page_title: Prospect Park (Brooklyn)
section_title: Planning
hierarchical_section_title: Prospect Park (Brooklyn) / History / Planning
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of landscape designer and architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
context_page_description: Prospect Park is an urban park in Brooklyn, New York City. The park is situated between the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush, and Windsor Terrace, and is adjacent to the Brooklyn Museum, Grand Army Plaza, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. With an area of 526 acres, Prospect Park is the second largest public park in Brooklyn, behind Marine Park.
  First proposed in legislation passed in 1859, Prospect Park was laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also helped design Manhattan's Central Park, following various changes to its design. Prospect Park opened in 1867, though it was not substantially complete until 1873. The park subsequently underwent numerous modifications and expansions to its facilities. Several additions to the park were completed in the 1890s, in the City Beautiful architectural movement. In the early 20th century, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation commissioner Robert Moses started a program to clean up Prospect Park. A period of decline in the late 20th century spurred the creation of the Prospect Park Alliance, which refurbished many parts of the park starting in the late 1980s.
context_section_description: The original impetus to build Prospect Park stemmed from an April 18, 1859, act of the New York State Legislature, empowering a twelve-member commission to recommend sites for parks in the City of Brooklyn. At the time, Brooklyn was the world's first commuter suburb, and it eventually became the third largest city in the country after New York and Philadelphia. During this time, concepts concerning public parks gained popularity. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had created Central Park in Manhattan, which became the first landscaped park in the United States. James S. T. Stranahan, then President of the Brooklyn Board of Park Commissioners, believed that 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..." He also thought a public park would attract wealthy residents. Stranahan originally envisioned one large park extending eastward to Jamaica, Queens. However, the city's rapid development made this impossible, and today, the largest remnants of this proposed landscape are Prospect Park and the 538-acre (218 ha) Forest Park in Queens.
  In February 1860, a group of fifteen commissioners submitted suggestions for locations of four large parks and three small parks in Brooklyn, as well as a series of boulevards to connect said parks. The largest of these proposed parks was a 320-acre (1.3 km²) plot centered on Mount Prospect and bounded by Warren Street to the north; Vanderbilt, Ninth, and Tenth Avenues to the west; Third and Ninth Streets to the south; and Washington Avenue to the east. Egbert Viele began drawing plans for "Mount Prospect Park", as the space was initially called, and published his proposal in 1861. The park was to straddle Flatbush Avenue and include Prospect Hill, as well as the land now occupied by the Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Brooklyn Museum.
  
  By late 1860, land had been purchased for Viele's plan. However, the onset of the Civil War stopped further activity, and the boulevards and smaller parks were pushed back. The delay prompted some reflection; Stranahan invited Calvert Vaux to review Viele's plans early in 1865. Vaux took issue with Flatbush Avenue's division of the park, thought that the park should have a lake, and urged for southward expansion beyond the city limits and into the then-independent town of Flatbush. Vaux's February 1865 proposal reflected the present layout of the park: three distinctive regions, meadow in the north and west, a wooded ravine in the east, and a lake in the south, without being divided by Flatbush Avenue. Vaux included an oval plaza at the northern end of the park, which would later become Grand Army Plaza. The revised plan called for the purchase of additional parcels to the south and west to accommodate Prospect Lake, but it excluded parcels already purchased east of Flatbush Avenue, including Prospect Hill itself. In addition, engineer-in-charge Joseph P. Davis and assistants John Bogart and John Y. Culyer were named to work on the project.
  By then, land speculation was underway. The plot bounded by Ninth and Tenth Avenues between Third and Fifteenth Streets was held by real estate developer Edwin Clarke Litchfield, who had erected his home, Litchfield Manor, on the east side of Ninth Avenue in 1857. The Parks Commission ultimately acquired the Litchfield plot in 1868 for $1.7 million, forty-two percent of the overall expenditure for land, even though the plot constituted just over five percent of the park's acreage. Much of this acreage houses the maintenance yards and is rarely seen by the public. In 1866, the New York state legislature passed a bill approving the acquisition of additional land on the southwest side of the park. The park was built around the preexisting Quaker cemetery, which was accommodated by an agreement under which the Society of Friends deeded their unused acreage to the park. In exchange, they retained the remaining 10 acres for their private cemetery in perpetuity, as we
caption: Frederick Law Olmsted, as depicted by John Singer Sargent in 1895
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