ABSTRACT
Prospect Park is the less famous but more fabulous younger sibling of Central Park. Both were designed by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) and Calvert Bowyer Vaux (1824–95) – pioneers of the profession in the United States. Prospect Park was designed shortly after the American Civil War (1861–65) as a pastoral refuge from the burgeoning city of Brooklyn, across the East River from New York. It is composed of roughly even proportions of meadow, forest and water tied together by a sophisticated circulation system. Prospect Park is one of the simplest but most subtle landscape compositions in North America. Charles Sprague Sargent described the park in 1888 as ‘one of the great artistic creations of modern times’ (Schuyler 1986: 124) and Vaux-biographer Francis Kowsky noted that it is ‘generally acknowledged as America’s finest romantic park landscape’ (Kowsky 1998: 172). The Long Meadow in particular is the apotheosis of Olmsted and Vaux’s ‘American Pastoral’ style. Kowsky called it an ‘incomparable masterpiece of pastoral scenery’ and Central Park historian Sara Cedar Miller described it as ‘arguably the greatest example of their vision of a limitless greensward’ (Miller 2003: 238).
