Last November, Prospect Park Alliance Archivist Amy Peck agreed to give me a tour of the Brooklyn park. The Alliance, a non-profit, was established in 1987 to sustain, restore and advance Prospect Park in support of the New York City Parks Department.
We were to meet at Litchfield Villa. The imposing Italianate mansion predates the park and is now the headquarters of the Brooklyn Parks Department and houses some Alliance administrative offices.
The front lobby was grand. The receptionist invited me to have a seat, and I admired the ornate tile floor that was bathed by the light from a skylight that shone through a circular balcony. A few moments later, Amy Peck arrived.
“Want to see the view from the roof?” she asked, and I jumped to my feet.
Up the winding stairs for three flights and through the small door, we headed out onto the building’s rooftop. The view was magnificent. Facing west, we looked across the rooftops of Park Slope, past downtown Brooklyn, over the river to the Manhattan skyline and to the Statue of Liberty in the distance. In every other direction, though, the thick autumnal canopy masked our view deeper into the park. Immediately, we went to work imagining what the view might have been like for Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.
When Edwin Clark Litchfield planned his country estate in 1857, he was building in a location that was remote from the growing city of Brooklyn. He and his wife, Grace, had the same view of distant Manhattan that Amy and I shared. In every other direction, though, it would have been hilly farmland.
When Olmsted and Vaux took on designing Prospect Park in Brooklyn in 1865, Central Park, though still under construction, was being used by crowds of visitors daily. In Brooklyn, the politics were different, and the designers were granted more creative freedom. They advised on where the park should be situated and on its dimensions. This time, they didn’t have to work within a long rectangle with a reservoir in the middle of it.
In fact, there was no body of open water in the sparsely wooded land where the park was to be situated. In their 1866 design, in addition to the nearly mile-long Long Meadow, Olmsted and Vaux promised forests, a waterfall, streams and a pond for boaters in the summer and ice skating in the winter. Of course, Brooklyn’s leaders approved and… what happened next? Well, that’s the story Amy Peck works to document and archive.
From the villa’s rooftop, Peck took me to where her office was in the Picnic House, a 1929 brick building on the west side of the Long Meadow.
Somehow, I’d been expecting the Prospect Park archives to be aisles of old wooden cabinets and filing drawers in a cavernous chamber with vaulted arches. Instead, she welcomed me into a modern office she shared with landscape architects, architects and construction supervisors that make up the Alliance’s Design & Construction team. A large 1888 map of the park was pinned to the wall near her computer.
“This is a copy of the first as-built drawing,” she says about the map. “It shows the park as it was actually constructed, twenty years after Olmsted and Vaux’s first design.”
From 1934 to 1960, Robert Moses was the New York City Parks Commissioner, and Prospect Park was maintained and modified under his leadership. His focus on recreation meant that many of his changes were made with little regard to the original Olmsted and Vaux intentions. Original buildings were torn down and replaced with modern ones. Playgrounds and other additions modified the landscape. The fiscal crisis that followed in New York City resulted in decades of low funding and neglect for the city’s parks. In response, a number of advocacy groups stepped forward to rescue the parks. The Prospect Park Alliance was formed as a public-private partnership under the leadership of Tupper Thomas in 1987.
“Part of the Alliance’s mission was to restore the park in accordance with the original plans,” Peck said. “But Olmsted and Vaux’s construction drawings had not survived.” Olmsted’s papers had not yet been published and had to be read on microfilm at the Library of Congress. Images of Prospect Park from the nineteenth century had to be gathered from a multitude of historical societies, libraries and museums.
“The results of all that research needed a home,” Peck explained. “So the archive was first established in 1997 to make the copies of those drawings and plans accessible to our staff. But, in addition to the historic documentation, Tupper Thomas realized that the work the Alliance was doing also needed to be preserved for future generations, so we also have an institutional archive.”
Along with newsletters, annual reports, meeting minutes, correspondence, reports and surveys, the institutional archive includes landscape management records that document the restoration of the park’s varied ecosystems, including Brooklyn’s last remaining forest.
When Amy Peck joined the Alliance in 2000, she was hired as a part-time data entry person in the archive department. In 2006, she became the archivist. She invited me to take a look.
