A Park’s Evolution

Prospect Park today has far more land protected to allow wildlife to prosper as it might have centuries ago. Of course, it is utterly different, despite how wild it may seem. Native Americans cultivated large swaths of land long before the arrival of colonists. Then, for over two centuries before the park’s opening in 1867, Dutch, then English colonists and then Americans altered the land, introduced new species, eliminated those (like wolves and bears) seen as a threat or a nuisance. And then the architects of the park — Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux — drastically reshaped the landscape. Prospect Park Lake, for example, is artificial, the product of an extraordinary amount of excavation and landscaping done before all the machinery we now use.

The photo below captures the park in a different age. It’s a favorite of mine.

A father (I suppose) photographs his children in 1910. The boy in motion, impatient. One daughter perhaps just bit disgruntled. The grounds are so refined, cultivated, manicured — a model of how nature is ideally, not at all the home of wild life.

If I am right, the boathouse bridge and Audubon Center would be behind and to the right of the photographer of this scene.