Prospect Heights - Brooklyn

Puppets, Preachers, and Pacific Park

Since next week is Thanksgiving, I will not be sending out a newsletter, but to compensate, I’ve made this one extra long…

Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights was recently deemed the “hottest neighborhood in the country,”¹ barely edging out the town of Jenison, Michigan. While a suburb of Grand Rapids claiming second place is unexpected, it should come as no surprise that this compact enclave of perfectly preserved turn-of-the-century townhouses and noodle bars, tucked between Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Museum, and Barclays Center, took top honors. The neighborhood’s borders are Flatbush Avenue to the west, Atlantic Avenue to the north, Eastern Parkway to the south, and Washington Avenue to the east.

Prospect Heights has followed a familiar trajectory of development, growth, disinvestment, resettlement and, finally, gentrification. Though initially slower to rebound than adjacent Park Slope, the neighborhood has been undergoing a dramatic transformation ever since the 2003 announcement of the massive 22-acre, $6 billion Atlantic Yards redevelopment project. While Prospect Heights bears all the trappings of gentrification, with destination bakeries, artisanal mayonnaise purveyors (now closed) and pilates studios, it is also home to one of the city’s largest historical districts, 916 buildings that were added to National Register of Historic Places largely as a reaction to the Atlantic Yards project. While historical preservation efforts like these may not stave off gentrification, and in fact may accelerate it, walking the leafy streets of Prospect Heights is an undeniably nice way to while away an afternoon.

MOUNT PROSPECT

Starting at Atlantic Avenue, Prospect Heights climbs gradually to Mount Prospect Park, the second-highest point in Brooklyn at 200 feet above sea level. On a recent Sunday morning, the park was packed with exuberant Labradoodles and pint-sized Pelés perfecting their dribbling skills in a large grassy oval while their parents looked on.

During the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, George Washington’s Continental Army positioned lookouts here to observe British movements across the Heights of Guan, a series of hills in central Brooklyn. In 1856, the City of Brooklyn took advantage of the elevation, constructing a reservoir fed by underground pipes from Ridgewood Reservoir in Glendale. With a 20 million gallon capacity, the Mount Prospect Reservoir supplied buildings too high for Ridgewood’s gravity-fed system. An eighty-foot pink-granite water tower was later built beside it to boost pressure.

From the Library of Congress

FROM VIELE TO VAUX

In 1859, Brooklyn Mayor Samuel Powell stated that “to attract a large population, it is indispensable that something else should be provided than interminable rows of brick houses along long lines of dusty streets, for these alone can never constitute a great city.” Brooklyn was already well on its way to becoming the third-largest city in the country, so presumably the population that Powell sought to attract was one with more money. In 1859, legislation was passed to establish a public park in Brooklyn.

Egbert Viele, the civil engineer behind the legendary Sanitary & Topographical Map of Manhattan, came up with the original design for Prospect Park. His plan created a buffer for the reservoir, developing the parkland around Mount Prospect, already a popular spot for weekend picnickers.

The Civil War put those plans on hold, and, in the midst of their massive Central Park project, landscape starchitects Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted replaced Viele as the lead designers. Unhappy with how Central Park’s crosstown transverses disrupted the flow of its landscape, they designed Prospect Park to function as one uninterrupted expanse and enlarged the park while moving it entirely south of Flatbush Avenue. Mount Prospect, the park’s namesake, would not be incorporated into Prospect Park’s final design.

View of site chosen for Prospect Park. First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Prospect Park, 1861.

The park opened in 1867 and almost immediately became an “indispensable Sunday resort for the toiling thousands of Brooklyn.”² By the 1930s, views of the Heights of Guan were long gone beneath haze and construction. With Brooklyn now part of New York City and connected to the Catskill Aqueduct, the Mount Prospect reservoir became obsolete and was eventually filled.

SOLDIERS AND SAILORS

Olmsted and Vaux’s plan called for an elliptical plaza at the north end of the park, envisioned as its main entrance. Initially known as Park Plaza, the area consisted of little more than earth embankments and the unfortunately named “Fountain of the Golden Spray.” The Parks Commission was not impressed: “It is devoid of all life and is a stony waste. It is suggestive of Siberia in winter and Sahara in summer.”

Everything changed in 1892 with the unveiling of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, built to commemorate Union forces of the Civil War. John Duncan, the architect behind Grant’s Tomb on Riverside Drive, won the $1,000 prize for his design of the 80-foot granite arch.

