Prospect Park Handbook

Conveniently sized to fit in a pocket or bag, this reference includes more than 100 places to visit in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and nearby Botanic Garden. Eleven walking tours cover numerous sites in the Park, including the Zoo and the famed Cherry Walk. Beautiful full-color illustrations and photographs identify various birds and flowers; 20 pages of maps help you navigate and find restrooms and public services.

Right in the heart of one of the nation's most densely populated urban areas sits an idyllic realm of graceful meadows, dense woods, placid lakes, and fresh air. Brooklyn's 585-acre Prospect Park offers a rural refuge to thousands of visitors every day. Created nearly 150 years ago by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert B. Vaux, designers of New York's Central Park, the duo considered Prospect Park their true masterpiece. Prospect Park, the first monograph on this exquisite public space, makes it easy to see why. Presenting a wealth of archival and newly commissioned photography and insightful text, David P. Colley and Elizabeth Keegin Colley trace the park's colorful history from its creation in the mid-nineteenth century to its decline in the 1970s and restoration in the 1980s, up to the park's new Lakeside Center facility, scheduled to open in 2013.

From the first orange glow on the water in the pond, to the last humans and animals running home from an evening rain shower, here is a day-in-the-life of a city park, and the playground within it. A rhythmic text and sweet, accessible images will immerse parents, toddlers, and young children in the summer season and the community within a park. Seasoned picture book readers may notice Emily Jenkins's classic inspirations for this book: Alvin Tresselt's Caldecott Medal-winning White Snow, Bright Snow, illustrated by Roger Duvoisin, and Charlotte Zolotow's The Park Book, illustrated by H. A. Rey.

Prospect Park is no longer a democratic vista; it is a hell and purgatory of crime and no redemption. A once idyllic park reddened by the blood of wanton crime and ritualistic execution attempted by an upholder of the Law. Who is the derelict bum who has strayed into its now pathological confines? Who is the bum Rusty? The Talion Law grew out of my experience of twenty-five years as Director of the Youth Bureau of the District Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, New York. I was aware daily of the mounting perplexities in the administration of criminal justice. I saw first hand the demoralizing pressures of overwork and shoddy compromise on the District Attorney and his staff causing a psychological warping of good men. A Chief Assistant, a close friend of mine, broke badly. In an alcoholic haze he used to wander into Prospect Park. I fetched him home on two occasions. He died of pneumonia having slept in the boathouse on a bitter cold night. So I thought: what if my dear friend survived the cold and drink, and awakened in Prospect Park? What might have happened to him? A park ranger’s mount is slashed on a bridle path. Swans are strangled on the lake. A hit man invades the park looking for whom. An old birdwatcher tricks him into an empty bear pit at the zoo. Why does the eight-year-old Jorge befriend the bum who calls himself Rusty? What does the Mafioso Solemner have in common with the bum? The Talon Law is rich in uncoaxed metaphors. The original aim of the park becomes a metaphor for the salvation of James Boerum.

A major new history of Brooklyn, told through its landscapes, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early 17th century to today.

This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.