★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
Prospect Park
Right now, you're standing on a battlefield where 17,000 years of ice carved these hills! Back on August 21, 1776, Colonial soldiers chopped down a massive white oak tree right here to block the British army during the bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War. Even though they lost, they saved George Washington's entire army! Those same designers who made Central Park actually called THIS their masterpiece - all 585 acres of it, including a secret forest nicknamed "The Last Forest of Brooklyn" hidden in the ravines. Can you spot Mount Prospect rising 200 feet high - that's like stacking 20 giraffes on top of each other!
Did You Know?
- Prospect Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—the same landscape architects who created Central Park—and features a 90-acre ‘Long Meadow,’ one of the largest urban meadows in the United States, designed to mimic the pastoral landscapes of the English countryside.
- The park is steeped in Revolutionary War history: during the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, American troops retreated across what is now the Long Meadow, and remains of soldiers, fortifications, and pits from the war were discovered during the park’s construction; a monument to the Maryland 400, who made a heroic last stand, stands at the base of Lookout Hill.
- Hidden within the park is a small, fenced-off Quaker cemetery, easily missed among the woods, where notable figures like former Brooklyn Borough President Raymond Ingersoll and actor Montgomery Clift are buried—a quirky, lesser-known feature that adds to the park’s rich tapestry of stories.