New York, Prospect Park entrance restored

Prospect Park, which opened in 1867, underwent numerous modifications and expansions to its structures and is considered to this day to be Brooklyn’s lungs. Several additions to the park were completed in the 1890s, during the City Beautiful architectural movement, while more recently the Prospect Park Alliance has been renovating many of its parts, starting in the late 1980s. In these months when offices have closed and cafes are not accessible, freelancers and students have been scrambling to find an alternative space to work, and laptops have appeared here too, under the century-old trees, in the bucolic setting designed by the same Central Park architects. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux probably never imagined that the roots of poplars, oaks, and chestnut trees would one day have the essential function of bringing Brooklynites back in touch with earth, in a distant future where you couldn't go out in a group and embrace another person on a bench.

Last week saw the completion of the restoration of one of the park’s arches, the one that connects Grand Army Plaza to the majestic Long Meadow. Prospect Park Alliance President Sue Donoghue noted that the park’s two architects “envisioned it as a way to leave behind the dirt and hardship of the city and enter a beautiful space.” The arch had deteriorated over the course of about 150 years, but is now serviceable thanks to a 500,000 dollar project funded by the Tiger Baron Foundation.

In the simplicity of the structure, the project is astonishing because the interior of the Endale Arch, once the paint that covered the interior surface was peeled off, revealed an inlay of white pine and black walnut wood panels that has been hidden for nearly a century and that now passersby, adults and children, runners and cyclists don't tire of looking at and photographing.