coots and geese provided background music, along with the surf. Nearby, nestled in a dune, I found a little art installation that some previous visitor had left behind.

 

 

 

As we headed back, we found a big mushroom that Marie saved to identify later. (You don't guess with mushrooms.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I caught my Blurry Bird of the Day, a redwinged blackbird, harbinger of spring in all places marshy and reedy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And we headed back up to Flatbush Avenue and ordinary life, having feasted on the foraging fringe of Brooklyn.

 

For a deep dive into Marie's beautiful matrix of New York, food, plants, life and beauty, you can buy her book 66 Square Feet: A Delicious Life, One Woman, One Terrace, 92 Recipes. And for her take on this walk, including her gorgeous photos, go here.

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.

Who ya gonna call? Not these louts.

A local blog, Park Slope Stoop, reports on a new activity for the bored, boozy young: a "Brooklyn Paranormal Society" whose waggish stated mission is "finding ghosts while inebriated." Their recent eveing in Prospect Park apparently attracted a big crowd of Bluto-meets-Venkman wanna-bes, who headed off with some paraphernalia and a "psychic" to laff it up. Here's a shot of the merry-makers on a previous trip to Fort Greene Park last month.

 

Not to go all Sam the Eagle here, but behind these tippling ignorami is the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, which marks the site of a crypt containing just some of the mortal remains of more than 11,500 patriots who died hideously of overcrowding, starvation, and disease after the Battle of Brooklyn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My husband is a big fan of "ghost tours," a staple of cute historic towns; I find them hokey and tedious, occasionally brightened by a talented out-of-work actor. Either way, they're a harmless diversion; I've even thought of leading one myself, to recount some of the haunting tales of the park's lost souls as I recounted here. But am I alone in finding the jokey pretext-for-drinking thing here a bit more off-putting? On their Prospect Park ramble, the tour-goers gamboled at the sites of five modern-day murders, some quite fresh in memory. I'm sure the victims' families would be thrilled to know their loved ones live on as post-frat fun fodder. Let's acknowledge them here with respect, so that their deaths in our beautiful park, this month of the dead, may be marked by something other than snickering and getting loaded:

Patricia Shea, a 40-year-old physician's assistant from Rockaway, found strangled in the park in 1982.

 

 

 

Allyn Winslow, a 42-year-old drama teacher from Brooklyn, shot to death while resisting a group of teen-agers trying to steal his bicycle on Quaker Hill in June, 1993

 

 

 

 

William Oliver, 61, a "peaceful soul" and avid walker stabbed to death while walking in the Vale of Cashmere in April, 2006

 

 

 

 

Mohammad Afzaf (photo unavailable), 41, reportedly suffering from mental illness and possibly homeless, beaten and left for dead in a wooded area near a jogging path in July, 2008

 

 

Julio Locarno, 23, shot near the Parade Grounds in 2011 while himself facing a homicide charge

 

 

Of course, this douchebaggery has drawn a little burst of media coverage, and the next outing--to Green-Wood Cemetery--will undoubtedly be a hit. (The trip, not listed on Green-Wood's official events calendar, promises, "We’ll stroll through the cemetery, visiting points of interest, while swiggin’, gigglin’ and taking pictures...pack a flask." Perhaps the cemetery's caretakers could follow the gang with a portable urinal.) Count me out.  

Swans eat my sins

It had been 6 years since I tagged along with friends to tashlich, the custom of "casting your bread upon the waters" on the first day of Rosh Hashanah to symbolize casting off sinful thoughts and ways. The body of water is supposed to contain fish; this one also supplies greedy swans and geese to gobble up transgressions.

With a bag of borrowed pita scraps, I gave myself a spiritual tune-up, just about halfway around the year from Good Friday. The swans don't offer absolution, but they are easier on the nerves than Confession.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The lake in Prospect Park draws a spectrum of Jewish celebrants, from cheerful Conservatives like my friends who sing and socialize, to earnest Lubavitcher proselytizers like those who checked us for shofars (we had one, blown with gusto by the young lady of the family), to intensely private Hassidic families like this one, in solemn prayer at the water's edge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this being Brooklyn, the lake framed the distinctive silhouettes of Muslim as well as Jew, in peaceful coexistence a few feet from one another.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I gazed across to the park's eastern edge, where a lone, loathsome condo now rises to mar the sylvan view, I wondered whether greedy developers and rotten architects ever cast their bread into the waters. And then remembered that one of the pieces of pita I'd tossed to the swans was for negativity and judgmentalism. Oops...well, there's always Good Friday 2016, and after that, another tashlich.

