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! (Sept. 2003)

Facts from previous article

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. User:Wetman (Nov. 2003)

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)

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)

Snow on a pine

Cherry blossoms

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))

Why I think this article is a start class

I will be regarded as churlish in most quarters, I suppose, but the October 3rd contributions to this article by Special:Contributions/64.131.146.91 is a lot of fulsome, original research. Churlish of me, because it was the first contribution of an anonymous editor, who probably felt pretty good about writing it, and while I find myself personally sympathetic to this writer's point of view, I find that much of the contribution floats around, an aesthetic appreciation unfounded on any references, the received wisdom that most of us in the Park Slope neighborhood absorb about Prospect Park without thinking too much about it. But does all of this worshipful prose to the Artistic Vision of Olmsted and Vaux play for readers in Aukland, New Zealand, or for that matter, Hershey Pennsylvania? These people like their parks too, for much the same reasons we like our Prospect Park. Except we have the names 'Olmsted' and 'Vaux' to beat people over the heads with, cultural snobbishness. Rather than our own opinions, we should be quoting Alan Tate's Great City Parks (Taylor & Francis 2004) or Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration by Eric Higgs. More use could be made of the late M. M. Graff, who, in her Tree Trails in Prospect Park wrote about the flora in a terse, economical, but useful way. These published writers articulate matters about Prospect Park that is more concrete than our cherished feelings about the place. The article is unbalanced: much about the Ravine, nearly nothing about the equally significant Meadow. Ohmigosh! in a thirty year span, 1930 to 1960, the Park lost (in addition to the Music Island) the Dairy Farmhouse (1935), the Thatched Hut (1937), the Concert Grove House (1949) The Greenhouses (1955) and the Miniature Yatch Club (1956). Cross reference these data point to Parks Department reporting housed in Brooklyn Public Library's Brooklyn Collection, and one has a concrete depiction of the park's economic slump that vague, unreferenced remarks to the "park's decay" cannot match in force or precision.

Missing significant topics, containing original research, lacking supporting references, this just doesn't read like a B class article, which has the characteristic of being substantially complete, if not written from an entrirely neutral point of view or having all of its references in place. This article is about a mid-range Start. If some have the urge to switch it back to B, do make the case here, first. For my part, I'll try to address some of these concerns, without bloating out the article too much. Thanks. Gosgood (talk) 23:44, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Parade Ground and southern border confusion

I would like to write an article on Prospect Park's Parade Ground. Also, I would like to mention it in the Prospect Park article where currently no mention of it is found.

It is an official part of the park and I am not sure why it isn't mentioned anywhere in the Prospect Park article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_Park_(Brooklyn)

Here is the page for it on Prospect Park's official site: http://www.prospectpark.org/parade_ground It is an important historically significant site in Brooklyn and I think deserves mention.

While researching this I discovered that the Prospect Park article says "public park in the New York City borough of Brooklyn located between Park Slope, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Kensington, Windsor Terrace and Flatbush Avenue, Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden." In keeping with no mention of the Parade Ground, no mention of the southern border of the park is to be found.

According to the list of Brooklyn Neighborhoods article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Brooklyn_neighborhoods), the neighborhood to the south of the parade grounds is "Prospect Park South" which would sound like it makes a lot of sense to be the neighborhood at the southern border. However, on the Prospect Park South article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_Park_South,_Brooklyn) it says the northern border of the neighborhood is Church Ave., exactly one block south of the bottom of the park.

I have found mention that "Caton Park" is the "micro-neighborhood" immediately south of the park and north of prospect park south. (http://www.cb14brooklyn.com/our-neighborhood/caton-park/). There doesn't seem to be any mention of Caton Park on wikipedia.

In addition to the Brooklyn Neighborhoods article's designation of the neighborhood as "Prospect Park South", Google Maps also makes this distinction. I have also seen all of the neighborhoods in the area referred to as "Victorian Flatbush".

You can see the confusion. Any recommendations for what should be done? Sssnole (talk) 06:35, 7 February 2011 (UTC)sssnole

Prospect Park in Redlands, California

Evidently, there's also a Prospect Park in Redlands, California, because I've been finding some images in the commons gallery that belong there, but were incorrectly added to this one. Everybody should move those images where they belong. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 04:58, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Lake picture

Was going to add this panorama of the lake, but I see there are already a few in the article and it's a GA. Just leaving it here in case other editors think it's worth including. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 04:19, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

"Rick’s Place" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Rick’s Place has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 November 20 § Rick’s Place until a consensus is reached. Edward-Woodrow (talk) 21:16, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Photos

A couple observations: would recommend at least one [more] photo of fauna. There are several mentions of birds, but the only photo is a blurry photo of a hawk with a rat. Also, no photo of the Vale of Cashmere. As it happens, most of the Commons Quality Images of Prospect Park include birds (no idea how that happened) and we have a Vale of Cashmere category. If I were to recommend two in particular, and acknowledging that I have a COI in this selection, it would be these two:

• 
  Green heron
• 
  Vale of Cashmere (it's not the focal point of the Vale, but a pretty path there)

Anyway, putting these here for others to consider given its GA status and since it already includes many images. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 01:16, 22 April 2024 (UTC)