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Grand Army Plaza and the entrance to Prospect Park, with Eastern Parkway in the background,
in a circa 1901 photograph. Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection, Library of Congress.
acquired land it no longer needed. The city kept the area
around Mount Prospect, but sold off the rest, which became
most of today’s neighborhood of Prospect Heights.
Olmsted and Vaux’s plans for the park included Grand
Army Plaza and two new, European-style boulevards lined
with trees and equipped with service lanes, Ocean Parkway
and Eastern Parkway. They were to be Brooklyn’s ChampsÉlysées.
Work started on Eastern Parkway in 1870 and was finished
in 1874, meant to coincide with the opening of Prospect
Park. Both the designers and Stranahan intended that Eastern
Parkway, especially near the park, would soon be lined
with large mansions on spacious grounds, making it the
wealthiest and most desirable address in Brooklyn.
But it didn’t happen. Litigation over property that had been
seized by eminent domain caused the land across from the
reservoir to remain undeveloped into the twentieth century.
Prospect Heights developer William Reynolds planned
a huge mansion for himself on the corner of Underhill
Avenue, well touted in the papers, but seemingly never
constructed. The areas between Grand Army Plaza and
Washington Avenue remained empty scrub land as the new
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, designed by
McKim, Mead & White, rose next to the reservoir.
SUBWAY HERALDS CONSTRUCTION
It took the 1903 announcement of a new subway line under
the parkway to finally jumpstart the first development. And
that development was not across from the museum; it was