“It’s an active, working collection,” Peck said, as she led me to the nearby temperature-controlled storage room. “Most of what we have are reference copies. We don’t actively collect historic materials, but sometimes people who have memorabilia owned by their parents or grandparents find me. They want to find a safe place for their treasures. It might be family scrapbooks or a poster from the 1980s, but I also have a Prospect Park lawn bowling shirt. Things like that.”
Putting on white gloves, she showed me some of what’s been collected. There were postcards and stereographs— some originals but mostly copies made from libraries and loans from private collectors such as local Brooklynite Robert Levine. Especially rich with information, though, were the large glass plate negatives donated to the archive. As she held them up to the light, I saw the highly detailed images of park scenes from over a century ago. One showed the spire-like chimney of the Wellhouse, the building Vaux designed to house the coal-fired boiler powering the well’s pumps to bring water to the park.
When Brooklyn became a borough and the park was connected to the city water system in 1913, the Wellhouse became obsolete. The unused chimney was torn down. In 2008, the Alliance began converting the unused building to a public restroom with composting toilets—the first in a New York City park. The other project goal was the historic preservation of the park’s oldest building and recreating a painted wooden portico lost to time.
What color was the original portico? Peck searched through written descriptions and historic images, but the black and white photographs didn’t help. Nor did hand-colored postcards.
“Those are the artist’s chosen colors and can’t be trusted for accuracy,” she said.
Ultimately the project leaders chose a color palette appropriate to the era. But there were other discoveries made during the restoration. She suggested we go take a look.
We crossed the Long Meadow and headed for the Ravine, the wooded center of the park where a stream, named the Ambergill by Olmsted, gurgled down over the rocks. As we walked, Peck explained that Olmsted had created names for each part of the water system. From its start at Fallkill Falls, the water flows through the Upper and Lower Pools and over Ambergill Falls, after which it is called the Binnenwater. Once past Binnen Falls the widening waterway is called the Lullwater, and it ultimately becomes the Lake.
When the Prospect Park Alliance was first established, she said, “the watercourse wasn’t functional any longer due to decades of neglect and unchecked erosion.” Restoring it was an early priority, both to save the Olmsted design and to revitalize this important ecological system.
Instead of following the stream all the way on our walk, though, we crossed the Nethermead— a smaller, secluded meadow in the center of the park— and headed toward Lookout Hill. At the bottom of the hill, on the banks of Prospect Lake, stood the small brick Wellhouse with its colorful, ornate portico. Just in front of the building, not far from the doorway, there was a wide circle of masonry forming a low seatwall.
“When they built the Wellhouse, there was a 50-foot-deep brick cistern out front,” she explained. “The pump was at the bottom of that giant well, along with a viewing platform, so you could go down and admire the huge feat of engineering in action.”
To light the deep cistern, an ornate iron-and-glass canopy covered it, allowing sunlight in. This was gone, but the project’s design team did some exploratory digging and uncovered the top of the well wall. The Alliance decided to turn it into seating to highlight the site’s history.
We continued to walk out along the peninsula and then around the lake to where the skating rink at the LeFrak Center at Lakeside. As we walked, Peck explained that a lot of her work also involves investigating how the park’s been used over the decades. Without park records to comb through, she searches historic newspapers, looking for accounts of people or events in the park. She said that she keeps in mind that each newspaper had a different perspective, and to get a clear idea of what may have really happened, she needs to read multiple reports. Any discoveries she makes, she shares with staff in newsletters. She also regularly holds informal open house sessions with new hires to introduce them to Olmsted and Vaux.
No tour of Prospect Park would be complete without a visit to the carousel. On our way back to her office, we stopped by the 53 horses, lion, giraffe, deer and two dragon-pulled chariots. The creatures were hand-carved by Charles Carmel in 1912 and all are astonishing, full of life and action. They were lovingly refurbished in 1990 and 2020. All around the carousel’s rounding boards were paintings of the park, some depicting buildings no longer standing.
Though not open for business, the men doing maintenance recognized the archivist and invited us in for a ride. Peck recommended one of the horses that goes up and down. As the carnival music started to play and the ride began to rotate, my stallion began at a trot but quickly got to a gallop. It was exhilarating. Clearly, I saw Amy Peck had done her research.
All photographs by Mark Roessler.
