The Lights In the Plaza
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By tradition, the Christmas season concludes with the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. But this year New Yorkers get an extra day. The special holiday lighting of four of the entrances to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park continues through Sunday night. Without a car, the only way to see all the entrances in one evening is to take the free Heart of Brooklyn Trolley, which will depart Saturday and Sunday evenings from Grand Army Plaza at 6:45, 7:30, and 8:15 p.m. If you don’t want to take the trolley, and want to combine your visit with dinner at a Park Slope or Prospect Heights restaurant, I suggest you take the F train to Prospect Park/15th Street to see the Bartel-Pritchard Circle entrance, then take a pleasant stroll up Prospect Park West to Grand Army Plaza (about 20 blocks). At the plaza, you’ll be near all kinds of restaurants, including Franny’s, the excellent nouvelle pizzeria at 295 Flatbush Ave.
According to the Prospect Park Alliance, 600,000 lights illuminate the entrances. The recently restored Bailey Fountain has the highest concentration of lights — 160,000, to be precise. Even many longtime neighborhood residents have never seen the fountain, located in a secluded oval area north of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch. The fountain, which features statues of grotesque figures, including the world’s surliest Neptune, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But its spectacular lighting, in patterns of ocean waves, draws people in. One hopes that it will be enough to draw attention to the desperate need to calm the ferocious traffic in the plaza. The arch itself bears 98,000 lights, while the tree under it — quite an amazing sight — comprises another 158,000.
Next best is the entrance at Parkside and Ocean avenues, right by the Parkside station of the B and Q trains. Ninety thousand lights lie like a blanket of snow atop Stanford White’s Pergola. Jim Conti, who teaches interior design at Pratt Institute, designed all the displays.
The lights call attention to the park’s beautiful entrances — which have nothing to do with the park’s designers, Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. Rather, in the 1890s the City of Brooklyn hired McKim, Mead & White to design new entrances in a classical style that had become fashionable but was anathema to Vaux and Olmsted. Naturally, we don’t need to take sides in that battle and can admire both Olmsted & Vaux and McKim, Mead & White. The partner in charge, Stanford White, was largely responsible for the present appearance of the entrances, not least Grand Army Plaza. White didn’t design the arch (it was built by John Duncan in 1889–92), but his protégé, Brooklyn-born sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, created the magnificent sculptural groups (Army on the west pier, Navy on the east pier, and the quadriga on top) adorning the arch. MacMonnies also did the “Horse Tamers,” the tour de force of equine sculpture at the Park Circle entrance, at the intersection of Parkside Avenue, Prospect Park Southwest, and Coney Island Avenue. This sculpture marks the fourth lighted entrance (10,000 lights on each of the two horses).
Going to see the lights is the best way I can think of to bid the holidays farewell.