All things worthwhile must end as gifts

That, anyway, is what Isamu Noguchi said late in life. "What other reason is there for art?"*

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden's gift to us this fall is an installation of the sculptor's works on loan from The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. A few days ago, on my birthday, we wandered the BBG's Japanese Garden--itself a work of living art--to see some of them. A drenching rain had broken weeks of drought; the sky was still turbulent-looking, and everything smelled faintly of something like jasmine. Downed leaves floated across the pond.

I confess that Noguchi's strange, simple shapes leave me more puzzled than dazzled, but I enjoyed seeing them, with some knowledgeable commentary by the Garden's own guides. This one, "Strange Bird," dwells near the "turtle island" and is a sly reference to a pair of bronze cranes that have been in and out (currently out) of the Japanese Garden over the years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Daughter was reminded of the Dodo in Looney Tunes' "WackyLand" (itself a goof on modern art). Apparently Noguchi, a Japanese-American who died in 1988 at age 84, considered himself rather a strange bird, a global citizen (and longtime New Yorker) yet one who never fully resolved his identity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sculptures are right at home in the Japanese Garden, with its design magic of "hide and reveal" and its illusion of deep vistas and distances. You spy "Mountains Forming" (1982-3) from afar, tucked out of reach above the waterfalls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you climb up to the Shinto shrine--itself a hidden treasure--you see it more clearly, but it's still tantalizingly out of reach. It also looks completely different--"another layer in this imaginary mountain landscape," says curator Dakin Hart of the Noguchi Museum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My problem with outdoor sculpture in natural surroundings is that the exquisite forms of trees, leaves, and clouds, and even raindrops, tend to overwhelm the human creations. But then, Noguchi did once say that everything is sculpture. Except, perhaps, the apartment buildings that rise beyond the garden's perimeter.

 

 

 

*From Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi, by Hayden Herrera, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Porky Plateau

There was no breeze to be found on Breeze Hill when we headed up for the opening day of Smorgasburg, the oh-so-Brooklyn phenomenon of all things curated and artisanal, in Prospect Park. We had despaired of the fair's recent incarnation in the new Brooklyn Bridge Park, which we renamed "The Sun's Anvil"; it doesn't feel right to "fork over" big bucks for fancy chow and then have to eat it squatting on a dusty curb or juggle it on the hoof. With the vast acres of Prospect Park, we figured, the hungry hordes would fan out--bringing both the possibility of new audiences discovering its treasures, and pigs turning it into their personal trough.

Breeze Hill is a somewhat neglected plateau overlooking the gorgeously restored Music Grove area; in my few visits there, it has been home to dumpsters and such. It's somewhat isolated and not readily seen from outside, but the hip folks found it, following their noses to the smell of barbecue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bam! We'd barely made landfall when we encountered two manbuns and a quilt with fey young ladies weaving $10 flower crowns (an activity we deemed "very Zooey").

 

 

 

The sun beat down mercilessly, but the crowds were undeterred. Biggest draw seemed to be the "Ramen Burger." I counted 32 people waiting patiently to obtain this delicacy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The vendors are a perfect kaleidoscope of all current "new Brooklyn" obsessions: irony, meat, no meat, etc.

   

"Lawless Jerky" came in mango and curry flavors, but I opted for the classic. I am ashamed to say I paid $6 for a bag of it, but I had to reward the guy for listening to me tell him how I had a granduncle named "Lawless Loadsman." It is awfully good, but not that much better than the gas-station stuff.

As for the garbage situation, it was spiralling out of control at several locations...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...but a representative from the Prospect Park Alliance assured me that the Smorg team had been sworn to a total clean-up by day's end. (I haven't gotten over there since to verify.) These guys were trying their damnedest to keep up with the tide of cups, troughs, and plates cast off by the gourmets.

 

 

 

 

As for Where to Eat Your Stuff, the answer yesterday was: Right there. In a park of more than 500 acres, it seemed the entire crowd had jammed themselves under 3 big trees in the center of the vendors, like a herd of cows in a blazing pasture. "I guess they want to be where the action is," Spouse observed.

