Talk:Prospect Park (Brooklyn)
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Dogs in Prospect Park
You can't talk about Prospect Park without mentioning the wonderful opportunities for dogs and their owners. While there is no dog run per se in the Park, dogs are allowed to run free **before 9am** in the three main meadows (Long Meadow, Nethermead, Peninsula) and in the Nethermead during the week after 5pm. Complete rules and more information available at www.fidobrooklyn.org, the homepage for FIDO (Fellowship for the Interests of Dogs and their Owners) in Prospect Park. Dedicated to making the Park more fun for everyone!
Moved from Prospect Park, Brooklyn (now redirect) facts here can be combined into current article, this article below written by User:Wetman
note: this entry duplicates Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York. Perhaps someone will have the patience to combine the entries.
Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, designed by the partnership of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and the English-born architect Calvert Vaux, and opened in 1868, is one of the United States' classic rural landscapes in an urban park.
The park covers 526 acres, once on the edge of Brooklyn (then already the third largest city in the U.S.), now the city's green heart, and features the 90-acre Long Meadow, almost a mile of unbroken rolling meadow enclosed by clumps of trees in the tradition of Capability Brown, the 60-acre lake, 'Lullwater,' and Brooklyn's only forest, the Ravine, all threaded with carriage drives.
The prime mover for a large landscaped park for Brooklyn was James Stranahan, who urged that such a park in Brooklyn "would become a favorite resort for all classes of our community, enabling thousands to enjoy pure air, with healthful exercise, at all seasons of the year." Stranahan engaged Vaux to come up with a plan, and Vaux induced Olmsted to partner him here as at Central Park. Construction began July 1, 1866.
Unlike the better-known Central Park, Prospect Park contained some historic structures, such as the Lefferts homestead, (an 18th century farmhouse now housing a museum of children's life), and Litchfield Villa, a quite recent (1857) Romantic Italianate villa by Alexander Jackson Davis, both of which the park's designers preserved.
Most of Prospect Park's rustic shelters and buildings were replaced after the turn of the 20th century by more ambitious structures in classicizing Beaux-Arts style, suited to the park's new monumental entrance at Grand Army Plaza, and other park entrances, by McKim, Mead, and White.
The Boathouse on Lullwater, for example, is screened by an arcade of engaged Tuscan columns that owes a lot of Jacopo Sansovino's library in Venice, but is clad with the matte terracotta that often substitutes for marble in American Renaissance architecture. The Boathouse now houses the nation's first urban Audubon Center, a model for environmental education centers being built across the U.S. with a goal of reaching one in four schoolchildren by 2020. A Camperdown Elm planted in 1872 near the original Boathouse has developed into a picturesque weatherbeaten specimen, no more than 13 feet high, like an oversized bonsai. It considered the outstanding specimen tree in Prospect Park.
During the long tenure of Robert Moses, a zoo, bandshells and many fenced playgrounds intruded on the park's rural character. Landscape maintenance was all but overwhelmed with parades, organized sports, and heavy public use.
Prospect Park is currently being restored and revitalized by the Prospect Park Alliance, formed in 1987 along the general lines of public/private cooperation laid out by the Central Park Conservancy. Park use, which had dropped below 2,000,000 annually, is now three times that.
[edit] Name change
This is a park, not a city. I say we move the article to Prospect Park (Brooklyn). What's the thought on this?--Pharos 02:11, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Category
I'd like to create a category for Prospect Park. Comments welcome before I actually go about doing so. — Anna Kucsma 14:05, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
- I know it's only been a few hours, but I'm going to go ahead and start work on the category anyway. It will be at Category:Prospect Park, Brooklyn. — Anna Kucsma 17:48, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Photos
The photos at left were taken in Prospect Park. I'm thinking of trying to find a place for one an/or both in the article — my preference is for the one of the snow — but I'm not sure if or where it fits. — Anna Kucsma 21:06, 11 July 2006 (UTC) (edited by Anna Kucsma 15:49, 17 July 2006 (UTC))
