Finding Your Hike in Prospect Park

If my title seems puzzling, let me explain. Prospect Park, Brooklyn, is a 585-acre unnatural wonder, shaped by its builders to represent rural values and spaces in a growing 19th-century city. From farmland and hillside, Olmsted and Vaux created forests, lakes, streams, ravines, meadows and other spaces, leaving you with a choice of what kind of hike you’d like.

In my last Prospect Park blog, I reported on a walk following the Park’s watercourse, from source to the 80-acre lake. This time, I’d like to show you more of the park, and its variety.

One thing to keep in mind if you come to visit the park: You won’t be alone. It’s the best backyard for millions of Brooklynites and visitors, and sometimes it seems they have all arrived at once at the same spot. Feels great (especially after times in the 70s when parts of the park seemed abandoned), but I wish the park had a better maintenance budget; it takes until Monday for everything to get cleaned up. 

 But even on the busiest days, you only need to walk away and find a quieter area for yourself. There are designated picnic areas (not enough) but also a culture of finding a likely space space, and using it, including spots along the roadways.

The park has areas that are clearly intended for sports, including a number of ballfields, it has performance venues including a bandshell that hosts a summer-long concert series, and this old-timey stage in the Music Grove.

Aside from hikers and picnicers and players of various sports, you’ll certainly run into many bikers and runners…and even some intrepid fishermen. Beliefs vary about how many edible-size fish are in the lake, but there’s no shortage of people trying!

As I mentioned in my previous blog on the Waters of Prospect Park, the lake and its tributaries are a major attraction of the park, although maintaining the beautiful vistas takes constant work, especially because of invasive species of plants such as phragmites (seen below) reeds that block shorelines and can pierce the lakebed and tiny ferns and algae that leave a green almost solid-looking surface to the water in places. (middle picture) They were recently tragically involved in the drowning of a 2-year-old who may have walked into water thinking it was land. The strange-looking device in the bottom picture is a weed-whacking boat that’s used to try to control them.

Often unnoticed amidst all these activities, Prospect Park also honors the dead in a number of ways, not often noticed except by hikers. Parts of what is now the park were a major battlefield of the Battle of Brooklyn, the first great battle of the Revolutionary War. On the east side of the park, a small plaque attached to a rock marks the Battle Pass, where Washington’s troops fought a fierce engagement trying to protect the heights behind them.

On the other side of the park, a more impressive monument honors a Maryland unit that was nearly annihilated, but delayed the British advance long enough for the major portion of the American army to escape encirclement and withdraw to fight again. 

Another memorial, along the lake shore, honors Brooklyn’s World War I soldiers.

The park’s architects, Olmsted and Vaux, wanted the park to resemble rural and pastoral scenes, with little hint of city. That intention can be seen as you hike the park in the rustic fixtures here and there, like these.

But, by the late 19th century, public ideas of a park were changing, and so was the design of park features. More classical, more ornate, more stone, less wood, less rustic…but still beautiful. Here are some examples of later work.

Just this past winter, the Park opened a new project, called Lakeside, featuring indoor and outdoor ice-skating rinks and a cafe…potentially a nice stop on a hike. Ironically, it is not on the lakeside; in fact its construction has allowed the lakeside area where the old rink was to be returned to something like its original state. The new rinks were built on the site of a former parking lot for the old rink. As you can see below, in summer the indoor rink is used for rollerskating and the outdoor rink is a giant sprinkler pond.

If you are into birdwatching on your hike, Prospect Park is a good choice; there’s an active group of Audubon birdwatchers around the park, and a wide variety of birds live in or stop over at the park. The most common are ducks and swans in the lake, but many others can be found if you’re looking.

All in all, a park with many hikes…and many ways to enjoy one (or to stop off the trail and enjoy something else…even a nap in the grass. If you haven’t seen enough possibilities yet, I’ve included some more pictures and a map below.

For more Gumbo blogs and pictures of New York City and New York parks, click HERE