 

But if they'd only skibbled down a steep, uneven granite stairs to the Music Grove, they could have basked on a bench in the shade, surrounded by busts of great composers (and now, alas, overlooked by a bloating condo at the park's eastern edge).

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few folks, like these quaint corn-nibblers, did take up the option, but the glade was surprisingly empty. Park newcomers may not even realize it's there (although the Alliance was earnestly providing maps at the chief Smorg entry point).

That's a shame...because anyone who wanted to walk off their roast-pork-and-pepper sandwich (yes, I indulged in half of one from Federoff's Roast Pork) could have been here in under five minutes.

And if they'd kept going five more minutes, they could have paddled off those porky calories on the lake itself, on the fleet of new boats in bathtub-toy blue.

And if they'd walked all the way to the Grecian Shelter, as we did on our way home, they might even have snared an "inbitation" to Serenity's spooky birthday party. We declined, and headed home to digest and rehydrate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Petalheads

"Rose Night" is our favorite members' event at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. An evening of endless setting sun...gin cocktails and a vaguely Gatsby vibe...and a dreamscape of roses.

 

There was a band playing Bertie Woosterish tunes...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...and folks making efforts at roseate style statements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fancy hats were a theme. Some came from out of the closet...

 

 

...while others were concocted on the spot. Father's Day hint: It's a good dad indeed who wears the hat.

My friend's grandmother used to say: There's a thin line between an outfit and a get-up. But in the Cranford Rose Garden, with flowers gotten up everywhere, you can get away with a lot.

 

 

 

Let's face it, the roses are the stars of this show. Anyone who knows only the sad, cold, fragrance-free missiles of an FTD bouquet should be prepared to faint with ecstasy upon meeting the Old Roses...heady perfume bombs with petals so lush they look like a kid drew their finger through whipped cream. (Rosarians call this "quartering," I believe.)

 

 

 

 

Lavender...one of the most elusive rose colors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How many shades of cream and gold can you imagine? Not enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This lascivious chamber of secrets is named, for some reason, "Jude the Obscure."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Climbers on chains!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These gardeners paint with flowers.

 

We left as the sun sank behind the climbers. Twenty years ago, a week from my due date at the cusp of summer, I knew I'd always associate the longest days and the roses with the coming of beautiful new life. I still do.

 

Still a small world

I bear a curmudgeonly lack of good grace toward Queens, my homeland, and especially towards Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Growing up, we never thought of it as anything but a sad afterthought to the World's Fair, whose rusting relics we'd pass on the way home from "the city." Ironically, the Spouse--a Brooklyn boy--had a job within the park for more than a decade, where he nurtured an obsessional love for all things World's Fair. In this underwhelmingly celebrated anniversary year of the 1964 fair, we went today to the "World's Fair Play Festival" at the Queens Theatre in the Park.

The set of interconnected playlets, set across decades in the '39 and '64 fairs and the present day, varied widely in quality, but some were excellent (especially "In the Hall of Artifacts," a haunting glimpse by Todd Almond of a brother and sister long after '64, in the age of HIV); and the notion of commissioning them and presenting them right within the old fairgrounds was wonderful. The cast gave it their all in a tiny black-box theatre, evoking a collage of human response to the fairs' pie-eyed optimism about Progress and The Future.

Afterwards, we wandered around the realtime, real place in its most quintessential present personality: We stumbled upon the riotous color, music and dance of a Colombian festival. The Colombian flag was a lively counterpoint to the dystopian sight of the old New York Pavilion.

 

 

 

 

Colombians do not have to be encouraged to dance to the music. It just sort of happens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every Colombian in Queens seemed to be there in sunny yellow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A pair of folkloric dancers entertained a crowd in the shadow of the Unisphere as jets roared overhead on takeoff from LaGuardia.

 

 

 

 

 

Stamping in very cool footwear, skirt swirling, and lots of chivalrous partnering were on display.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cultures collide and mash up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We wrapped up the day with an iced coffee doused with caramel and condensed milk from a Colombian coffee cart that drew long, avid lines of old-school java-lovers. Garbage cans overflowed; cars nosed past masses of oblivious pedestrians as the fair wound down. In all its messy reality, the park remains a truer global village now than it ever was in the Imagineered version.