Walkabout with Montrose: The Road to Prospect Heights

The hills of central Brooklyn have long been battle grounds of one kind or another. At the start of the Revolutionary War, in 1776, the Battle of Brooklyn was fought along Brooklyn’s terminal moraine, the glacial hills that included the famous Battle Pass, now in Prospect Park, where the American forces were almost overwhelmed.

Part of that battleground was also Mount Prospect, the second highest point in Brooklyn, near the present day intersection of Flatbush and Eastern Parkway, a hilly wooded area used as a lookout post by George Washington that would later give rise to the neighborhood of Prospect Heights.

The entire area had been settled by Dutch farmers, including several branches of Bergen’s, since the 1630’s, and was mostly tenant farms and fields worked by slave labor.

Located between the towns of Bedford and Brooklyn, the area was bisected by the Ferry Road to Flatbush, an expansion of an old Indian trail, which eventually became the Flatbush Road, east of present day Flatbush Ave.

(Many of the original roads and streets in PH were moved in the 1850’s, resulting in some of the diagonal and off-grid placement of buildings that intrigue Prospect Heights residents today.) The Flatbush Road was a major thoroughfare, the main road between the town of Flatbush and the town of Brooklyn, and the ferries to Manhattan.

In 1809, the Brooklyn, Jamaica, and Flatbush Turnpike Company incorporated, and toll booths were erected along their routes, including Flatbush.

Part of the old Flatbush Road went through parts of what is now Prospect Park, land made uninhabitable by fevers and malarial diseases caused by stagnant ponds located in the thick undergrowth.

When Brooklyn was incorporated as a city in 1834, the Prospect Heights area was the least populated of Brooklyn’s nine wards.

In the 1830’s, land speculators Charles Hoyt and James Underhill were selling plots of land, but not much was built on for the next twenty years while the city of Brooklyn laid out the city’s street grid.

The first streets established in 1846 were Carlton Ave and Dean Streets, with present day Flatbush Ave replacing the old Flatbush Road in 1852. The oldest surviving buildings in PH are two wood frame houses on Carlton Avenue that date from the 1850’s.

A reservoir was built on Mount Prospect in 1856, with a pumping station on Underhill Ave. This supplied fresh water to much of Brooklyn until the Catskill Mt and Delaware River Valley reservoirs completely took over in the 1940’s.

But it was the development of Prospect Park, Grand Army Plaza, and Eastern Parkway that directly led to the graciously appointed streetscapes we enjoy today.

The success of Central Park in 1857 prompted Brooklyn city fathers to commission a park and parade ground in Brooklyn two years later. This park commission hired Egbert Viele, the original engineer for Central Park, to draw a plan for the park.

Had he been able to complete his plan, Prospect Park would have straddled Flatbush Ave, and included Mount Prospect, the reservoir and northeast as far as present day Prospect Place, as well as Battle Pass and the land surrounding it to the west.

The development of the park was halted by the onset of the Civil War, after which the commission asked Calvert Vaux and Fredrick Law Olmsted to review the plans.

The duo rejected having Flatbush Ave and the reservoir in the park, and provided the city with revised plans in 1866, excluding these eastern parcels, the plans were approved, and the park was built between 1866-73, Eastern Parkway from 1870-74, and Grand Army Plaza was finished by 1879.

A huge controversy occurred when the city acquired the eastern park land through the right of eminent domain, and then sold some of the land back to private developers when it was no longer needed by the city.

This land was rocky sterile land occupied only by goats and squatters, the Brooklyn Eagle said in 1873. When the site of the park moved west, the city sought to unload some of unnecessary eastern parcels, and after much litigation and controversy, the parcels were sold to private developers for a song.

Marketed as being located in the highest and most desirable part of the city, this area, roughly from present day Park Place to Empire Blvd, remained a howling wilderness until the 1890’s, with squatter’s shanties surrounded by pigs, goats and chickens occupying much of the land.

Meanwhile, the public buildings adjacent to the park were being planned, and the developers made a fortune selling some of the same land back to the city at highly inflated prices.

That sale included some of the land upon which the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Brooklyn Public Library were built. Mount Prospect Reservoir, sandwiched between the Botanic Garden and the Library, later became a public park.

Olmsted and Vaux’s picturesque Eastern Parkway effectively separated the public and private lands. By the early 20th century, the entire area north of EP had became the beautiful residential blocks of Italianate, Romanesque Revival, Queen Anne and Renaissance Revival row houses and apartment buildings that have always enjoyed the proximity to the park and these great institutions.

One hundred years later, after many years of work by homeowners and activists, most of Prospect Heights received landmark status, and became the Prospect Heights Historic District this just this fall. This past Sunday, the community held its bi-annual house tour.

My Flickr page features some of the architectural highlights of this great part of Brownstone Brooklyn. The research for this article is from the 2009 LPC designation report for the Prospect Heights Historic District, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the NY Times, and the NYC Parks Dept.