Parkways and Public Monuments

As the residential grid of Brooklyn expanded eastward and southward in the post-Civil War era, urban planners recognized the urgent need to impose spatial order and provide hygienic green space. The most profound spatial interventions in Brooklyn's history were conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the pioneering landscape architects responsible for Central Park and Prospect Park. In 1866, Olmsted and Vaux proposed a revolutionary concept that would dictate the layout of central and southern Brooklyn: the "parkway".³²

The Invention of the Parkway

• 1870 and 1874Construction of Eastern Parkway
• 1,100trees mandated by Olmsted along Eastern Parkway
• June 15, 1894First dedicated bike path in the United States, on Ocean Parkway

Eastern Parkway, constructed between 1870 and 1874, was the first thoroughfare in the world designed explicitly as a parkway—a concept Olmsted defined as a "shaded green ribbon" intended exclusively for personal carriages and recreation, strictly prohibiting commercial wagons and heavy trucks. Stretching from Grand Army Plaza (the formal main entrance to Prospect Park) toward Ralph Avenue, the parkway was engineered as a 200-foot-wide linear park. The cross-section featured a broad central macadam roadway, flanked by dual tree-lined pedestrian promenades, and dedicated outer service roads paved with stone blocks for local access.^33,32

Olmsted mandated the planting of over 1,100 trees, primarily utilizing elms along the main road and a variety of maples on the service roads, effectively extending the sylvan aesthetic of Prospect Park miles into the residential grid. To ensure the boulevard remained a high-end residential corridor, the city enacted strict zoning restrictions requiring that only "first-class" residences be built, with all buildings set back exactly 30 feet from the sidewalk. This fostered the development of grand mansions and luxury apartment blocks that eventually earned the moniker "Doctor's Row". In 1978, in recognition of its global importance to urban planning, Eastern Parkway was designated a Scenic Landmark by the LPC, protecting its spatial organization and landscape elements in perpetuity.³²

Concurrently, Olmsted and Vaux designed Ocean Parkway, stretching five and a half miles south from the perimeter of Prospect Park down to the Atlantic Ocean at Coney Island. Authorized by the state legislature in 1869 and largely completed through the 1870s, Ocean Parkway mirrored the tripartite design of Eastern Parkway. Notably, in response to the booming popularity of the bicycle, Ocean Parkway inaugurated the first dedicated bike path in the United States on June 15, 1894. The path was originally 14 feet wide and featured a strict speed limit of 12 miles per hour, seeing upwards of 2,000 daily users within months of its opening. The thoroughfare underwent significant renovations in the 1970s and was officially designated a Scenic Landmark in 1975.^34,36,37

Monumental Commemoration

The termination points of these grand avenues naturally evolved into sites for monumental civic art. The most prominent is the Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch at Grand Army Plaza. Designed by architect John H. Duncan and constructed between 1889 and 1892, the arch serves as a breathtaking Beaux-Arts gateway to Prospect Park. Modeled loosely on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the monumental arch is dedicated "To the Defenders of the Union, 1861–1865," honoring the veterans of the American Civil War. The structure is heavily adorned with magnificent bronze sculptural groups by Frederick MacMonnies (an apprentice of Augustus Saint-Gaudens), depicting the Army, the Navy, and a crowning quadriga of Columbia—which famously fell off its chariot in 1976, prompting a major restoration. Inside the 80-foot archway, bas-reliefs by Thomas Eakins and William Rudolf O'Donovan depict Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.^39,40

Further north, Fort Greene Park—another landscape touched by the genius of Olmsted and Vaux, and originally championed as a public space by Walt Whitman—houses the somber Prison Ship Martyrs Monument. Designed by the eminent architect Stanford White of the firm McKim, Mead & White, and dedicated in 1908 by President William Howard Taft, the monument honors the estimated 11,500 American prisoners of war who perished aboard British prison ships moored in Wallabout Bay during the Revolutionary War. The monument consists of a 149-foot-tall granite Doric column topped with a massive, seven-and-a-half-ton bronze urn. The column rests above a crypt where the recovered remains of the martyrs were interred in 1873. Designated a landmark in 1973, the monument represents a grim acknowledgment of the high human cost of the American Revolution, providing a profound historical anchor within the pastoral beauty of the park.^42,40