While the massive quadriga sculpture atop the arch and the two bronze groupings representing the Army and Navy—all by renowned Beaux-Arts sculptor Frederick MacMonnies—were well received, the two bas-reliefs on the arch’s interior were not. The reliefs, which were not sculpted by MacMonnies, depicted Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant on horseback and were met with harsh criticism. Grant’s horse was described as a “miserable creature,” and critics suggested it would be better to remove the “costly bits of bric-a-brac” entirely than to display them “where their manifest inferiority hurts the finer sensibilities of every lover of art.”

One of those critics was Franklin W. Hooper, director of the Brooklyn Museum, whose immense Beaux-Arts headquarters, designed by McKim, Mead & White, was rising just down the road at 200 Eastern Parkway.

The photographs from this era feel somewhat surreal—dark-suited silhouettes of curious onlookers wander through mounds of freshly excavated dirt, the newly constructed totems of a reimagined city rising around them.

A room inside of the Soldiers and Sailors arch was designed to display Civil War relics. In the 1980s, the Prospect Park Alliance started staging exhibitions in the space, including Dread Scott’s 1994 installation imagining a future civil war. Featuring Molotov cocktails fashioned from 40-ounce bottles and bloodied mannequins in police uniforms, it drew the attention of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and future mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, who unsuccessfully tried to deface the installation several times.

By far the best use of the arch was as home to New York City’s only puppet library. From 2005–2009, New York Puppet Library stored over 100 puppets, some as tall as 20 feet, in the stairwells and chambers of the arch.

Anyone needing a giant dancing cat or a puppet horse could borrow one, no library card needed. The operation was forced to move after leaks threatened to turn the papier-mâché puppet menagerie into pulp.

2023

A recent $8.9 million renovation, carried out by the Prospect Park Alliance, replaced the roof, shored up and repaired the interiors and added two giant fans to draw off moisture.

2025

DEATH-O-METER

By the early 20th century, most of Prospect Heights had been developed and, thanks to transportation improvements linking the neighborhood to the newly built Brooklyn Bridge and waterfront, the area saw an influx of new residents. Unfortunately, some of those residents introduced a new and pernicious menace to the neighborhood: dancing.

At least according to Reverend Dr. Edwin D. Bailey, pastor of the Prospect Heights Presbyterian Church, who published a fiery screed lamenting the new “dancing mania” as a “growing evil” luring youth away from their studies and religious duties. Reverend Bailey, who sounds like a ball of laughs, asserted that “excessive indulgence in pleasure is not conducive to good character, good scholarship, good morals, or good behavior.”

Meanwhile, the real danger in the city wasn’t unfolding on the dance floor but on its streets. Car ownership rates jumped from 223,143 vehicles in 1920 to more than 674,000 by 1928. Traffic deaths climbed accordingly. In 1927, the Brooklyn Safety Council installed a massive Death-O-Meter at Grand Army Plaza, urging the city’s drivers to “Slow Up” and posting the latest injury and fatality statistics for all to see.

While the Death-O-Meter is long gone, Grand Army Plaza is still a danger zone. Navigating its concentric ovals feels like a live-action game of Frogger. The Department of Transportation has proposed a plan to make Grand Army Plaza car-free.

PACIFIC PARK

Development along the southern edge of Prospect Heights in the late 1800s was sparked by land seized through eminent domain for Prospect Park. Nearly 150 years later, the same mechanism was used to reshape the neighborhood’s northern boundary.

In 2003, a proposal was unveiled for Atlantic Yards, billed as the densest real estate development in U.S. history. The plan consisted of 16 high-rises and a flashy Frank Gehry–designed sports arena covering 22 acres, most of it with a little less than half of it to be built atop an MTA rail yard on Atlantic Avenue between Flatbush and Vanderbilt Avenue.

Frank Gehry’s design for the Nets arena and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.

Developer Forest City Ratner promised the project would deliver “Jobs, Houses, and Hoops.” In 2006, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), the state authority overseeing the project, declared the entire site blighted, allowing the seizure of several privately owned buildings. The nonprofit Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, led by Daniel Goldstein, whose condo sat exactly where the arena would go, fought the plan in court while demolition continued.

(Here is a link to the 2011 documentary Battle for Brooklyn)

As Wall Street Journal writer Julia Vitullo-Martin observed in 2009, “The development got just far enough to do considerable damage to the neighborhood without progressing far enough to do any good. Atlantic Yards has razed 26 buildings, with government help, creating the blight its developer had argued was there all along. Now there are gashes where late-19th century and early-20th century buildings once stood.”

Despite fierce opposition, the project proceeded. Goldstein vacated his apartment in spring 2010. Two years later, the Barclays Center opened with eight consecutive sold-out concerts by Jay-Z, who owned a small percentage of both the Brooklyn Nets and the building itself. The original Gehry design had been scrapped, replaced by a more utilitarian stadium that was wrapped in an undulating latticework of 12,000 rusty-steel panels that were said to evoke the “color and scale of adjacent brownstone blocks.”

