The Roles Prospect Park Plays for Brooklyn

To some, parks are often viewed as a staple of the city, for others it is a place for leisure. Every park is filled with history and reflects back onto the city in which it presides. Fairmount Park and Central Park both have a rich history and an

This large amount of people has prompted legislative action to clearly define the park’s borders in 1929, and has also inspired park management programs to protect the

This may seem controversial as some people may not be able to understand how public parks benefit anyone. Public parks may seem purely aesthetic and ornamental, adding no true value to society, therefore some would argue that the government has no justification for taking their property.

Saratoga is a good example. City government finally put a plan together to develop parks in 1969. El Quito Park, which my dad dubbed “Gopher Hole Stadium,” was a field of dirt with a couple of baseball backstops in it for two decades. It, Wildwood Park (uptown), and a couple of others were finally developed in the early 1970s.

In Chapter 4 of On the Border by Char Miller, he discusses the importance of San Antonio's park system and how it can to be with the help of elected city officials. He conveys that in the 1990s- Mario Salas was elected as the councilman of District 2, which serves the east side of San Antonio. His goals were to increase the number of parks in the east side in order to expand that side of town. The East Side of San Antonio has always been a historically black neighborhood. In the 20th century, San Antonio had a commissioner style government in order to create a city of parks.

The experiment of the city needs some fine-tuning. Social reformers from all different stripes come out in full force to correct some of these urban problems. One of these campaigns is for the establishment of parks and its close cousin the playground. Landscape architect Charles Eliot whose work heavily influences the Boston Metropolitan Park System strongly pushes a park system to combat the growing urban

Many parks are not large spaces. There are many small urban areas set aside for public use. These are generally referred to as:

Parks have been around for many years. They truly have impacted not only suburbs, but they have majorly impacted cities. Without the invention of parks it would be hard to escape city life. Cities are still changing from what they used to be and how they are designed. However the future of the parks is unsure due to funding and lack of maintenance. The first idea of a park was from William Penn in 1682. He created a plan for Philadelphia to have five areas of park - like land. Then James Oglethorpe had an idea in 1733 for Savannah. He established a system, where neighborhoods were revolved around a square (Schuyler, 2015). The first recorded urban park was Fairmount Gardens. It was created in 1812, in Philadelphia when they constructed their waterworks. The park first started off at five acres, surrounding the waterworks. The park had become so popular that in 1828 they expanded it to twenty-eight acres. In 1850, Lemon Hill and Sedgley estates were added to Fairmount, which made the popularity of the park increase. People thought the park site was chosen because of the class of people that lived there, but that was not the case. The land was chosen because it was too elevated. Since the land was so elevated that made it too hard to build and expensive to build anything there or to build roads on that kind of land (Schuyler, 2015). Parks then became very popular in cities. William Cullen Bryant and Andrew Jackson Downing became the faces

Perhaps the most important of all is Central Park. Central Park goes against everything Wolfe mentioned from people acting like animals, to the bad conditions of the city, and all the noises and craziness. This is the place in New York City where everyone goes to get away from it all. If someone is stressed and needs to get out of the city, but still be in the city, this is where they go. There are over 800 acres of grass, playgrounds, a carousel, castles, statues, and the Bethesda Fountain. The elegant horses equipped with a carriage and a chauffer are ready to take you for a ride around the park.

Central Park was the first landscaped public park in the United States. Advocates of creating the park – primarily wealthy merchants and landowners – admired the public grounds of London and Paris and urged that New York needed a comparable facility to establish its international reputation. A public park, they argued, would offer their own families an attractive setting for carriage rides and provide working-class New Yorkers with a healthy alternative to the saloon. After three years of debate over the park site and cost, in 1853 the state legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan.

The most famous park built in a rail road is located in New York. The High line was constructed in the 1930’s to make a transportation-fueled urban economy perform more profitably and to improve conditions ins New York city’s most heavily used public open spaces – its streets. However, no trains have traveled its tracks since the early 1980’s. The elevated rail bed was carpeted by meadow grass and wildflowers. So in 1999, a not-for-profit group of neighborhood residents, business, owners, design professionals, and civic groups joined to form the Friends of the High Line. Their mission was to bring the out-of-use viaduct into the federally sanctioned rail-banking program, which would open the rail deck to the public for use as a walkway, a gallery,

With 585 acres of public park space, Prospect Park is the flagship park of Brooklyn. With a watercourse and a ravine both located in the park, the park offers many recreational activities for its visitors from fishing, boating, playing ball games, running, and sledding in the winter. The park is notable for its summer concert series called "Celebrate Brooklyn!" which draws performing artists from around the world.

Play space were created to get children of the streets, when New York was being developed cars were increasing at a high rate and children had to complete with on-going traffic while playing in the street. Due to the increase numbers of cars in the city, children injuries and death was at all-time high, because they had no place to play and the cars were taking over the streets of New York. This was the main reason park were built, so that children had a safe place to play. In the early years when parks came about the served a valuable purpose for children, today it seems that park in the urban low-income neighborhoods lost its significance. According to the Wridt article, the interview she conducted of the three individuals ages ranges from 13-60 years old. These individuals arise from the same neighborhood but yet they all have very

Building a public dog park in a residential area of the city may generate big discussion about the benefits and problems that can come with it. I believe that the creation of a dog park would be a great way to improve resident's lives for several reasons. Firt of all, The amount of people who own a dog have increased in the last decade. This means that the percentage of people that will beneficiate by a dog park could increase over the years. Second thing, green areas in cities have shown to improve life quality of its residents. Finally, the creating of a park would raise the property values around the park.

A city needs to provide three environments: commercial, public and residential. First, a commercial environment is where people work, it is real state intended for use by for profit business, such as office complexes, shopping malls, and restaurants. Second, a residential environment describes a place intended for living in, a house, condo or apartment as opposed to an office or workshop, so basically its an area for a family. Third, a public environment is a social space that is generally open and accessible to people. Roads, public squares, parks and beaches are typically considered public space. Battery Park City truly supplies all these three environments.