Changes Afoot at Grand Army Plaza
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

At Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, Richard Meier’s oddly named On Prospect Park nears completion, the renovation of the front stairs of the Brooklyn Public Library has recently been completed, and this week brings an announcement from the New York City Department of Transportation of some long-awaited improvements to the traffic morass the plaza has become. With a projected Thanksgiving completion date, the transportation department, in a statement, said its project will include “three large, landscaped pedestrian islands, five crosswalks and a protected bike path that will provide new safe connections for both pedestrians and cyclists.”
Calvert Vaux laid out the plaza as part of his original design of Prospect Park in the 1860s. The plaza lay at the point of the park nearest the population centers of
Brooklyn, and at the confluence of major roadways: Flatbush Avenue, Union Street, Vanderbilt Avenue, Prospect Park West, and Vaux and Olmsted’s Eastern Parkway. Park visitors traveled by horsecar along Flatbush Avenue to Grand Army Plaza from downtown Brooklyn. Stanford White directed the plaza’s extravagant embellishment in the 1890s. John H. Duncan’s triumphal arch, dedicated to the Civil War Union dead, received its magnificent sculptural groups by White’s protégé Frederick MacMonnies, a native of Bedford-Stuyvesant. White himself designed beautiful gazebolike replacements for Vaux’s rustic horsecar shelters, and a good deal of statuary — including Mac-Monnies’s superb standing figure of James S.T. Stranahan, the Brooklyn civic leader who oversaw construction of the park — went up. In the 1930s, the pleasingly grotesque Bailey Fountain, recently restored by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation and the Prospect Park Alliance, rose in the oval just north of the arch.
By then, the plaza had become a “traffic circle.” Soon, the ferocious automobile traffic on Flatbush Avenue, Eastern Parkway, and Prospect Park West would choke the plaza with fumes, and create a pedestrian nightmare that made the simple act of walking from Prospect Park West to the Brooklyn Public Library seem like a death-defying act. As for pedestrian access to the arch for a close-up look at MacMonnies’s sculpture — well, forget about it.
To tour the plaza, begin in front of the Brooklyn Public Library. The plaza, with its arch that Henry Hope Reed called the greatest triumphal arch of modern times after the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, suggests that its surrounding buildings be grandly classical. In 1908 the fine Brooklyn architect Raymond F. Almirall designed a grand classical edifice for the library, and construction began. Then budgetary problems stopped construction after foundations had been dug and part of the frame had gone up. Decades went by, from the 1910s to the 1930s, when the big hole in the ground at Grand Army Plaza ranked as a major civic embarrassment. Finally, in 1937 the architects Githens & Keally designed a monumental Art Moderne structure making use of the existing foundations; the new library opened in 1941. It’s one of the city’s finest modern buildings. Be sure to check out the breathtaking catalogue room just inside the front doors. The building may be modern, but it has a classic monumentality, with a grand staircase cascading in beautifully proportioned terraces down to the corner of Eastern Parkway and Flatbush Avenue. Githens & Keally expertly showed how a modern building could be fitted into the classical context.
Across Eastern Parkway rises On Prospect Park. I generally like Mr. Meier’s crisp, glassy modernist pastiche, like his apartment buildings on the West Village waterfront. They are sited not to do battle with their environs. At Grand Army Plaza, that’s not so much the case. And I wonder why that particular building has to be built at that particular site. Grand Army Plaza is — or was — one of very few completely classical places in the city. Do we — or do developers and architects — hate the classical so much that it can’t be allowed to flourish even in discrete venues such as Grand Army Plaza?
Mr. Meier’s building might be perfect elsewhere. Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights begins with a bang at Grand Army Plaza, then, several blocks on, at Atlantic Avenue, hits the Vanderbilt Yards, where Forest City Ratner intends to build its Atlantic Yards megaproject. At Vanderbilt and Atlantic, the rather breathtaking prospect of open yards ringed by big and sometimes beautiful reinforced-concrete industrial buildings suggests, as much as does the arch in Grand Army Plaza, that a certain kind of development take place. It strikes me that Mr. Meier’s building, which partakes of an aesthetic in part informed by the structural frankness of early 20thcentury “daylight factories,” would fit splendidly into this context — were gorgeous (and enormous) buildings such as the Ward Bakery (1913) allowed to remain. (Ward is being dismantled right now.) Instead, Forest City Ratner insists on a freak-show ensemble of towers by Frank Gehry.
Back at the plaza, though, there’s no prospect of another modernist incursion like Mr. Meier’s building, the library is whole again, and the transportation department project may help weave the elements together for the beleaguered pedestrian. In short, it’s high time we honored the plaza as our finest inheritance from the City Beautiful era.