Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll find out about a $37.5 million restoration project in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. We’ll also get details on a report that says poverty inched up in 2024.
There haven’t been any roses in the Rose Garden in Prospect Park in Brooklyn for at least 70 years. And in 18 months, the Rose Garden will be no more.
It will be replaced as part of a $37.5 million project that will reinvent eight acres that include a section of the park called the Vale, where the garden was added in the 1890s, nearly 30 years after the park opened. Deputy Mayor Julia Kerson said at a groundbreaking ceremony on Monday that the project would make the Vale “more accessible, better maintained” and that it was being “designed with families in mind.”
The work is being paid for with money set aside by New York City in 2021, when Bill de Blasio was mayor. The Covid pandemic slowed the design work, park officials said. The city’s Economic Development Corporation will oversee construction, with an 18-month timetable for completion.
The Vale was one of the landscape features built into Prospect Park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architects who also designed Central Park.
Morgan Monaco, who as president of the Prospect Park Alliance is the park administrator, said that “we referenced the original Olmsted master plan” in shaping the Vale project. Olmsted and Vaux had laid out a playground, “or the 19th-century version of a playground,” she said, “so children were the focal point of our design process from the very beginning.”
The result is what she called a “nature-based play area,” with tree stumps, logs and boulders configured for jumping, balancing and playing.
Olmsted and Vaux designed a children’s pool for model boats, similar to the Model Boat Pond in Central Park. “But over time, Robert Moses came in and said, ‘Original Olmsted design be damned, I am going to put in three basins,’” Monaco said. The ornamental basins, dating from Moses’s reign as the city’s parks commissioner from the 1930s to 1960, were made of concrete. Water sprayed from them the day they were unveiled, but almost never after that.
Despite its lack of roses, the area nearby the basins is still known as the Rose Garden; it will give way to a pollinator garden. The gardeners will plant what park officials call “bird-friendly species” of flowering plants — pale purple coneflower, wild bergamot and yarrow.
The idea is to add another destination for migrating birds on the Atlantic Flyway. They can already touch down at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, just across Flatbush Avenue from the park, or in Green-Wood Cemetery, less than a mile away. The park project also calls for an arbor planted with coral honeysuckle.
For decades the Vale, like a wooded area of Central Park known as the Ramble, was a prime spot for cruising by gay men. A spokeswoman for the alliance said that it planned to scheduled nature programs and other activities there after the restoration, but that it would add signs acknowledging its place in L.G.B.T.Q. history.
Ken Lustbader, a co-director of the N.Y.C. L.G.B.T.Q. Historic Sites Project, said that he was “appreciative that they have reached out to local stakeholders and are acknowledging the rich history of the Vale, especially its more recent history as a gathering spot for the L.G.B.T.Q. community, particularly for the Black queer community.”
The Vale project also includes a new pavilion and a picnic lawn. The pavilion will be built into a hillside and will have a green roof. Inside the pavilion will be bathrooms; park officials said the need for those amenities came up when they surveyed the community.
Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia, said that some preservations opposed the pavilion. “It will make dramatic changes to this historic section and impose a large built structure in a late-19th-century landscape,” he said. But he noted that the final design had been approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Public Design Commission.
Weather
Expect sunny skies and temperatures near 39. Tonight will be partly cloudy with temperatures in the high 20s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Friday (Eid al-Fitr).
ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE
The St. Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan will march up Fifth Avenue, starting at East 44th Street at 11 a.m. Vanderbilt Avenue will be closed between East 43rd Street and East 46th Street; more than a dozen blocks between East 43rd Street and East 84th Street will also be closed. Some buses will be rerouted. The Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North will add trains in the morning and the afternoon, and the two lines will ban alcohol on trains for 24 hours, starting at 5 a.m.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“We like to say it’s the largest project you’ll never see.” — Bob Harrison, the head of engineering for a new underground transmission line from Quebec that will be capable of providing electricity for a million customers in New York City.
The latest New York news
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Behind the mayor’s smile: While charming in public, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has thrown sharp elbows in private as he pushes his political brand and agenda among fellow progressives.
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Epstein’s access to elite private schools: Jeffrey Epstein used his money and influence in the world of elite private schools to assist friends and acquaintances.
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Why did Trump officials award $2 million to a Queens art school? The National Endowment for the Humanities has seldom given seven-figure grants. Now, big awards are going to handpicked projects, including the Grand Central Atelier, which has three full-time employees.
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Dinner without the drinks: Sales of alcoholic beverages, traditionally a reliable revenue stream for restaurants, are down markedly — and their bottom line is, too.
Poverty edged up in New York City in 2024
It’s no surprise that the costs of basics like housing and food rose in 2024. But incomes and other resources, like public benefits, did not keep pace. The result, according to the latest Poverty Tracker report, was that more than a quarter of New Yorkers lived in poverty in 2024.
More than half said that high costs had prevented them — at least once — from doing things like buying food, paying utility bills or seeing a doctor.
The report, released yesterday, said that a record 2.2 million New Yorkers — 26 percent of the city’s population — were living in poverty, twice the national figure.
“This is most of the people you see on the train,” said Richard Buery Jr., the chief executive of the anti-poverty group Robin Hood, which works on the Poverty Tracker report in partnership with Columbia University. “At the end of the month, they don’t know if they’re going to be able to feed their families.”
The report found that a family of four in New York City with up to $100,000 in income, or a single adult with up to $47,000 — a group of nearly five million people — struggled almost as much those living in poverty. Thirty-four percent of them often couldn’t afford basic needs, compared with 38 percent of New Yorkers who were considered poor.
METROPOLITAN diary
Terminal Lunch
Dear Diary:
In February 1976, I hitchhiked from Cleveland to New York City with my friend and classmate Fitz. We had flunked out of college and did not want to face our parents.
Fitz’s older brother Chip and Chip’s girlfriend, Ellen, had offered to share their three-room railroad flat at 73 East Fourth Street.
There was a blizzard, and the trip was difficult. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was shut down. Fitz and I got stuck with dozens of other travelers at a Howard Johnson rest stop for 22 hours.
When the turnpike reopened, we got a ride on a tractor-trailer into Newark. Our final ride was with a man who had lost his job that morning. He was understandably angry.
As he dropped us off at the Hoboken PATH terminal, he gave us his pack of cigarettes with four cigs left in it, plus four quarters.
We had coffee, a doughnut and a smoke at the terminal lunch counter. Feeling revived, we took the PATH to Christopher Street and started walking to East Fourth Street.
— L. Paul Burke
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post The Prospect Park Rose Garden Is Being Reimagined appeared first on New York Times.