While the arena, today home to both the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty, fulfilled the “hoops” component of Forest City Ratner’s promise, the jobs and houses were slow to materialize. In 2014, one year after the entire project was originally meant to be complete, Forest City sold 70 percent of the residential portion to Chinese developer Greenland Holding Group, which renamed the project Pacific Park.

In late 2023, Greenland defaulted on $349 million in loans. More than twenty years in, only half the buildings have been completed, and of the promised 2,250 affordable units, just 1,374 exist. Cirrus Real Estate recently acquired the development rights to the buildings and put forward the “contours of a plan” (not to be confused with the concept of a plan) that proposes taller, but fewer towers, and would result in an estimated 9,000 total housing units compared to the previous plan of 6,430 units. This proposal would also increase the average height of the buildings to 550 feet from 350 feet.

From Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park newsletter

During the site’s groundbreaking ceremony in 2010, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that in 100 years, “nobody’s going to remember how long it took. They’re only going to look and see that it was done.”

For a far more in-depth look at the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park saga, see Norman Oder’s Substack. He has been covering the story since 2003.

RESTAURANT ROW

Vanderbilt Avenue is Prospect Heights’ de facto restaurant row. That reputation, however, hasn’t stemmed the tide of closures inevitably resulting from rising rents. Olmsted, LaLou, Mitchell’s Soul Food, R&D Foods, Faun, and Patti Ann’s have all shut down in recent months.

Incidentally, some friends and I once ordered the “Chips and Goop” at Patti Ann’s and watched in stunned silence as the waiter ceremoniously opened a single-serving bag of Jay’s potato chips, poured them into a crystal bowl, and placed a smaller bowl of Lipton French onion soup dip mix alongside.

Over on 782 Washington Avenue, Tom’s Restaurant has been doling out cherry lime rickeys, chocolate egg creams, and pancakes since 1936. After Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968 and rioting broke out on Washington Avenue, neighbors and customers formed a human chain around Tom’s to protect the restaurant. While it is not the subject of Suzanne Vega’s 1987 hit, Tom’s Diner (that’s in Manhattan), Jeffrey Eugenides did write his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex in the restaurant. As of 2025, there is no tableside chip and goop service at Tom’s.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s audio starts off on Flatbush Avenue before stopping outside a Baptist church on Vanderbilt where the pastor gamely tries to get his congregation to join him in song. After a brief stop at Mt. Prospect Park, I lingered outside another church with an absolutely phenomenal band that might even inspire old Reverend Edwin D. Bailey to get up and dance.

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2008

Richard Meier’s 1 Grand Army Plaza, described in the AIA Guide as “a massive beached whale”

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPH

Danny Lyon took this photograph in 1974 on Vanderbilt Avenue, a few years after completing The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), which documented the demolition of buildings to make way for the World Trade Center. Today the ground floor of the building is home to a Thai restaurant called The Nuaa Table.

Lyon (b. 1942) is widely considered one of the most important documentary photographers of the 20th century. His best-known work, The Bikeriders, chronicled the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle gang over several years and was adapted into a film in 2024.

ODDS AND ENDS

• Aaron Copland, the “Dean of American Music,” grew up in Prospect Heights in an apartment building on 628 Washington Avenue

• One restaurant that has survived the Vanderbilt churn is ramen spot Chuko. Though they moved across the street from their original location, they’ve been offering steaming bowls of some of the city’s best noodles since 2011.

• In the early 2000s, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani interviewed some of her Prospect Heights neighbors and created a series of guide books and walking tours that explored the neighborhood’s transformation: Intersection | Prospect Heights

• Painting the gentrification of Prospect Heights

  

• If you’ve spent any time in Prospect Heights over the last decade, chances are you’ve come across this vehicle, a Chevy Blazer clad in steel plates that looks like the love child of a Cybertruck and Parliament’s Unfunky UFO.

  

  The vehicle, which sadly I didn’t spot this week so I had to resort to sharing an old photo of it, belongs to Charles Walters who owns Williamsburg Pizza. When asked what’s with the space tank, he told NBC News, “What’s life about if you can’t have fun and freak people out?” Good question.

Have a great Thanksgiving and be sure to have fun and freak your family out. See you in two weeks!

1. https://www.redfin.com/news/hottest-neighborhoods-2025/

2. “Prospect Park.; The View From The Reservoir Boating On The Lake. The Central Park. The Merrick Camp-Meeting. Departure Of The Highlanders. The Labor Movement.” Nyti.Ms, 11 Aug. 1873, Nyti.Ms/48Xildt. Accessed 21 Nov. 2025.