Park Circle is at the southwestern tip of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where several thoroughfares converge in a vast traffic circle. One dreams that such open spaces, rich with possibilities for urban enjoyment, were not so given to the infernal roar of automobiles. Yet stand at the park entrance, your back to the circle, and you may savor, up close, a pair of magnificent sculptures flanking the entrance. These are “The Horse Tamers” by Frederick W. MacMonnies, dedicated in 1899.

The sculptor’s works embellish the arch at the northern end of the park – the “Army” and “Navy” groups on the south-facing piers, the quadriga atop the arch. Just inside the Grand Army Plaza entrance to the park stands MacMonnies’s statue of James Stranahan. In Manhattan you may know MacMonnies for his Nathan Hale, in City Hall Park.

MacMonnies was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He got a job as an office boy and clay modeler in the Manhattan studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The boy saved up his money, supplemented by a gift from the architect Charles McKim, to go to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. There he made quite an impression with his fluid modeling and came under the tutelage of the neo-rococo sculptor Falguiere. In 1891, MacMonnies exhibited his Stranahan and Hale at the Salon and won second place – unprecedented for an American sculptor. In 1893 he created a Court of Honor fountain, with 27 figures, for Chicago’s Columbian Exposition.

Each of the “Horse Tamers” groups shows a man trying to subdue two wildly rearing horses. (These are not “wild horses,” by the way, for their feet are shod.) The contorted forms of the horses, unlike anything else in New York, represent as great a tour de force of equine modeling as you will see in the world.

Walk east on Parkside Avenue. On your right are the Parade Grounds, created by Vaux and Olmsted as part of their Prospect Park design. Outside the park proper, these grounds were intended to keep large gatherings and sporting events out of the park. The name – “Parade Grounds” – refers to one of their functions. In the 19th century, men formed clubs in which they donned detailed uniforms of many nations, then engaged in precision military drills. These were popular entertainments, and the clubs held competitions with one another.

Facing the Parade Grounds from just within Prospect Park stands a structure that we call a “peristyle.” “Style” refers to columns (think “stylus”), while “peri” means “all around” – thus, a peristyle is a structure, like an ancient Greek temple, with columns all around its periphery. The interior of the peristyle is open, screened by beautiful Corinthian colonnades. The meticulousness of the detailing and perfection of proportion make it one of the city’s loveliest structures. Stanford White designed it, in 1904, as a reviewing stand for the drills.

White also designed the pedestals of the “Horse Tamers.” These are part of White’s necklace of ornaments around Prospect Park’s periphery, one of New York’s greatest treasures.