Learn About Prospect Park, in Grime and Glory

Brooklyn’s beloved Prospect Park, built as a pastoral refuge by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, offers a peace and solitude hard to be rivaled in any of the city’s other green spaces. But even more than it contrasts to other green spaces, Prospect Park contrasts intensely to fast-paced, urbanized Brooklyn itself.

NYU Stern Urbanization Project planner and former dishwasher, anarchist and journalist Patrick Lamson-Hall traces the history, decline and resurgence of Prospect Park alongside similar trends in Brooklyn throughout the 20th century. As Brooklyn’s crime rates rose in the ’70s, so did Prospect Park’s infrastructure degrade — by 1976, Grand Army Plaza’s chariot-driving arch-goddess had fallen over, symbolically representing decay in both the park and Brooklyn.

In a classroom lecture titled “Grime and Glory: A History of Prospect Park,” Lamson-Hall will not only share the park’s origins, but also the lessons it teaches about policing, public safety and empowered citizens.

The lecture will be from 6:30-8:30 p.m. on September 17 at Brooklyn Brainery. Tickets are $10.

Photo by Hannah Frishberg