When Prospect Park was first opened to the public in the late 1860s, the City of Brooklyn was proud to claim a landmark as beautiful and as peaceful as New York’s Central Park. But the superstar landscape designers — Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux — weren’t finished.
This park came with two grand pleasure drives, wide boulevards that emanated from the north and south ends of the park. Eastern Parkway, the first parkway in the United States, is the home of the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, its leafy pedestrian malls running through the neighborhood of Crown Heights.
But it’s Ocean Parkway that is the most unusual today, an almost six-mile stretch which takes drivers, bikers, runners and (at one point) horse riders all the way to Coney Island, at a time when people were just beginning to appreciate the beach’s calming and restorative values.
Due to its wide, straight surface, Ocean Parkway even became an active speedway for fast horses. When bicycles became all the rage in the late 1880s, they also took to the parkway and avid cyclists eventually got their first bike lane in 1894 — the first in the United States.
By the 20th century, parks commissioner and ‘power broker’ Robert Moses reinvented the idea of the parkway, in many ways the very opposite of Olmsted’s original intentions. Today the parkways fit awkwardly into New York’s sprawling highway system, making the streets dangerous for neighborhood residents.
And right at a time when Ocean Parkway, in particular, has suddenly become one of the most religious streets in the country.
FEATURING: A tale of two cemeteries — one that was demolished to make way for one parkway, and another which apparently (given its ‘no vacancy’ status) thrives next to another.
LISTEN NOW: PARKWAYS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF BROOKLYN
Are you free on Saturday, May 31st, 2025? Join Tom and Greg from the Bowery Boys, along with the Gilded Gentleman Carl Raymond, for a three-hour dinner cruise around lower Manhattan through New York Harbor and up to the Statue of Liberty.
Get information and book your tickets at likemindstravel.com.
CLARIFICATION: As sent in by listener Lewis, today the Garden State Parkway is partially open to some commercial traffic. This does support my claim that the word ‘parkway’ is what you want it to be!
“Garden State Parkway had that restriction for something like the first 50 years. Sometime in the last 15 years, they did start to allow some limited trucks. No semis. Nothing big.”
FURTHER LISTENING
Other Bowery Boys podcasts with similar or related themes:
FURTHER READING
Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted / Justin Martin
Gotham / Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrows
Pleasure Drives and Promenades: A History of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Brooklyn Parkways / Elizabeth MacDonald
Prospect Park / Ronald P Verdicchio and the Prospect Park Community Study Group
Propsect Park: Olmsted and Vaux’s Brooklyn Masterpiece / David P Colley
Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York / Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T Jackson
1 reply on “Parkways and the Transformation of Brooklyn”
A very interesting historical tale in Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway, which I grew up around loving only 3 blocks from their about 88 percent of my live. Thank you for this in depth historical tale on these Parkways and the photos of this now very long a time era .