Location: Brooklyn

Covering 526 acres, Prospect Park is located just south of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Landscape designers Calvert Vaux and Frederick Olmsted designed this park in 1865, filling it with the things that make a retreat magical and wonderful: winding paths and trickling brooks, simple stone bridges and mossy boulders, along with trees, rolling meadows, and fields of flowers. The central features of the park are the Long Meadow, Prospect Lake, and the Ravine, a well–preserved section of Brooklyn forest that provides a haven for birds and small woodland animals.

Construction of the park involved as many as 1,800 workers, who were all supervised by Frederick Olmsted. As with Central Park, even the most natural–seeming elements were the result of hard labor; trees were planted, fields were flattened, the shape of the lake was modified, and an underground drainage system was installed. Olmsted also designed many of the minute details of the park, such as small picnic arbors along the paths and the Concert Grove. In the 1930s, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses had many of the park’s features restored and added the Wollman skating rink.

Prospect Park was immediately popular, and more than 15 million visitors came to the park each year during the late 1800s. Today thousands of Brooklynites still visit the park on a daily basis to enjoy picnics, play soccer, walk their dogs, bike around the loop, or relax by the lake.